University of Virginia Library

Coed Applications To Yale Soar
As Girls Vie For 500 Openings

Reprinted with permission from
The Wall Street Journal.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - R.
Inslee, Jr. is a tall, handsome,
33-year-old bachelor, and thousands
of the nation's teen-age girls
all but squeal when they hear his
name.

They squeal not because Mr.
Clark is tall and handsome, but
because he is the dean of admissions
at Yale University here. And
Yale, a male bastion for 267 years,
is . Since that announcement
was made a few weeks ago,
some 5,000 girls from all over the
world have written or wired the
office of Mr. Clark with urgent
requests for application blanks. Uncounted
hundreds of others have
called.

So suddenly, R. Inslee Clark Jr.
- previously known only to the
nation's young men and a few
female acquaintances - is a very
popular man with the ladies. A nod
from Mr. Clark says 17-year-old
Lynn Eliston of New Haven "could
change my entire life."

The legions of female applicants
are competing for only 500 places
at Yale next year; 250 freshmen
women will be accepted along with
250 upper class transfers. With so
few spots and so many applications,
Mr. Clark has his hands full.

"The women I've talked to so
far are all startlingly hard to rank,"
he says. "They are much more
closely grouped than the men, who
usually can be placed into categories
more easily."

Some Words From Elihu Yale

No one at the busy admissions
office will draw a profile of the
"average" female applicant, but it is
clear that many are alumni daughters.
"We've been beseiged by a
torrent of letters from excited
alumni who only have daughters,"
says John Muyskons, the admissions
director.

One such excited alumnus is
Elihu Yale of Orange, Conn. Mr.
Yale, a 1950 Yale graduate and a
descendant of the Elihu Yale who
helped found the college, says he is
"overjoyed" by the decision to
admit women, especially because "I
have no sons - Joan is our only
child." Joan Yale plans to apply
shortly.

The daughters of the alumni
aren't exactly unhappy about the
new Yale policy: "This is unbelievable.
It's miracle," says Jennifer
Sherman, an 18-year-old from
Scarsdale, N.Y., whose great-grandfather,
grandfather, father, brother,
uncle and several cousins are all
Yale men. "It's so neat finally to
have a chance to be part of all that
tradition. I guess my whole life so
far has been Yale."

Other young girls are applying
for reasons other than tradition.
"Most girls have in the back of their
minds that socially this whole thing
could lead to something big," says
Karen Hamity, a pretty Smith College
sophomore who would like to
transfer to Yale. She says she is
already pondering "who to invite to
next fall's Harvard game."

Sara Houk, a music major at
Randolph-Macon College in
Lynchburg, Va. would like to transfer
to Yale because, among other
things, "I'm tired of drunk dates at
mixers down here." She goes on:
"Yale boys don't seem to drink to
get drunk, so I feel I'll be able to
communicate on a more relaxed
level there."

Mr. Clark, however, says the
girls tell him a different story. He
insists all the girls he has spoken to
swear they want to go to Yale
purely for academic reasons. And
the Yale administration swears that
the only reason girls are being
invited is so that they can get a
Yale education. The Yale alumni
magazine quotes Henry Chauncey
Jr., special assistant to President
Kingman Brewster:

"What we must keep in mind is
that we are bringing women to Yale
not because it will be good for men
but because we feel women have a
right to a Yale education." He adds,
however, that, "trying to make
plans for them requires a new way
of looking at things." One
difficulty: "Everyone knows that
women prefer to take baths rather
than showers, but in all of Yale
College there is only one bathtub."

Some Dreams of Glory

The lack of bathtubs doesn't
bother would be Yale coeds,
though. A Minneapolis high school
senior would be willing to for go
baths for four years to gain her
ambition in life: Membership in
Skull and Bones, one of Yale's
secret senior societies. A freshman
at Goucher College in Towson, Md.,
also has dreams of glory at Yale.
She is "just dying" to transfer to
Yale and become the first female
member of the Whiffenpoofs,
Yale's famous singing group.

Group Application

The Yale admissions office has
even received a group application,
from, of all places, Cambridge,
Mass. The letter sought admissions
for all 13 girls in a Radcliffe College
. The girls said they
wanted to transfer to Yale "to end
the frustrations of
semi-coeducation and in order to
participate in and learn from the
Yale community as has not been
possible at Harvard."

It would seem that most girls
and boys and alumni are happy
about the Yale policy shift, but
there are dissenters. One alumnus, a
Wall Street broker, complains that
he won't get out to lunch for the
next several weeks because of the
mountains of reference letters he
must write for daughters of
acquaintances. "My phone hasn't
stopped ringing since they made the
announcement," he moans. "All
my 'old friends' with college-age
daughters are suddenly
remembering me."