We Bombed in New Haven

Yale has undergone a cultural transformation. Its response to the trends of the Sixties has finally put it on the map. "Yale Chic" bombards the public everywhere. Its heroes--Brewster, Reich, Segal, Coffin, Cavett, Doonesbury--have become nationwide personalities through the bestseller lists, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, late-night talk shows and daily comics.

Yalies, noted Harvard philosopher George Santayana in 1892, "are like passengers in a ship or fellow countrymen abroad; their sense of common interests and common emotions overwhelms all latent antiphathies. They live in a sort of primitive brotherhood, with a ready enthusiasm for every good or bad project, and a contagious good-humor."

Women at Yale reaffirms Santayana's observations. Emerging from this persistent "brotherhood", it examines recent changes in Yale's psyche caused by coeducation. The book is a community analysis, the story of Yale's transformation, which relates its findings to both individual relationships and dominant American social trends.

The co-authors, Pepper Schwartz and Janet Lever, were graduate students in sociology when the coeducational transformation began. Both knew Yale before 1969's Coed Week and had experienced Yale--"lush, expensive, and cloistered"--as an eminently male institution. The introduction of women into a tightly-knit society of male privilege presented a unique opportunity for a sociological study and the two women began accumulating data. Not content with simply interviewing the 96 undergraduates in their survey, Schwartz and Lever underwent mixers, beer guzzling, weekend trips, and pick-up attempts with their Yale subjects. Indeed, the data accumulated so rapidly that Schwartz's expertise served as ground-work for the well-known Student Guide to Sex on Campus (written by a group which could only be found amid the earnest self-consciousness of Yale--the Student Committee on Human Sexuality.)

All-male Yale was as heterogenous as a Harvard final club. The Yale ego, according to Schwartz and Lever, was based predominantly on prep-school standards of virility. Indeed, the authors are obsessed with the influence the preppie code had on Yale society. Male friendships were intense and women mere objects of the necessary weekend proofs of manhood. When the coeducation experiment began, one "Old Blue" cautioned the undergraduates:

And gentlemen--let's face it--charming as women are--they get to be a drag if you are forced to associate with them each and every day. Think of the poor student who has a steady date--he wants to concentrate on the basic principles of thermodynamics, but she keeps trying to gossip about the idiotic trivia all women try to impose on men.

Although many Yale men were unable to accept women as intellectual and daily companions, individuals and institutions had to change to meet the new demands, while carefully-bred roles collapsed over breakfast coffee. "I had forgotten how to talk to a boy when I looked terrible," declared a transfer from Vassar.

The book examines many of the social institutions which thrive on sexual segregation. Supplemented with Garry Trudeau's cartoons and extensive student comments, Schwartz and Lever undertake an entertaining, though generally facile ("The effects of the mixer on an individual can be destructive.") description of sexual patterns in an all-male or all-female institution. Ostensibly, as the college structure is transformed so are the social mores and individual relationships within it.

Many of us have experienced the same transition from monosexual to coeducational living. For both Harvard and Yale much of the trauma which Women at Yale catalogues is ancient history. We have long since learned to eat scrambled eggs and read our papers at the same tables.

Still, "It is a male-oriented world," announce the authors, "and Yale is a caricature of that world." As in many sociological treatises, the cosmic dimensions of the study are asserted in the conclusion:

Much of what we say can be extended to male-female relationships in general. For example, speaking of dichotomization of roles and the idea of date and friend, one need only look at the pattern of the American working man who totally separates his work from his family. In many ways, he lives a weekend system--bifurcating his life so that his wife does not know him--nor does he know her--as a total person. The relationship between the sexes has been predicated on superficiality and artificiality and both coeducational and monosexual campuses can show us how these systems develop.

The investigation al Yale also reveals one of the most significant aspects of the difficulties of women today--their lack of a collective consciousness. In the rush of both sexes to coeducate, Schwartz and Lever found, "female friendship was the last need on the agenda." Yale admitted undergraduate women for the first time in 1969. Each had high expectations of the other. Perhaps however, Yale has socialized women to its goals more effectively than its women have altered Yale's.

Women at Yale offers only occasional insight into the problems it probes. The problems, though important, are shopworn, and the book's analysis fails to reveal many new dimensions. From weekend mixers to bed and breakfast is not actually the one small step for Yale men and the giant leap for womankind that it was advertised to be.

"Basically," they conclude, "people are people." But, after all, what can you say about a 270-year-old college that went coed."