Word: coeds
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...primary defense offered up by single-sex advocates, however, is that there is something important about all-male social space—something that would be lost in a world of co-ed clubs. One final club president told me that he enjoys "having a space on campus where you can interact with just your own sex," and that he finds a "value in male camaraderie." Variations of this theme surface again and again in conversations with club members. Many express concern that with the introduction of women, cohesion, tight membership bonds, and institutional respect would all vanish. They often...
...decades ago. These schools’ students do not seem to spend their time pining for the single-sex days of yesteryear. Geoff C. Shaw, a senior at Yale, says that "cohesive would be one of the first words to come to mind" when describing Yale’s co-ed secret societies. Under gender segregation, he believes the clubs would be compromised. "You’d be missing out on the contributions of half the population," he says...
...Princeton seniors I spoke with articulated similar sentiments. Giovanna Campagna, who is in Princeton’s tony Ivy Club—one of the last to integrate—told me that having co-ed clubs "makes the whole social world more gender-balanced—it’s not like a bunch of guys can rule the scene." She is unequivocal about her preference for gender integration: "I wouldn’t want to be in an all-girls eating club," she says firmly. Lizzie Presser, another senior and a member of the Terrace Club, also found...
Preferences are molded by experience, so it’s possible that current Yale and Princeton students value co-ed clubs simply because they’ve never known anything else. But it seems much more likely that Harvard’s single-sex defenders are plagued by status quo bias...
Opponents of integration are right to claim that final clubs wouldn’t be the same after they went co-ed, yet they forget that not all changes are for the worse. When new arrivals break an organization’s homogeneity, something gets left behind, because it’s easier to exist in an environment free from the tensions created by difference. But ultimately, the inclusion of more diverse perspectives also makes for a richer community, and this gain more than compensates for the discomfort of no longer being surrounded by faces that look just like your...