Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992 TAG: 9201100431
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PHILIP WALZER LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
STILL FILLING A NICHE
The Big Man is nowhere to be found on five campuses in Virginia.He's not the student government leader at Hollins. Not the head of the drama club at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, the valedictorian at Mary Baldwin, the yearbook editor at Southern Seminary or the field hockey captain at Sweet Briar.
Those positions all are held by females, because the schools are women's colleges.
The lush campuses, all nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in central Virginia, have long conjured up an equally rich image of their students - uppity Southern white girls, debutantes in pearls and cashmere looking to graduate to marriage.
Some women still bring their horses - or BMWs - to campus. But with a generous outlay of financial aid, the colleges have branched out to include the middle class and minorities. And when students look ahead, nearly all talk about graduate school, not wedding rings.
For them, the high point of a campus without guys is the freedom it brings to the classroom. "You don't think twice about raising your hand," Sweet Briar junior Melinda Junker said in a dorm lounge as a soap opera played soundlessly. "In a coed class, you'd wait a split second, and a male already answered the question."
Janae Thomas, a freshman from Herndon, added, "You might think, `There's this gorgeous guy here and in order to impress him, it's better to remain quiet than to ask a question or clarify something.' That doesn't happen here."
"In terms of finding an identity in the classroom, it is better," said Maggie O'Brien, president of Hollins College. "I can tell you that from my experience at Vassar."
But the lack of male distraction has its down side when classes are done. And, O'Brien said, "the students spend more time outside the classroom then in it."
To meet men, most students clear out on weekends for beer-drenched parties at three nearby schools - Hampden-Sydney, Washington & Lee and Virginia Military Institute. At Hollins, dissatisfaction with social life bubbled over last fall, turning a forum on the curriculum into a chain reaction of pleas to increase campus activities.
"A lot of people are tired of the party scene and feeling like they have to do it," said sophomore Meredith Crowley of Massachusetts, who considered transferring this year. "I didn't feel like I was being treated as an intelligent human being. I have yet to meet a guy I could be sure to say he was sober."
However, the lure of coed schools has decimated women's colleges in the past quarter-century: The number in the country has dropped from 228 two decades ago to 91. But Virginia's schools, most of which are celebrating major anniversaries, appear to be thriving.
"Our identities, at any rate, are certainly thriving," O'Brien said. "We are doing something here that's very important. But we have to work harder to get students."
Sweet Briar's $53 million endowment ranks it among the top 2 percent of the nation's colleges in money per student. Randolph-Macon Woman's College, which is celebrating its centennial, last month completed a $40 million fund drive. Mary Baldwin, with a record enrollment of 1,347, is "a hair under" its $35 million goal for its 150th birthday, said President Cynthia Tyson.
Hollins also is in "a strong financial position," O'Brien said. But unlike her peers, O'Brien doesn't rule out coeducation if times get tough.
"For me to exclude an option for Hollins College would be very inappropriate," she said. "We have many remarkable strengths as an institution. But in the larger marketplace, we face a lot of threats."
Few colleges - public or private - really are thriving these days, O'Brien said. Between budget cutbacks and a decrease in college-aged students, colleges have to do more to attract their students. They have to market themselves. And they have to consider some changes.
O'Brien first mentioned the m-word a few short weeks after she took over the helm at Hollins.
"We have no immediate plans to accept men," she said recently. "But we have a unique identity to begin with." It is the only one of the women's schools to offer a graduate program in English - a program that already admits men.
"One issue we will be considering is whether to make housing for graduate students available on campus," she said. "In the next years, it's something many colleges will have to look at. Colleges will have to find ways, in the '90s, to be more competitive."
Still, she said, the special niche that a women's college fills will not disappear. "We support women in a proud and unique way."
\ Assertiveness the rule
\ Politics professor Ernest Duff was on the defensive in his senior seminar at Randolph-Macon Woman's College recently.
