When Harvard boys get fed up with dating over-achieving, uber-intellectual Harvard women, they’ve always had one refuge: Wellesley. Oh and that other one: Lesley College.
However, this formerly all-girls school, only a hop, skip, and jump away from campus, has recently broken with its long-standing policy and opened its doors to 22 lucky men, threatening straight Harvard men’s hegemony over Lesley ladies.
Lesley freshmen Dave Cocco and Brian Fedell are living the ultimate teenage boys’ fantasy. Their double is surrounded on all sides by the rooms of female undergrads. In their entire dorm of approximately 200, they are among four males.
“We’re surrounded by women,” Cocco says. “Girls are always coming up to me. They aren’t slutty or anything, but they stop us all the time to say, ‘Hi! How are you? What’s your name?’”
The boys’ decisions were greeted with varying levels of surprise. “When I told people from home I was going to an all-girls school, everyone would just kind of look at me in shock,” Cocco recalls. “My high school Latin teacher, who’s 25, told me up-front that he was jealous of me.”
“My friends back home tease me about going to an all-girls school,” Fendell says, “but I can turn it around on them too, talking about how the ratio is so much in our favor.” Members of both sexes seem to be taking the transition pretty much in stride. Perhaps the past presence of boys on campus (from the Art Institute of Boston [AIB], a partner school) has made this year’s changes seem less dramatic.
And don’t get too jealous yet, boys. Says Thomas Morgan, another freshman at Lesley: “It may seem like we’re lucky because we get all the girls, but really...the girls just go for the AIB artists, anyway.”
