"We thought of ourselves as architects:" Coeducation and the Yale Campus, 1968-1973
"Each patch of earth a testament"
“Each patch of earth a testament:
Flagstones feel the trace of footsteps
Fallen for nine generations”
— Richard R. Wilson, 1971 Yale Class Book
A student crossing Old Campus at night passes by the statue of Theodore Dwight Woolsey.
On the evening of November 14, 1968, “the Trumbull dining hall was crowded and angry" (according to a Yale Daily News article published the next day). An audience of 400 waited on the arrival of Yale President Kingman Brewster — one student speculated that he would address them from the library overlooking the dining hall. After years of student pressure, faculty support, and shifting tides at other elite universities, President Brewster was finally poised (on the dining hall stage) to announce his plan to coeducate Yale College in the fall of 1969. His proposal — to house first-year women in Trumbull College (in rooms to be vacated by men), and all other women off-campus — was met with “uproar.” Voices echoed off the dining hall walls as students voiced their disapproval of a housing plan that starkly separated men from women. The debate over how a campus designed to educate, house, feed, socialize, and discipline men should reshape to accommodate women was in full, uproarious swing.
"The ability of Yale’s twelve residential colleges to absorb women in residence is obviously very uneven as they weren’t designed with that prospect in mind."
— Yale President Kingman Brewster, in his November 1968 presentation
In the months that followed the Trumbull dining hall meeting, administrators advocated for women to be housed separately. This preference was driven both by a desire to build community between women on a predominantly-male campus, and a concern that gender-mixing would tarnish Yale's reputation.
Male students pushed for women to be integrated into the residential colleges, driven by a similarly ambiguous combination of beliefs: that women and men should be treated equally, and that each Yale man should have equal opportunity to date Yale women in their own residential college.
In the wake of Brewster’s unpopular proposal in the Trumbull Dining Hall, the administration began considering alternate plans, one of which involved using the Taft Hotel (visible at left), located next to Old Campus, as temporary housing for women undergraduates. A November 1968 memo exploring this option noted the advantages: “This would involve no integration and no crowding.”
Throughout the fall of 1968 and the winter of 1969, students continued chiming in on plans for accomodating women undergraduates. An undergraduate in Pierson wrote to President Brewster with a proposal to house Yale’s College’s first women off campus rather than forcing crowding within the residential colleges. A graduate student at Yale wrote to the administration offering another alternative to crowding: “It is proposed, therefore, that the University erect temporary structures, housing as many as fifty girls each, in each of the several courtyards of the colleges… The design of the buildings would carry particular architectural identity, isolating the structure, yet the opportunity for direct campus involvement would be maximized.”
One transfer applicant from Vassar wrote to Sam Chauncey, Special Assistant to President Kingman Brewster, explaining her opinion on the distinct temperaments of women versus men, and why these temperaments should be taken into consideration in allotting single versus shared rooms. Chauncey replied: “... I have looked over the proposed rooming areas for women next year and I would say that women will have a proportionate share of single, double, triple and quadruple rooms. I think this is proper as women are being admitted as Yale students, and not in a separate category.”
In November 1968, students in Morse College unanimously voted in favor of coeducation in Yale college as quickly and as completely as possible: allowing women to enroll in the fall of 1969 and live within the residential colleges.
Headline from the "Davenport Dispatch."
Advertisement for a "Big Mixer" in the "Davenport Dispatch."
In a February 14, 1969 issue of the "Davenport Dispatch," the gender dynamics of "Old Yale" share page space with the new. An article detailing housing plans for women in Davenport College is immediately followed by an advertisement for a "Big Mixer", a ubiquitous weekend occasion for Yale men, where women from nearby colleges would travel to Yale for an evening of socializing. These "Mixers" quickly waned with the arrival of coeducation.
Students in Branford College were only slightly less enthusiastic about coeducation than their peers in Morse — 78% of respondents to this survey preferred coeducation within the residential colleges.
Students in Saybrook College voiced their objection to the haste with which coeducation was being implemented: “we feel that these plans… do a disservice either to the male population of Yale or more importantly to the prospective female students.” 70 students signed this petition, in favor of delaying coeducation until 1970.
This survey card, sent to women applying for transfer to Yale in 1969, exemplifies the administration’s expectation that some women would prefer single-gender residence spaces. Of the women who were admitted for transfer, not a single one had indicated preference for an all-women dorm.