Duff was agonizing over the proliferation of McDonald's restaurants and other signposts of American culture in Central America. But his students, seated on couches surrounding him, weren't buying it.
"I'm sure you wouldn't want to get rid of indoor plumbing," said Jennifer Haynes of Charleston, W.Va. "That's spread all over the world."
Mary Ruggerio of Chicago charged in when Duff said the polio vaccine had increased the world's population by millions. "So you don't want a polio vaccine to cut down on the population?"
Ruff responded: "I'm saying there's a down side to it."
"There's a down side to polio vaccine?" Ruggerio asked, stupefied, as if correcting a little sister's foolish mistake.
The assertiveness of Duff's students is the rule at women's colleges, teachers and students say, and it's a quality that professors encourage.
Alex Alexander of Chicago, a junior math major at Sweet Briar, said, "I'll sit in class and if I don't understand something and have a funny expression, he can read my face and he'll say, `Alex, do you know what I'm saying?' "
The nurturing atmosphere contrasts with the chilly climate of coed classrooms, studies show: There, men dominate discussion, get called on more than twice as often as women and are taken more seriously.
Junker, the Sweet Briar junior, saw it firsthand before she transferred from Iowa State University. "I really felt the questions were directed to male students," she said. "When they talked, they were asked to further their answers, whereas the attitude to female students was, `Oh, that's fine.' "
As a result, proponents say, women's colleges produce a disproportionate number of female power-wielders in the country, including former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, television journalist Diane Sawyer and nearly half the women in Congress. Virginia graduates include Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl Buck (Randolph-Macon '14) and Time magazine publisher Lisa Valk (Hollins '72).
\ Camaraderie counts
\ Traditions at the colleges tend to be innocent capers. On Tinker Day at Hollins every October, classes are canceled and students hike up nearby Tinker Mountain, where juniors serenade seniors, groups put on skits and seniors serve everyone a picnic lunch. The outfits are gaudy, and the skits are bawdy.
At Randolph-Macon, the big October event was the Pumpkin Parade. Seniors, clad in black gowns, marched across campus with pumpkins they had received from sophomores. Then the two classes sang to each other and heard a rap from President Linda Koch Lorimer.
The traditions exemplify the camaraderie and deep friendships that students say are forged at women's colleges. But the opportunities to develop relationships with men are severely limited.
"The social scene is so primitive," Sweet Briar history professor Gerry Berg said. "In a coed environment, it's possible to go for a cup of coffee with someone. In this environment, men and women see each other in highly artificial settings; they never meet in a Laundromat."
The prime setting is the off-campus frat party, which is repelling a growing number of students. Katie Neidow, a Randolph-Macon junior from Virginia Beach, got turned off her freshman year.
"I felt awful at Hampden-Sydney," she said. "You were treated like a piece of meat. When you walked in, everyone would turn around and if you weren't Christie Brinkley, you might as well leave."
D'Arcy Writsel, a Hollins senior from Springfield, felt the same at Washington & Lee. "When students go up there, they're often given the idea that to get the beer they have to give something in return," she said. "I've heard horror stories about young women who slept with guys because they felt they owed them something."
But many see pluses in the lack of parties on campus: It keeps the peace so students can focus on studies and extracurricular activities. "You get so busy," Neidow said. "Your days go to midnight and there's no time to say, `Gee, where are the boys?' "
And it offers a greater degree of control over social life. "You can go and see them whenever you want," said Lucile Page, a Sweet Briar freshman from Georgia. "And then you can drive away."
\ Horses pull students in
\ "You got it, you got it," Jill Randles, a horseback riding instructor at Sweet Briar, shouted to Page as she approached a 3-foot-high jumping block. But she didn't. Her horse, Gregory, an unsteady saddlebred, nearly toppled over.
"Kill it, kill it with your stick," Randles yelled, and Page flicked her whip against Gregory's flank a few times.
