Coeducation Celebration (Including Link to Photos!)

On Friday, October 9, almost 160 alums and guests met for lunch in the Grand Ballroom at the Yale Club in New York to celebrate the 40th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College. The event was conceived of and organized (beautifully) by Vera Wells and Susan Yecies. Rick Cech and Max Addison took terrific photos, which are posted in the Photo Galleries section of this site—click here to view.

The largest contingent were from ’71, though Abby Bloom ’72 took the honors for longest distance traveled, having come from Sydney, Australia–joined by, I add, her mother, who came in from Long Island and is 95, and her daughter, who went to Princeton. Many stayed on after the lunch at the Yale Club for afternoon drinks and then dinner.

The speakers—Sam Chauncey, John Wilkinson, Elga Wasserman and Mary Miller, current Dean of Yale College—were for me an unexpected treat. Sam, John and Elga of course were listed as speakers on the invitation, but I hadn’t got to know them when we were at Yale, and had imagined them as, well, the Voice of Authority. But they were charming and delightful.

Sam Chauncey spoke on the pre-1968 history of coeducation at Yale, noting among other things that in 1956 Arthur Howe, dean of undergraduate admissions, suggested that women be admitted to Yale, whereupon Whitney Griswold threatened to fire him if he ever mentioned the topic again. Kingman Brewster, who succeeded Griswold, was at the outset opposed to admitting women as undergraduates—as was his wife, Mary Louise—but later became a downright cheerleader for coeducation.

Susan Yecies, introducing John Wilkinson, recalled that as a senior she’d come to babysit for the Wilkinsons and had been confounded by the request to please diaper the baby before he goes to sleep. Susan did not know how to diaper a baby. She called around; none of the other Stiles women knew how either. Calculus, yes; diapers, not so much. Finally, Susan was rescued by Matt Jordan, star of football, track and wrestling.

John Wilkinson began by quoting a line from Scaramouche carved over the entrance to the dining hall in HGS, built in 1932: “He was born with a gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad.”

“In those would-be revolutionary times of the late sixties, Sabatini’s line was apt” despite its overwrought tone (critics derided the novel as a potboiler). “For the world did seem to be more mad than usual, and laughter was becoming an increasingly rare gift” in an era of assassinations, war, and political turmoil.

The events of May Day 1970 were “a tsunami,” yet “we do know now, in retrospect, that there was a revolution, a genuine one,” John concluded. As Maya Lin’s Women’s Table depicts, there were some 600 women enrolled at Yale in 1961, when John’s wife, Virginia, entered the Graduate School. By the mid-1990s, there were 5,250. “It transformed the entire university.”

In 1971 or 1972, Elga Wasserman recounted, she, Georges May and a male undergraduate student came to the Yale Club to explain coeducation to a group of alumni. At the time, as many of us know, the Club had a separate women’s entrance. Elga told Georges that if she had to use the women’s entrance, she’d refuse to join the panel. She used the main entrance.

Coeducation was approved in November 1968 and implemented in September 1969, and “time pressure was our greatest ally,” Elga said. “There was no time for any deliberation.” She and Kingman visited Vanderbilt “to decide if it was ‘appropriate’ for the women—whatever that meant.” They knocked on the door of the freshman suite designated for inspection. The door was opened; they peeked in; for some reason there was a box of Tampax on the dresser. “‘I think this will do,’ said Kingman.”

The best thing ever to happen for coeducation, in Elga’s view, was May Day 1970. “It unified the student body. Everybody now felt they belonged.” Issues of women’s varsity athletics were quickly fixed; the female-male ratio was also adjusted, though it was a major issue early on; the scarcity of tenured women faculty remains problematic, though Mary Miller’s deanship shows our progress.

Mary grew up in a rural town in New York State and it was only by luck that her father allowed her to apply to one formerly all-male school, which is how she ended up going to Princeton as an undergrad. “I know the resentment that spread among you” when the “1,000 male leaders” line was repeated, she said. She reminded us that when Yale was founded, its mission was to train Congregational ministers. In the 20th century, “it was a fine regional school, with only a few outliers until after World War II.” The civil rights movement informed the changes thereafter; “the single most important thing” in the university’s becoming a national and an international institution, in her view, was coeducation.

