Coeducational No More

The ongoing debate over the advantages and disadvantages of coeducation has by now grown old. After several decades of full-scale experimentation, the effects of permitting men and women to study together at Harvard are clear: Coeducation is an unmitigated failure.

The reasons for abolishing coeducation at Harvard do not strictly follow the conventional line: that women take a man's eye off his homework. This is scarcely the problem at Harvard (even less so at Yale, where, as they say, the men are men and the women are too).

Nevertheless, coeducation at Harvard does deleteriously affect many men's attitudes toward the academic life. Men, whether from a sense of chivalry or from a threatened ego, tend to shy away from competition with females.

We have all seen the type in high school who prefers to impress the ladies with his athletic prowess than to demonstrate his ability in solving quadratic equations. Indeed, as the authors of the recent book Learning Together: a History of Coeducation in American Schools observed, sports programs were grafted onto public secondary institutions in the late eighteenth century precisely to correct the perceived attack on boys' virility that coeducation had introduced. Many Harvard men view the presence of women in the same way, retreating to the football field or a final club to prove their masculinity.

Although these men would be better served if they came to recognize a smart woman as something other than a threat to their manhood, an 18-year-old instinct will not be educated away with a Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) visit to a proctor meeting. (Repeat after me: "I am a man, and it's okay that some women are smarter than I.") It's a shame that, in the name of social engineering, four years of these students' educational lives are severely disrupted.

Moreover, the mission of the University itself is undermined by the presence of women. Despite the feminist's tireless efforts to deny both common sense and the entire history of civilization, women by nature are more delicate in their sensibilities than men. How else to explain the child's stronger emotional attachment to his mother but by the mother's gentler disposition?

The fact that we find across cultures and across time a preponderance within societies of women who nurture rather than dominate suggests that such a tendency is more than a social construct. The caring female is a natural phenomenon.

It should be stressed that gentleness and sympathy are by no means negative characteristics--if only many a brutish man were more feminine in his treatment of others. But the female constitution is such that many women are, for lack of a better word, sensitive. A survey of the letters The Crimson receives testifies to this fact.

In nearly every context, the fact that men choose their words more carefully in mixed company is a sign of civilization. But in a collegiate setting, such a practice threatens the institution's very purpose. If a professor collects evidence that suggests, for instance, an innate male advantage in understanding mathematical concepts but is reluctant to present such a view lest he offend the distaff portion of his class, the University's search for truth has suffered a setback. And this sort of thing takes place more often than we know.

Lastly, though, coeducation is ultimately an attempt at androgenization. Throughout their college lives, Harvard men and women are bombarded with the same set of stimuli, the same corpus of knowledge, the same objective approach to facts--a process which promotes the notion that men and women are essentially the same. Yet, ignoring both the critical differences in men and women's interactive capacities and their divergent sex roles can have damaging effects on the coeducated student's life.

A preview of the larger problem is seen in the countless examples of male-female miscommunications that take place everyday in section meetings, on the pages of campus publications, and during dinner conversations. Imagine, considering the tensions it causes in simple verbal communication, the dangers coeducation must lead to in sexual communication.

A lasting marriage depends upon each partner's proper understanding of his or her role in that partnership. Those roles are complementary yet distinct, as reflected in the act of intercourse itself. A coeducational environment that fosters a misleading sexual identity--one of masculinized females and feminized males--guarantees at the very least confusion in the life of the man and woman who, having come to believe that little or no difference separates the sexes, discover the opposite to be true.

It is little wonder that the United States, which has pursued coeducational policies perhaps more vigorously than any other country in the world, faces many severe problems of male and female socialization today.

Many may object that ending coeducation, while perhaps a benefit for Harvard men, would be terrible for Harvard women. After all, where would they go? To Wellesley? To Smith? No doubt, banishing Harvard women to such places would be a terrible outcome. If those were the only options, it would be better for Harvard women not to be educated at all. But before Harvard-Radcliffe, there was a place simply called Radcliffe. It was a fine institution and had a tradition, so we're told, of producing "remarkable women." Harvard women could go there.

The marriage of Harvard and Radcliffe in 1975 was rocky from the very beginning, and the time has come for that union to end. Annulment, of course, is out of the question (Harvard and Radcliffe have consummated their marriage, to be sure). A legitimate divorce should be pursued instead, for Radcliffe has time and again been unfaithful to her husband. She has forsaken her first love, veritas, for the ephemeral passions of political correctness and feminism.

It's a wonder Radcliffe herself hasn't yet filed for divorce, considering her oft-repeated claims of spousal abuse. "Harvard harassed me," she said. "He got me drunk and raped me," she cried. A divorce in this one rare case, therefore, would be in the best interest of both parties. And if it's any consolation, Radcliffe can keep the children--Deans Epps and Jewett.