The trouble at Sarah Lawrence (original) (raw)
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- March 20, 1977
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On the fall night in 1954 when I arrived Sarah Lawrence College, threw my Bermuda shorts and gold circle pin into the wastebasket and changed into my leotard and jeans, my mother called. She was crying. She had been to a cocktail party and met a well‐known columnist who told her there were no virgins on the Sarah Lawrence campus. How times have changed. Recently, the development office received a letter from an alumna in San Francisco who was distressed by the rumor that the campus is now 50 percent homosexual.
I have recently been back to my old college, talking to the administration, faculty and students, and there is no doubt in my mind that the 50 percent figure is ridiculous. Nor, I feel, is there anything more than loose talk to the estimate floating about the campus that 30 percent of the women students are lesbiaris. Charles DeCarlo, the college president, believes that 5 to 10 percent would be more accurate—about the same as current estimates of the proportion of homosexuals, male and female, in the population at large. What has happened, he says, is that this small group has magnified the issue on the campus by taking center stage.
Yet so visible and vocal are the adherents of lesbianism—or bisexuality, as they prefer to call —at Sarah Lawrence today that the issue has be‐. come a cause celebre among teachers and students alike. It has created confusions, tensions and conflicts beyond anything in the school's recent experience. It is scaring off applicants, and there is a danger that word of mouth about it among alumnae and others in the educational and business communities may affect the college's ability to raise the funds it needs to maintain its high academic standards.
The weeks I have just spent at the college, however, convince me that the emergence of homosexuality into the full light of day as a professedly viable alternative for young women (and men) not the essence but the byproduct of the problem at Sarah Lawrence. The root problem—anguishing precisely because there is much that is right on both sides of the issue—is a collision between the women's movement on campus (in which the lesbians form a small minority) and the administration's efforts to proceed from token to full coeducation.
In part, the conflict traces back to when the college began admitting male students in the late 1960's. The men—now close to 20 percent of the student enrollment of 635—came to dominate the classrooms and lake over positions of authority. A feminist backlash, fostered by some members of the faculty, not only reclaimed the power lost to the men but subjected the campus to a far more strongly feminist atmosphere than had existed before the men arrived. All the fiercer, therefore, the resistance to any change in the character of the college that would necessarily reduce the feminists’ influence and role. And all the more militant the solidarity with anything—including lesbianism —that champions the right of women to explore their natures, preferences and potentials in their own way.
More generally, the tensions at Sarah Lawrence arc an outgrowth of the reassessment of traditional male and female roles through which American society is passing. College campuses are often barometers of what is going on less obviously the whole country. Other women's colleges—including those, like Vassar, Bennington and Connecticut College. that have also taken the plunge into coeducation—have experienced similar strains. may he that the trouble at Sarah Lawrence is more acute because its students have always thought themselves as avant‐garde, game for more extreme individualism and greater risk of pain. The crisis of identity at Sarah Lawrence today, however, is of a kind that is particularly difficult for young people in their most Vulnerable years to cope with. The question is what the college can do to work its way out of the predicament that threatens its reputation stability and morale.
For the average student at Sarah Lawrence—bright, privileged, with a view of life shaped by progressive political outlook and exposure to the liberal arts—the administration's decision in 1968 to admit seven males on a trial basis was a welcome step. The principles on which the women's colleges had been founded were giving way nationally to a preference for the benefits of coeducation, and most of the girls at Sarah Lawrence looked forward to a better social environment for themselves as the change took hold.
It did not work out that way. As male schools in the Northeast began to go coeducational, the men from Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth cut down on their weekend treks to Sarah Lawrence, and such group socializing with boys as mixers and weekend excursions began to lose their popularity. The Sarah Lawrence campus, which used to be empty on weekends, began to be filled with girls with no place to go. A general sense of loneliness and isolation set in.
