This weekend, alumni, students, and others will gather at Dartmouth to celebrate the College's 25th year of co-education. It is an anniversary of a period in Dartmouth's history when the administration finally realized that a single sex educational enclave was an anachronism, and that men and women could in fact live and learn together. This fact, rather obvious now, was only just then beginning to dawn on some members of the Dartmouth community.
There are many stories of those years triumph, tragedy and everything in between. Participants will come to celebrate the progress and reflect on the future. In doing so, they will remind us that while the process of co-education has come far since the days of organized mixers between Smith and Dartmouth, it is not yet complete.
Unfortunately, it seems that the College is once again rather slow on the uptake where matters of co-education are concerned. Consider the Women In Science Program (WISP), an initiative designed to increase the number of women in science at Dartmouth and beyond. Its study groups are open to women and men alike; it offers students of both sexes access to a network of mentors in different fields; and it publishes a newsletter which is available for all who care to ask.
Yet there is a hidden side to this otherwise excellent program. WISP provides an internship program for first-year students which gives them the opportunity to conduct research with a faculty member in the sciences. This program, however, is exclusively for women. Since the internships are virtually the core of a WISP experience, this approach is analogous to offering all students at Food Court the chance to buy drinks and dessert, but saving the main course for a select few.
However, exclusion does not always equal discrimination. To extend the previous analogy, when Food Court offers kosher sandwiches alongside its regular ones, no one can sensibly say that it is discriminating against non-Jewish students. After all, it is merely fulfilling a valid need -- the requirement to provide for certain people whose eating habits are different from others. In fact, ignoring this difference would be unequal treatment, and would probably constitute discrimination. Therefore, if WISP was based on the premise that women students, for some valid reason, needed a different science education than their male counterparts, its special treatment of these students would make sense.
But WISP makes no such claim in its publications, nor has Dartmouth, its host organization, sanctioned separate education since 1972. We are therefore left to assume that there is some undefinable "something" about the single-sex program that male competition would destroy. This was the same excuse used by certain Dartmouth alumni to defend Dartmouth's single-sex status, and more recently, by two southern military colleges to deny admission to women. In all three cases, it has been proved invalid, and rightly so.
Nonetheless, Dartmouth continues to turn a blind eye to WISP's discriminatory practices. Perhaps some administrators hope that the means (discrimination) will promote and justify the end (equity). This, unfortunately, is Orwellian doublethink in its most ridiculous form. Inequality in the pursuit of equality is a contradiction, and undermines the very goal it seeks to pursue.
Dartmouth made a fateful decision twenty-five years ago, and as we reflect on the benefits from that decision, the reasons offered to defend the status quo seem more and more feeble and illogical. Let us hope that, when we look back at today's Dartmouth twenty-five years from now, we do not find an echo of the past -- single-sex education tottering on a shaky premise and supported by a silent administration. Some traditions deserve to be followed, but exclusive education is not one of them.
