‘It seemed very daring, and we thought of all kinds of complications — appropriate to the attitudes of 20 years ago,” recalled the dean of students at Oberlin College, in a 1970 cover article in Life about that institution’s bold experiment in allowing men and women to live together in the same dormitories. Coed dorms, the magazine’s cover announced, represented “an intimate revolution on campus.” At the time, proposals at Princeton, Yale, Wesleyan, and Williams to allow the mere presence of female students were greeted with dire warnings of civilization’s imminent collapse.
Today’s proposals on many campuses to alter bathrooms, dorms, gyms, clinics, and career advising to accommodate transgender students, and related efforts to promote respectful and inclusive language, appear to administrators as wholly new issues — and sometimes, to state legislators, as dangerous threats. But they are only the latest chapter in a much longer history. Colleges and universities have always been powerful shapers of gender and sexual norms.
Ever since Ronald Reagan’s 1966 attack on California’s public universities, singling out Berkeley during his gubernatorial campaign for failing to punish dissidents, conservative politicians and journalists have portrayed campuses as hotbeds of radicalism and bastions of political correctness. But, in fact, just as they have tended to reproduce rather than challenge class and race inequities, they have often been guardians, not disrupters, of the gender order.
Higher education in the United States was largely closed to women until the 1830s. To be sure, many of the public land-grant universities founded in the decades after the Morrill Act of 1862, and some respected private institutions, have been coeducational for a century or longer. In the early 20th century, private women’s colleges — not only the Seven Sisters but also Spelman, Mills, Scripps, and many religious institutions — employed women as faculty members while preparing female students to be pioneering leaders.
Yet within living memory, in the 1950s, the department in which I was trained, the history department at the University of Chicago, had no female faculty members. One of my professors in graduate school described the anguish of male academics when that began to change: The faculty lounge and department meetings, they sincerely felt, would never be the same.
Until relatively recently, several of the most prestigious undergraduate colleges did not admit female students into their classrooms and libraries, relegating them to “sister” institutions or excluding them altogether. As the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have shown, the uptick in the pace of transition to coeducation in the 1960s and 1970s often hinged less on a commitment to equity than on the changing preferences of male students.
The classroom and the faculty lounge are hardly the only places where higher education has maintained the status quo of gender inequality. According to the historian Nicholas Syrett, white college fraternities have long inculcated class-bound visions of masculinity and ritualized physical and sexual violence toward women. And sexual assault on campus remains endemic today.
More than 40 years ago, Title IX opened up campus athletic fields, pools, and locker rooms to women. Yet for many Americans, top male football and basketball players remain the most visible face of higher education. Even as women have been named presidents at many colleges, a countervailing trend has seen the salaries of top football and basketball coaches — a true boys’ club — far outpace those of academic administrators. In addition, the growing emphasis on STEM fields has elevated the status of those departments in which the advancement of women has been slowest.
Now transgender and gender-fluid students are building on the pioneering efforts of feminists to question male privilege in academe. Athletics is a key area in which these students are challenging simplistic means of classifying male and female participants. Residential life is another.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many institutions abandoned the requirement that men and women live in separate dorms with sharply divergent parietal rules based on the notion that administrators should serve in loco parentis, thus ensuring female sexual virtue, in both image and reality.
More recently, in the past two decades, gay and lesbian students have begun questioning the heterosexist presumptions underlying housing policies that assume roommates must always be of the same sex. As an undergraduate at Swarthmore, I wrote a proposal that led to a trial program allowing men and women to live together in a shared suite, which drew attention from higher-education publications (including The Chronicle) and from social conservatives, who called it a risky experiment, almost as dangerous as letting gay people serve in the military.
Two years ago, Calliope Wong, a trans woman, courageously publicized her rejection by Smith College on the basis of a federal financial-aid form that reported her gender as male. The controversy raised the profile of discussions at women’s colleges about whether transgender or gender-nonconforming applicants should be eligible for admission.
Since then much has been written on the adoption by women’s colleges of policies to open up admissions to some or all transgender applicants. Some of that coverage seems to recycle the longstanding trope of feminism as dated and irrelevant, casting women’s colleges as dinosaurs unable to keep up with the times — or even using the debates over trans inclusion to hint that women’s colleges have been a misguided idea all along.
But there are costs to the preoccupation with the relatively narrow matter of admissions at women’s colleges. Focusing on them lets other institutions off the hook. Most transgender college students in the United States attend public institutions that have always been coeducational.
Some of the changes that today’s transgender students need should be easy to make — for example, letting them choose the gender that will be designated on paperwork. Others, such as the construction of gender-neutral public restrooms in every building, and training residential-life staff members, require material investments. Some student-health clinics do not provide hormones, and some registrars refuse to let students use their preferred name without going through a legal name change. Many curricula include little or no coverage of the growing field of transgender studies.
Above all, too many young people lose support from their families of origin or struggle to pay for college because of their decision to transition. Colleges and universities have the ability to intervene. My own institution has hosted daylong conferences for LGBTQ students from Newark, N.J., high schools, building valuable and sometimes lifesaving links to resources and programs that can help trans and genderqueer youth who are struggling to pay for college or find employment.
Colleges that hold job fairs, welcome corporate recruiters, and maintain alumni-networking databases can also use their leverage to ask prospective employers what measures they have in place to ensure the recruitment and retention of qualified transgender employees.
Though transgender students are a small minority on every campus, accommodating them serves everyone by making our institutions more humane, just, and equitable. And if the history of gender in higher education has a lesson, it is that students who questioned the status quo tend to look more reasonable in hindsight than do their detractors who dragged their feet.
Timothy Stewart-Winter is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University at Newark.