In theory, there was all the variety and excitement of New York, half an hour's train ride away. But New York, to many of the girls, meant their parents’ homes, a place they did not associate with weekend fun; and to others, without friends in th,t city. New York was an emotional Sahara. As for the boys at Sarah Lawrence, there were still too few of them for easy relationships. A freshman girl from Englewood, N.J., told me: “This place really freaks me out. I act so peculiar around guys, like I was in the eighth grade or something and had never talked to one before. There's so much competition, you really have to do something to stand out.” Another girl said, “Everyone around knows if you see an interesting guy on campus he's either got a girl on his arm or a purse on his shoulder.” A somewhat older female student said over a cup of coffee at the Pub, the student coffee house, “God, it's so embarrassing. I talked to a guy in front of me in line at the bookstore the other day and I realized he thought I was trying to pick him up. He thought I was being too aggressive. I apologized to him. It's awful that you can't act naturally and be friendly in a human way.” In a Greek history and literature class, when the professor asked, “What is fate?” a boy, one of four in the class of 18, stopped twirling the locks of his matted hair and said: “Isn't it those women buzz
Most girls at Sarah Lawrence shrink from that kind of buzzing. And although some of the men, who tend to be nonconformists, glory in the abundance of available women, many of them give every sign of being somewhat overwhelmed by the concentration of competent, expressive females and their implicit sexual and emotional demands. There is a kind of vicious cycle at work: With so many girls to choose from, it becomes harder for young men (who may be slower to mature anyway) to form satisfying relationships, which leads to further feminine recoil; and the girls who corn. pete for the few available men feel bad about themselves if they fail, as most of them must fail, given the pre
It is easy to say that all this has little to do with the principal reason for going to college—receiving a higher education—but the fact is that, in this country, going to college has traditionally been linked with participating in a social milieu that can shape future career and marriage. In earlier days, the doctrine of in loco parentis, under which the college ad ministration acted as surrogate parent, was so all‐embracing that, in some colleges, in President DeCarlo's words, it “meant management of everything from manner to matchmaking.” The retreat from the parental role forced on colleges by student pressure in the 1960's leaves the students responsible for creating their own social communities and making their own decisions about such matters as drugs and sex and work; and treating 17‐ and 18‐year‐olds as grown‐ups, in the European tradition, may be a good thing. But it does mean that, after 5 o'clock, the close relationship between students and faculty comes to a sudden stop and the students are left on their own. At Sarah Lawrence, as the crisis developed, the withdrawal of adult guidance and social arrangements made the confusions all the harder to
In this supercharged atmosphere, the feminist reaction to dominating males exploded with irresistible force. There was no other issue to stand in its way. The civil‐rights movement was moribund; the antiwar cause a distant memory; religious revival passe. At last there was something to draw young women together in an experience of shared fulfillment affecting not only their personal lives but their need for an outlet for their youthful idealism. A women's studies program funded in 1973 encouraged its women students to “discover” their bodies, to express their sexual feelings openly and to form bonds of mutual support as they re‐examined all aspects of women's natures, social roles and relationships to men. With Marx, Jesus and social justice receding as saviors of mankind, all hopes for a new world were placed
The lesbian faction of this women's movement makes its appeal on two planes. The first is biological. Lonely and loveless students who cannot find heterosexual partners for the love dramas that form the closing phase of adolescence are forced, by the proud and open talk of the bisexual alternative, to question and justify their own sexual orientation. The second plane is political. The lesbian choice is presented as an expression of radical political and social thought, and often it is difficult for the young student to reject these claims without seeming to be a reactionary coward.
Indelicate as they may be, graffiti on powder‐room walls can be sociologically revealing. One wall had this to say: “I am a homosexual virgin who needs a 9 badly.” “Don't worry, it'll happen soon enough.” “Right on,” “Thanks for the support,” “Anytime. Room—.” “What makes one gay?” “It's kind of hard being gay.” “Out of fad or actuality?”
The administration's response to this situation is an uneasy one. With the end of the school's parental role, says DeCarlo, the students’ sexual activities are not the school's concern. The students are old enough to lead their own lives, and he says, in all such matters, it is difficult to tell from their talk how much is real and how much is braggadocio. Yet he admits to being “appalled” by some of the “posturing” that goes on. “What once might have been a youthful fantasy, of brief experimentation with homosexual feelings, and which would have been integrated in a normal growth toward adulthood, is now objectified, made public and related to political and quasiintellectual movements.” The director of admissions, Sandra Feig, worries that young students often do make sexual choices in accordance with ly fashionable rather than in harmony with their emotional needs. The declared lesbians on campus emphasize that they don't try to pres‐sure anyone to become homosexual or bisexual. But the process may be more subtle than that.
