Education: Where Girls Are Inconvenient

The judgment that ministers should be men led America's early universities, which were essentially seminaries, to refuse admission to girls. Coeducation did not start until 1837, when Oberlin let some women in. By the turn of the century, Columbia's President Nicholas Murray Butler thought the battle for coeducation had been fought and won: "The American people have settled the matter. Why discuss it further?"

Yet discuss it further is just what the student daily at all-male Princeton has lately been trying to do. "Coeducation is the solution for Princeton's social illness," argues the...

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