I, A Yale Coed

We don't know how good we have it. Everyone at Harvard and Radcliffe should be obliged to spend at least one week a year at Yale, so that all petty problems and minor irritations with Cambridge fall into their proper perspective. The MBTA, the Bick, even Cambridge's foul and constant precipitation have never been as dear to me as they were after three days of Bull Dogs.

I left Harvard for Yale for three days of Coeducation Week. A boisterous campaign for coeducation at Yale, led by a small group of disaffected, and frustrated, student radicals culminated in this week, which saw about 1000 girls from schools all over the East eating, sleeping, and studying as Yale undergraduates.

The Week was something of a coup for anti-administration radicals at Yale. Although President Kingman Brewster agreed in theory with the idea of a coeducation week, he wanted it held much later--maybe in January or February. Unable to get any immediate cooperation from "The King," a coalition formed of student government types, Yale SDS, and some of the younger college masters went ahead with plans to bring on the girls. When it became apparent to Brewster that he was being presented with Coeducation Week as a fait accompli he cut off communication with the organizers and, as of the middle of The Week, no one had heard a word from him. "One of the most important parts of this project" boasts the official Coeducation Week press release, "is student power."

But I doubt that many coeds had that sort of student power in mind when they decided to share themselves with Yale for one week. Although there were innumerable efforts to make it respectable by scheduling coeducational panel discussions with titles like, "Educational Innovation: Is It Possible Within The Present University Structure?" and "Exploitation In Ghetto Real-Estate Transactions," we all knew why we were there, and they all knew why we were there and we didn't need any panel discussions to help us along.

I lived in Stiles College, a new house made of sombre, irregularly shaped stone towers that rise in fierce and jagged incongruity with the lacy elegance of the rest of Yale's gothic structures.

Registering coeds were met at the front desk on Monday by A Group Of The Guys From The House who in posture and approach were very much like A Group Of The Guys From Nini's. They looked me over, shoved my temporary student I.D. card toward me (Jody Adams is a Yale Undergraduate from November 4 to November 6) and sent me, with a guide, to find my room and its owner, my "student host."

My student host was not happy to be a student host. He made it clear to me within ten minutes of our meeting that he had only volunteered his room because everyone else on his corridor had and he had been subject to some "pressure" and, besides, he had Law Boards on Saturday and he didn't like being dislocated before a test like that, and he hoped I didn't mind but he was going to take his radio and alarm clock with him when he left. He also let me know he intended to stay in his room as long as he legally could (from 8 a.m. to midnight). He did, and I was forced to tiptoe around him while he studied and to get dressed in the closet. I didn't spend much time in my room.

As soon as I unpacked I went to the Stiles dining room for lunch, and sat down alone. Two boys, who deliberated for a long time over the iced tea dispenser, sat down with me.

"What school are you from?" "Radcliffe." "Oh, yeah?" They smirked at each other and looked at me curiously and vaguely amused. I got used to that reaction. "But what are you doing here when you've got Harvard up there?" I also got used to that question.

They hastened to tell me that they had both decided not even to apply to Harvard, they wanted to go to Yale so much. And Yale was every bit as good academically as Harvard, probably even better, and there was no question but that a lot of guys really missed out accepting Harvard over Yale. They were frantic in their assurances, and I got the first taste of the Yale paranoia about Harvard that I was to keep running into for the next two days.

By early afternoon it was cold and sunless. A very light, raw rain began to wash over Yale's gray stone. I walked down Broadway, the slightly sleezier, more tightly jammed Mass. Ave. of New Haven. Down Elm Street to the Old Campus where the freshmen live and where several coed games of frisbee and touch football dotted the quad. All over the campus there was something giddy in the air--like a giant joke that everyone was in on. Lots of smiling went on. People smiled at each other on the street and said hello for no reason. One ecstatic sophomore stopped me in front of Sterling Library and told me that seeing a girl at Yale on a Monday was almost more than he could bear. After four years of prep school and two years of Yale he had been led to think that "girls folded and disappeared from Sunday evening to Friday morning." It was a little depressing coming from a twenty-year-old.

I found the Yale Daily News building, and saw a notice inviting all interested coeds to work for the paper while they were in New Haven.

Everyone there was terribly polite. In fact, I was generally treated with more deference and gallantry in three days at Yale than I have been in three and a half years here. The boys at the News stood up when I came into the room, they helped me on and off with my coat, and they watched their language. I heard "Oh Sh . . . ugar" at least twice, and "F . . .ooey" once, which I must say embarrassed me a great deal more than what they had intended ever would have.