There is probably very little active proselytizing and certainly no coercion by homosexuals at Sarah Lawrence. or any other college. At the same time, the very existence of a cohesive, open homosexual group and its vocal political philosophy presents each student with the need to take some attitude toward it; in a sense, to make an active choice that never entered most people's heads in more covert days. At a time of life when sexual feelings run high, and in a community with little opportunity to meet with the opposite sex. there comes to be a kind of pull toward homosexual ex
Whatever the strength of this pull, there is plentiful evidence of distressing divisions on the subject among the women students. Several freshmen told me of having been frightened during orientation week when they were greeted by two young women with shaved heads who walked arm in arm. Some girls have probably turned to sexualized female friendships; for most, the taboos against such experimentation have clearly remained in force. Yet, given the feminist mandate for the right of women to make their choices, few would dude — or, at least, state openly—that such experimentation is wrong. In a recent self‐rating test, only 6 percent of the female freshmen thought homosexual relations at the college should be prohibited—compared with 46 percent of students nationwide.
I would suspect that many girls who feel threatened and upset by the open homosexual behavior accepted by the Sarah Lawrence community are, at the same time, ashamed of their reaction. A freshman from the Middle West told me: “It's really weird here. Girls check you out. I don't know where to look. It makes me feel so creepy. My roommate and went to this party, and girls were making out together on the couch. There were only five boys there and they were all taken. This girl asked me to dance. I didn't want to say no but afterward I went back to room and cried.”
A similar effect is noticeable among the young men. Many of them had already been somewhat intimidated by the feminist backlash. “You have to be careful not to say anything that seems chauvinist or egocentric,” a sophomore told me. Another, a young poet, complained of the difficulties of being a male poet on a campus “where Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath are goddesses.” Exposed to the same pressures as the females to question their own sexual identities, some males try to escape from the attendant anxieties and confusions by acting like studs. Others spout feminist jargon the way a converted bourgeois spouted Marxism in the 1930's. Said one young man: “I like being at a woman's school, understanding a woman's perspective. I was in love with a gay woman, and she and this place have really helped me to see how my culture had prejudiced me against women. My gay friend learned to trust me even
It would be a mistake, of course, to exaggerate the scale and importance of these emotional dislocations. There are many students of both sexes who don't feel overwhelmed at all. One very outgoing young girl said. “Anybody who's lonely here just isn't trying. All my friends are boys. That's the way it's been all my life.” Moreover, as DeCarlo says, “Loneliness and dissatisfaction with the social situation are the common complaints on college campuses today” — springing, to some extent, from “the general character of American life [and] the reaction to it of bright young people.” Also, it is a part of growing up; “in some sense, to solve this problem is to begin building a solid framework for the mature life.” One New York psychoanalyst who has been treating Sarah Lawrence students for 20 years contends that they are not much different from young people anywhere, except that the psychic pain of their end‐ofadolescence turmoil is more
It should also be emphasized that the level of academic work at Sarah Lawrence appears to he extraordinarily high. The theater and dance classes are deeply involving and productive. Students in these departments seem dedicated to what they are learning and how they are learning it. The science department amazed me with its graduate statistics. Twentyout of last year's 25
medical ‐ school applicants were accepted at top‐ranking schools; on the medical boards, they scored in the 98th percentile of all students nationally in verbal ability. In 1957, when I graduated, the science department had half a dozen students and barely a bunsen burner. Today's labs are crowded and well
equipped. Law schools and anthropology and psychology
graduate departments have
found Sarah Lawrence students to be high‐scoring, well
prepared, educated and motivated. These students have won dozens of fellowships for graduate study.
The high academic standards provide many of the cope with loneliness and social void, the administration, it seems to me, should take the initiative in forming new social structures. It could try to make some formal connections with schools with more men than women. It could encourage young faculty families to live on the campus. Older faculty could dine with students to help calm the turbulent atmosphere. Giving up being a substitute parent need not amount to abdicating all responsibility.
As for the lesbian issue, it might be possible, without reversing the sexual revolution or infringing on anyone's civil rights, to suggest an effort to control the visibility of homosexual activity, so that the campus can again attract some of the students who are now frightened off. There is an important difference between discretion and repression. A little hypocrisy here might be in the service of institutional survival.
These admittedly are palliatives. The underlying problem is that Sarah Lawrence flounders half‐way between being a girls’ school and a coeducational institution. A feminist movement that could accommodate itself more naturally to either educational philosophy takes on embattled and distorted forms. Bow this problem will be solved, however, is difficult to predict. A real deadlock exists.
