It is no coincidence that this year marks the 25th anniversary of both coeducation and the Dartmouth Plan of enrollment patterns.
The two were necessarily linked from their inception in the early 1970s. The Board of Trustees voted to implement year-round operation so they could coeducate without expanding the campus and facilities to accommodate the large number of new female students.
Way back wwhen
After 103 years as a single-sex school, the College formed its first committee to examine coeducation in 1872, when a large number of western schools, such as Stanford University, had coeducated.
Seven years later, though, the College decided that coeducation might hamper learning. "Most people of sense appear to be well satisfied that there is a propriety in not herding young men and women together in our great institutions of learning," The Dartmouth reported in 1879.
The question of coeducation did not become urgent until the 1960s. The College began offering Summer term courses in the 1961-1962 academic year, and women could take courses which would count towards their degrees at their home institutions.
In a 1965 poll of students conducted by The Dartmouth, 71 percent of the faculty supported coeducation, while only 28 percent of the alumni offered even mild support for coeducation. Students were split exactly in half over the issue.
In 1969, the College experimented with "Coed Week," where women were bussed to the campus to participate in classes and campus activities.
After Coed Week, the College began participating in the 12-college exchange program, allowing women to take classes at Dartmouth for a year.
The Board of Trustees formed the Trustee Study Committee on Coeducation as a result of internal pressure to coeducate. They recommended in 1971 that the College coeducate completely.
Under pressure from students and faculty, the Board said they would admit women if it could be accomplished without major residence hall construction or reduction of the number of male students. This constraint led to the creation of the D-Plan.
Facilitating coeducation
John Kemeny, who was the College's president at the time, established the Committee on Year-Round Operation, which included 12 administrators, faculty and students, to look into the possibility of year-round operation.
In addition to the fears that coeducation might destroy many College traditions, the logistics of it also led some to believe that Dartmouth's Ivy League standing could be jeopardized if it lost a large portion of its 3,000 male students which would cut into the pool of athletes.
After a computer program projected that year-round operation would free 666 beds, the CYRO prepared a 25-page report in May 1971 recommending year-round operation.
As it is known today, the D-Plan is still similar to the CYRO's original recommendations, which included a year-round calendar of four 10-week terms, a required Summer term in residence, a 33-course graduation requirement and a reduction of required on-terms from 12 to 11.
That report concluded by stating, "Year-round operation will enhance the educational opportunities that the College can offer its students and will permit the introduction of coeducation no later than September 1972."
The CYRO report also recommended the expansion of off-campus programs, which Kemeny supported.
The faculty approved the CYRO proposal in late October of 1971 and recommended to the Board of Trustees that year-round operation and coeducation be implemented by September of 1972. The Board of Trustees approved the proposal one month after the faculty.
Dartmouth was the last Ivy League school to admit women.
Action and adjustments
The College's first years of coeducation were turbulent ones, where women were a small minority on a male-dominated campus. In addition, many men resented having women at the school.
Some of the problems faced by the first women at the school manifested themselves during an old Green Key tradition -- the Hums song contest, where administrators and students voted a song called "Our Cohogs" as the best original song from that event. Cohogs was a derogatory term for the new female students.
The lyrics, sung to the tune of "This Old Man," included lines such as "Our cohogs, they play one, 'cause of them we have no fun."
The D-Plan has also seen a fair amount of turmoil since its inception.
While some like the flexibility it presents for off-term opportunities, others complain about the social disjunction the D-plan causes.
Still, by 1980 the College had advanced to the point where they began sex-blind admissions. They had gradually increased the percentage of women up until that point. The Class of 1999 marked the first year of gender parity when more women than men were admitted.
