University of Virginia Library

Girls On The Grounds

University students clamored a long time
to have girls allowed in their dorm rooms
on weekends, but many have shown considerable
reluctance at having any of the
opposite sex in their classrooms the rest of
the week.

All the old arguments on the matter-girls
are a distraction, girls would undermine
the traditional social life of road trips and
big weekends, girls are inherently weak-minded were
heard, in a rather lighthearted
manner to be sure, at the debate
Friday between the University and a team
from Princeton, another all-male institution
(see story, p. 1).

Yet the admission of women into the
College seems inevitable at this point. There
are female students in every other division
of the University, and their number has
often been restricted only by the limited
dormitory accommodations the University can
offer.

The faculty committee studying the matter
and the Board of Visitors will undoubtedly
take their time about arriving at any decision,
but we predict that the College will be an
exclusively male institution only a few years
longer. Any skeptic should consider the preference
for coeducation of many of the
members of the faculty, recent civil rights
legislation, and the inadequacy of Mary
Washington College's facilities, to mention
a few of the pressures that will force change.

To some members of the University community,
this is decidedly not a happy
prospect. What these persons should do now
is not gnash their teeth in frustrated anger
and mutter threats about sending their sons
to Washington and Lee, but work toward
some compromise where as much as possible
of the atmosphere of the old University
can be preserved in the new-and coeducational-University.

We have maintained that a co-ordinate
women's college on the outskirts of the existing
University would be the best
compromise. Its students would attend most
classes on the Grounds, use the existing
libraries and laboratories, and be integrated
into almost all phases of University life-except
in a residential sense.

If there is some better solution, we hope
the faculty study group can discover it.
We hope that in their work they sample
a wide variety of University opinion on
the matter. We hope, most of all, that
both the advocates and opponents of
allowing girls in the College start thinking
realistically about the adjustments that will
be required on both sides.