The feminist‐controlled Student Senate, reflecting the separatist phase in which the women's movement now finds itself nationally, voted last spring for a return to the school's clear mission and identity as a single‐sex college. Within the women's studies program, there is strong feeling that DeCarlo should be replaced by a female president and that there should be an infusion of feminism into all courses and fields of study. DeCarlo, on the other hand, would like to turn Sarah Lawrence into fully coeducational college with a more neutral name, and to reduce the feminist
I came away from my visit to Sarah Lawrence feeling that a majority of the students want true coeducation on a 50‐50 basis, and that the homosexual issue will tend to fade when new and currently unpredictable social issues arise. For one thing, it is probably inevitable that young people with an elite heritage of questioning everything would be in the forefront in questioning the rigidities of sexual roles. For another, homosexuality on the part of older students with an outlet for their energies and commitments; easier and more satisfying social possibilities will just have to wait. One transfer student told me, “I'm getting the best education in the world. Here everybody talks and thinks about what's going on in their classes. At Stony Brook, where I was, nobody talked or thought, even in class. Now I'm just working, and later, after I graduate, I'll resolve my social problems. have lots of friends on this campus who are bisexual, but that's just not my solution, so I'll wait.” Another woman student said, “I was so upset after my freshman year here, I transferred to a Midwestern university. But I came back. The education here is finally worth anything.” This sense of wider intellectual opportunities at Sarah Lawrence is shared by many of the young men, who feel they otherwise would have been limited to more banal and routine institutions. A charming premed student said, “When I was at Willamette College out West, everyone talked about things, money or sports. Here everyone tells you how they feel, what's inside. It's heavy but exciting. Sarah Lawrence has been a great place for me.” Despite the troubled atmosphere, the dropout rate at Sarah Lawrence is 15 percent—about
Still, there is no minimizing the potential effect of the trouble on the school's future. Even though DeCarlo has brought the tuition to within $200 of competitors among the Ivy League schools, the applicant pool has been drying up. Sarah Lawrence, which, in 1957, turned down three out of every four applicants, now has an acceptance rate of 85 percent.
Some of this, of course, is traceable to the drop in applications experienced by all women's colleges as coeducation became the thing in the late 1960's, but a good” part is doubtless attributable to the reports of lonely campus life and a high degree of homosexuality. Visiting highschool seniors, as well as parents I have spoken to, have been upset to see women necking openly. Other women's colleges have been able to remain considerably more selective because their applicant pools have remained larger. Vassar, Bennington and Connecticut College report acceptance figures of 50 percent, 50 percent and 48 percent respectively; Wellesley, which did not go coed, has a 49 percent rate. If males were excluded from Sarah Lawrence, the admissions office told me, there would be a financial crisis, because of a lack of women waiting to fill the vacancies that would
What, then, Is to be done? To help women students campus minonties is nothing new, anywhere. Harold Taylor, who was president of Sarah Lawrence in the 1950's, remembers a scandal in which the leader of a homosexual group was expelled. Those were the days when none of us understood the workings of our bodies and the social meaning of our fenutleness, and when all sexual activity was devious and underground. I well remember the shock I felt when a friend on campus nearly bled to death from an illegal abortion. For all Its excesses and disturbances, I prefer the openness and selfof today's
However, I do believe that the women's movement, working in tandem with the sexual revolution, has placed a severe burden on young women students by making the “choice of sexual identity” a feminist requirement in a world as free and open as ours. It begins to be a situation, filled with deep inner terrors, in which psyches spin and whirl, finding no limits to provide definition and afford unity and rest. As Dr. Arnold Cooper, professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, puts it, “An openly active homosexual environment is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of adolescence. There is some reason to be concerned that such an environment will make more difficult the course of sexual development for certain particularly vulnerable young people. Few intelligent persons would today infringe upon the right of the homosexual to follow his or her own course with a consenting adult. Equally, however, most agree that it is no advantage to be homosexual in this world, whether it is called illness or not, and those who may not wish to be homosexual should be afforded a quiet, unpressured opportunity to find themselves.” Nothing is going to make the end of adolescence easy or graceful for any group on any campus. But the male‐female ratio at Sarah Lawrence today is unworkable. Just as there can be no return to the hypocritical codes of the past, so the expulsion of the males already on campus seems a feminist distemper. In spite of the difficulty of recruiting males, and at the cost of some dampening of feminist zeal, Sarah Lawrence must go forward to a more normal coeducational environment, so that everyone can have at least a decent crack at having a broken heart In a less an
‘Many of the men give every sign of being overwhelmed by the concentration of competent, expressive females and their implicit sexual and emotional demands.’
Anne Roiphe is a journalist and the author “Torch Song” and other novels.
In a time of confusion over sexual identity, a women's college pays the penalty of being avant‐garde.
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