I volunteered to write a story for the paper, and after a great deal of snickering and behind-the-hand jokes I was assigned to cover the Abe Fortas Film Festival at the Law School. The Festival consisted of the seven films that were so obscene that they were only saved from destruction by Abe Fortas' vote on the Supreme Court. Somehow appropriate for the first night of Coed Week.

After dinner at Stiles, with two more new acquaintances and another discussion of the fact that the undergraduate education at Yale was probably better than at Harvard and that these two boys hadn't even applied to Harvard either, I went off alone to my night at the movies.

The audience was packed with undergraduates and their new-found coeds, hissing, booing, and trying very hard to sound like a Brattle audience. The movies were pretty repulsive. All of them consisted of ladies removing their clothing and writhing around--all alone--on sofas, beds, and desk tops. In one of them, the heroine became carried away and used her sun-glasses and a cross she had been wearing around her neck for purposes of self-gratification. I left early.

Back through the now heavy rain to the News. The scene was frantic--with the deadline an hour away, strange faces constantly popping in telling me to hurry up, and half-heard comments about that goddamned Cliffie. At that moment the whole experience was suddenly surrealistic. There I was at Yale, for no reason except that a group of boys just couldn't stand it anymore, sitting in a strange newsroom, writing some story about some lady masturbating with a cross. It was bizarre and slightly absurd. All at once I was feeling isolated and quite lonely.

After the article was finished, I was exhausted. I walked slowly back past Liggets, past their J. Press, and past Maury's (the place where Louie dwells) to Stiles, where I discovered two girls from the University of Connecticut playing a game of bridge that was still going when I left on Wednesday morning. I found the bathroom, which had been cleared out for us. There was a huge female sex sign on the door with the words "Up Against the Wall Mother Yale" scrawled beneath it. I said goodnight to my student host (who left with his radio and alarm clock) and fell, exhausted, into bed.

The next day was election day, and smiles were much scarcer. Besides, by now the boys were more accustomed to girls in their classes and libraries, and the mixer-shine of the first day was beginning to fade.

Through an extra lot of smiling and a great deal of sympathy for a tale of a Harvard rejection I managed an invitation to luncheon at a Secret Society--like a Harvard Final Club but even crustier and more archaic. The Secret Societies are so secret that visitors are not even permitted inside the huge, windowless stone "tombs" that house them, and we had our lunch on the fourth floor of a nearby University administration building.

This was the Yale of 20 years ago, the Yale I had always somehow pictured. Three-piece suits and Pucci prints abounded, as did champagne punch, stuffed figs, and talk of skiing. The steward wore a flower in his lapel from the secret garden of the secret building of the secret society. These very well-cared-for young men seemed quite unaffected by anything that went on outside of their tomb.

My escort pointed to an elderly black waiter who was bowing and scraping a great deal, and announced that that waiter's father and grandfather had worked for this society, and so did his son. "It's like a family tradition for them you know, being waiters here and everything." "Oh," I offered. "Then that's something like slavery then isn't it?" He thought. "Why yes, I guess you might say say that. It's kind of like slavery," and he seemed half astonished, half proud of the discovery he had made. I bolted my stuffed figs and took off as soon as I could.

I left Yale on Wednesday, but most girls stayed on until Sunday. The week was relatively unstructured, so there were always girls alone, or in groups, walking, studying, smiling--being generally approachable.

The boys loved it. Business in New Haven restaurants soared during Coed Week, and parietals were virtually nonexistent. One senior told me that it was the "best thing to happen to New Haven since the blackout." They were happy--you could see it.

But for all of its obvious value, there was something rather peculiar about Coed Week. I suppose the strangeness was unavoidable in such a laboratory-experiment stuation. I found myself as I walked through a building or across a yard smiling left and right, stopping and marvelling at just exactly what it was that I was doing. I realized that I felt almost like a missionary or someone from the Salvation Army. It was as if 1000 angels of peace were being visited upon New Haven to calm the seething inhabitants and to show the benighted the light of coeducational normalcy and tranquility. The ever-present smiles on the faces of the girls were almost beatific, surely maternal, and terribly altruistic. Reverend Coffin said that Coeducation Week was an effort to "reincarnate communities--to transform them from cold routinized bureaucracy into a warm organic existence." We were helping those poor guys, oh yes we were. It was very strange, indeed.

On Wednesday morning, after a sleepless election night, I saw the sun rise over Harkness Tower. Early in the day I bought a post card with Stiles College on it to send to my mother, and boarded the creaky New Haven railroad to Boston.

When I arrived in Cambridge and emerged from the MTA, there were couples all over the place--couples in the U.R., couples in Widener, couples by the river. These kids were totally without the incredible anxiety that seemed to tear at their counterparts in New Haven. It never has to occur to us here that it could be any other way