The riding courses, offered at all the Virginia women's colleges except Mary Baldwin, have helped perpetuate the "finishing school" image. But they've drawn top-notch students to the schools, officials say.
"At first, my attitude was, `God, this might bring a lot of bimbo students here,' " said Berg, the history professor, a member of Sweet Briar's admissions committee. "But in fact, many come here because the riding is so good, and they're good students, too."
Students say that off campus, the Southern-belle stereotype is difficult to shake. Melody Twigg, a senior contemplating graduate school in international relations, recalled one young man's reaction. " `Oh, you're from Mary Baldwin. Where are your pearls?' I went shoosh," she said, slapping the air.
The schools are expensive, with fees ranging from $12,900 for Southern Seminary, a two-year school, to Sweet Briar's $17,350. But the colleges offer at least a third of their students aid based on financial need. At Sweet Briar, the average package is $11,200.
Yet Berg says there still isn't "that wide kind of heterogeneity you'd find in a big university." The percentage of black students doesn't exceed 5 percent at any school.
Women's colleges sprouted in the 1800s as the only option for women, who were closed out of other colleges. They were trained primarily for teaching and missionary work.
The schools began to decline in the late 1960s, as a host of all-male colleges went coed and others expanded athletic opportunities for women under federal Title IX guidelines. Recent studies show that only 3 percent to 12 percent of female high school students even consider a women's college.
Virginia's schools have stayed alive partly because the state has long been hospitable to both types of single-sex schools, said Peter Mirijanian, communications director of the Women's College Coalition in Washington. Virginia still has two of the nation's handful of all-male schools, VMI and Hampden-Sydney.
Lorimer, president of both Randolph-Macon and the national coalition, also credited the schools' well-organized alumnae, "an updated version of the old boys' network," with keeping the pipeline stocked.
But the schools also have tapped new markets, including men, in inconspicuous ways. Baldwin's adult studies program has grown to 600 students - or nearly half its enrollment. Seventy-eight are male.
Hollins' declining undergraduate enrollment has been offset by growth in its coed graduate school, which includes 47 men.
Baldwin's students rarely mix with the adults, who take classes with tutors or at off-campus centers. But Hollins' graduate students in writing sometimes take undergraduate courses, and Lori Barber, a junior English major from Ohio, has noticed the difference.
"The men try to run the class," she said. "They make a lot of really sexist comments and don't stop to think that the school is designed for women and they should respect that. I would be pleased to see only female graduate students."
Despite her gripes, Barber exhibited a loyalty voiced almost unanimously at the schools, a commitment that women's colleges hope will keep students coming through the next century.
"If I ever have money," she said, "the school will have it all, eventually."
Staff writer Madelyn Rosenberg contributed information to this story.
\ Hollins College, Roanoke. SAT range for middle half of students: 910-1080. Tuition, room and board: $16,200. Endowment: $40 million. Creative writing graduates include Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard. Founded in 1842.
\ Mary Baldwin College, Staunton. SAT range: 835-1050. Tuition, room and board: $15,340. Endowment: $20 million. Program for the "exceptionally gifted," with 53 students, allows high-school females to take college courses and graduate up to four years early. Founded in 1842.
\ Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg. SAT range: 920-1130. Tuition, room and board: $16,700. Endowment: $50 million. Methodist-affiliated. New "Junior Year at Home" program includes 12 students, including men and foreigners, studying American culture in classes and trips. Founded in 1891.
\ Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar. SAT range: 900-1110. Tuition, room and board: $17,350. Endowment: $53 million. Largest campus includes three lakes and 900-acre dairy farm. Received five National Science Foundation grants in past three years. Founded in 1901.
\ Southern Seminary College, Buena Vista. SAT average: 650-950. Tuition, room and board: $12,900. A two-year school; majors include equine studies and early childhood education. Non-denominational despite name. Founded in 1867.
Memo: CORRECTION