Hundreds of students, faculty and returning alumni from the first coeducated classes at Dartmouth packed a section of Leede Arena on Friday night for the coeducation weekend's convocation ceremony -- which kicked off the year-long celebration of the 25th anniversary of coeducation at the College.
In front of many alumnae from the Class of 1976 -- the first to include matriculated women -- Vice President of Alumni Relations Stanley Colla '66 praised these "pioneers" who stepped onto campus in 1972.
"It is difficult to imagine what spirit of adventure or courage it took to choose Dartmouth 25 years ago," Colla said. "That choice was a road less traveled by."
"But what is clear is that Dartmouth has been made better by that choice," Colla said.
Audience members gave a standing ovation for College President James Freedman who will leave a "Dartmouth redefined" when he steps down after this year's Commencement, according to Colla, quoting excerpts from a September editorial in The Dartmouth.
During Freedman's presidency, Dartmouth's student body has achieved virtual gender parity and has among its faculty the highest number of tenured women professors in the Ivy League, Colla said.
Freedman quoted former College President John G. Kemeny's 1972 convocation speech, during which he thunderously welcomed the first coed student body as "Women and Men of Dartmouth." Kemeny was the president under whose watch coeducation occured.
"Dartmouth would be incomplete without women and on its way to becoming a second-rate institution without them," Freedman quoted Kemeny as saying.
Since the beginning of coeducation in 1972, women have shaped Dartmouth in a variety of ways -- they have been editors of The Dartmouth, presidents of Student Assembly and have assumed other leadership roles at the College, Freedman said.
"A lot of us are aware that coeducation has changed Dartmouth and has changed it for the better," Freedman said.
Freedman said he would like to dedicate the current school year to the memory of Kemeny, who died in 1992. Both Kemeny's wife and daughter were in attendance on Friday.
History Professor Mary Kelley -- who herself was among the first women of Dartmouth when she first arrived at the College as a professor in the early '70s -- delivered the anniversary address, recounting the struggles and triumphs behind the history of coeducation.
Kelley said although the initial process of coeducating the College began in 1971 with Kemeny and the Board of Trustees approving admission of women, the debate behind coeducation reached further back.
One student wrote in a January 1960 editorial in The Dartmouth, that if coeducation would "help, not hinder" Dartmouth's upward trend as an institution with "high academic standards and a better curriculum and faculty," he would support coeducation.
The student also wrote he would be willing to accept the "new social regulations" resulting from coeducation if "coeducation is a greater good than freedom in the wilderness."
As handful of women began arriving on campus in 1969 as exchange students from colleges such as Wellesley, Smith, and Colby-Sawyer, articles in The Dartmouth distinctly referred to female exchange students as "girls" while referring to their male counterparts as "students," Kelley said.
Tensions between male and female students were apparent during Green Key weekend in 1975, when brothers of the Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity entered a song called "Our Cohogs" into the Hums contest, Kelley said.
Sung to the tune of "This Old Man," the song included lyrics such as "Knick knack, paddy wack, send the bitches home," Kelley said.
Not only did the song win the Hums contest that year, but the dean of the College at the time joined the Tri-Kap brothers in their singing rendition, Kelley said.
The difference between males and females was even more apparent in numbers. In the '70s, male students overwhelmingly outnumbered female students by a nine to one ratio, Kelley said.
And the male-dominated social environment -- including 21 male fraternities -- limited the number of Saturday night options for the early women, Kelley said.
The gender disparity existed within the faculty as well. During the time of coeducation, male professors composed 92 percent of the faculty, Kelley said.
"The idea that a woman might be a professor did not occur to some of the Dartmouth men," Kelley said.
However, Kelley said Dartmouth has made great strides in closing the gender gap.
The Class of 1999 was the first class in Dartmouth's history to have more women than men. The class had 1,048 students entering the College in the fall of 1995 -- 526 female and 522 male, Kelley said.
Today 30 percent of the College's total faculty and 27 percent of the tenured faculty are women -- placing Dartmouth at the top in the number of tenured female professors in the Ivy League, Kelley said.
Kelley described the strides Dartmouth has made with the development of the Women's Resource Center, the Women's Studies program and the Women In Science Project, founded by the late Chemistry Professor Karen Wetterhahn.
Kelley concluded her speech by praising the women of Dartmouth -- past and present.
She pointed out four of the most prominent positions at the College -- the presidency, the provostship, and the deanships at the Thayer School of Engineering and Dartmouth Medical School -- will turn over by the end of the academic year.
"We will see how many of these positions will be filled by women," she said.