—Katherine Hyde

Bios of our speakers follow:

Henry (“Sam”) Chauncey, Jr. ’57

I started work at Yale the afternoon of my graduation in 1957 as an Assistant Dean of Yale College. In 1963 I became Kingman Brewster’s Assistant. In 1972 I was made Secretary of the University. I pinch hit in admissions, community relations and coordinated administrative matters for coeducation.

In 1982 I left Yale and started Science Park. I went to Gaylord Hospital as President in 1988. In 1995 I returned to Yale to the Public Health School to revitalize the Health Management Program and teach.

I retired in 2000 and live in Vermont where I am on the Boards of Vermont Public Radio, the Vermont Community Foundation, the Vermont Journalism Trust and the State Commission which regulates aspects of hospital expenditures. I am also on the board of a company in NYC and the Board of the Lustman Memorial Foundation in New Haven.

Mary Miller, MA’78, PhD81

Mary Miller, Sterling Professor of History of Art, became dean of Yale College on December 1, 2008. A prominent art historian, Miller has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1981. She was the Vincent J. Scully Professor of History of Art from 1998 until her appointment to the Sterling Professorship ten years later. Prior to assuming the deanship, Miller served as master of Saybrook College for nearly a decade. Her husband, Edward Kamens, is the Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies and served as acting master of Saybrook from December 2008 through the end of the 2008-2009 academic year.

Miller has served as chair of the Department of History of Art, chair of the Council on Latin American Studies, director of Graduate Studies in Archeological Studies, and as a member of the Steering Committee of the Women Faculty Forum at Yale.

Specializing in the art of the ancient New World, in 2004 Miller curated The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. For that exhibition, she wrote the catalogue of the same title with Simon Martin, senior epigrapher at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. She is also completing the work of her archaeological project to document and reconstruct the Maya wall paintings at Bonampak, Mexico.

For her work on the Maya, Miller has won national recognition including a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. She has been chosen to deliver the two most prestigious lecture series in her discipline: she will give the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in spring 2010 and the Slade Lectures at Cambridge University in 2014-2015.

Elga Wasserman, JD’76

After graduating from Smith College and earning a PhD in chemistry at Radcliffe/Harvard, I worked in various capacities as a chemist in industry and academia while raising three young children. I began working at Yale as assistant dean of the Graduate School in 1962 and remained there until November 1968, when President Brewster asked me to oversee the admission of women undergraduates to Yale College in the fall of 1969, together with Sam Chauncey. I worked as Brewster’s Special Assistant and as Chair of the Coeducation Committee until 1973, when I entered Yale Law School as a member of the class of 1976.

After graduation from law school, I spent one year clerking on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. From 1977 until 1994 I practiced law in New Haven. I spent the next five years writing a book based on interviews with the relatively small number of women who had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, “The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science”, published in 2000 by the Joseph Henry Press, a division of the National Academy Press. Since that time I have lectured widely on women, science, equal opportunity and the lack thereof and gradually retired. My husband and I moved to Lexington, Massachusetts in 2006 and are now enjoying spending more time with our family, trying to stay fit, and forming many stimulating new friendships.

John A. Wilkinson ’60, MAT’63, MAH’79

I arrived in New Haven in September, 1956, as a freshman in an all male, mostly homogeneous Yale College and left in 1974 as Associate Dean of Yale College and Dean of Undergraduate Affairs to complete the coeducation of a secondary school, which had been resolutely all male for over 300 years. In those eighteen years at Yale as student in three schools and in several roles as a dean, I participated in a magnificent transformation of the University, one which was always exciting, sometimes even frightening, but with a stunningly positive effect.

My second act at Yale was with my classmate Bart Giamatti, who brought me back as VP for Development and then Secretary of the University. Those nine years were no less exciting, though the challenges often differed, but again Yale became a better and stronger institution, a truly great international university. All this prepared me for two more stints as a head of school, one Quaker and the other Benedictine, again leading one to coeducation, and ultimately back home to New Haven to an active, though less stressful, retirement.