University of Virginia Library

But Fewer Scandals

Old Nassau Follows Eli Lead

Reprinted from The New York
Times.

Seven hundred girls from 30
Eastern colleges have moved into
Princeton University to spend the
week proving that two sexes are
better than one.

"I mean, there are men around
after you get out of college - it
seems unnatural to have just one
sex before that," explained Donna
Cohen, a brunette sophomore from
Briarcliff College.

Miss Cohen, who reported that
she had already met a lot of "really
neat people," is one of the
temporary coeds who will be here
until Saturday, living in separate
rooms in the same dormitories and
attending classes and meals with
Princeton undergraduates.

Called Coeducation Week, the
program is an experiment that its
male student sponsors hope will
quickly lead Princeton to the real
thing.

"It's good intellectually and
every other way to have girls
around," said Meir Z. Ribalow, the
Princeton junior who organized the
project, "and does the fact that it's
also fun mean that there's anything
wrong with it?'

"Stole" Idea

Mr. Ribalow, an English major
from Cambria Heights, Queens,
readily admits that he "stole" the
idea from Yale, which had its own
coed week last November.

A few days after that experiment,
which resulted in none of the
scandals that some in New Haven
had feared, Yale announced that it
would become fully coeducational
at the undergraduate level this fall.

Some students here are hoping
for a similar reaction from Nassau
Hall, Princeton's imposing, 213-year-old
administration building.

Following what has recently
become a trend among Eastern
colleges, the Princeton trustees last
month endorsed undergraduate coeducation
"in principle," but they
did not set a date for starting it.

At the graduate level, both Yale
and Princeton have had women
students for some time.

But having women in undergraduate
classes was a new experience,
and the Princeton students,
according to several faculty observers,
even dressed more neatly
for it.

"Novelty Of Thing"

"Maybe it was just the novelty
of the thing, but I felt much more
alert and turned-on intellectually
with the chicks around," said one
senior, expressing a view that
seemed common even among some
professors.

"I enjoyed lecturing much more
with girls in my class," said Stephen
L. Klineberg, assistant professor of
sociology. "Girls are stimulating
creatures to have around."

Mr. Klineberg's "Social Structure,
Culture and Personality" is
the most heavily subscribed course
on campus, with 490 students
enrolled. This week his classes grew
to near 1,000.

Along with their orange-and-black
identification cards, the visiting
girls had been issued course
directories, and they were free to
attend any classes that appealed to
them. Many attended several a day.

Princeton "Prettier"

A few of the girls here today
said that they had also taken part in
the coed week at Yale. Although
the two schools are ardent rivals,
the girls reported almost no differences
beyond the fact, as one Smith
sophomore put it, that "Princeton's
prettier, I guess, if you don't like
cities."

To make room for this week's
visitors to the peaceful, secluded
campus, several hundred Princeton
men voluntarily moved out of their
dormitory rooms.

"If the girl doesn't mind, the
guy whose room it is can sleep on
the couch or something and nobody
really cares," Mr. Ribalow
said, although he added that university
policy and the official rules of
coed week theoretically prohibited
nighttime visiting.

Applications Screened

But girls who obviously wanted
to come here just to see boyfriends
were turned down, as Mr. Ribalow
and his committee sorted last
month through 2,500 applications
that flooded in as word of the plan
reached women's colleges.

An application expressing interest
in Princeton's chemistry
department - whether genuine or
not - was considerably more likely
to be accepted than one that
mentioned, as many did, the
renowned and prestigious eating
clubs that line Prospect Avenue.

"My reason for being here is to
go to classes, although it has been
pretty much of a social experience
too," explained Martha Spaulding,
a senior from Wellesley College.

Miss Spaulding, whose room this
week has a bathroom thoughtfully
equipped with a red warning light
that reads "girl in Can," spoke, for
example, of one of Princeton's
Shakespeare courses:

"It was absolutely fantastic,
although actually, since it was a
lecture, I guess it wouldn't have
been much different without girls."

One that will be different
though, she promised, is her borrowed
room, elegantly paneled but
littered with beer cans, dust and
cigarette ashes left by the young
men who usually live there.

"It's just a pigpen," she said,
distastefully carrying a dirt-colored
chair from which the stuffing was
leaking, "with a little elbow grease,
maybe this week I can make it
attractive."