Word: wabash
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Wabash held its academic ground--and instead co-opted the decade's new male zeitgeist. Even traditional courses like mythology examine "male/female archetypes, with readings from Camille Paglia and Robert Bly." In this day of the Million Man March, the college's Malcolm X Institute has assumed a larger influence on campus. Alumni are hailed not just in Big Business (former AT&T chairman Robert Allen) but also in show business (Broadway costume designer Tom Broecker), and Wabash was the first college to produce the Pulitzer-prizewinning play about AIDS, Angels in America. At the same time, Wabash...
...Wabash, remarkably, has preserved its gender--and has even made it a trendy selling point. Men's colleges once looked about as viable as castrato choirs. But Wabash, independent since it was founded in 1832, is giving its Georgian campus a $100 million face lift, with modern science and sports facilities, and has just enrolled one of its largest and smartest freshman classes in years. It's a tribute to the college's richly intimate teaching traditions: its fewer than 1,000 students, from all economic backgrounds, often learn as much over dinner and wine tastings at professors' houses...
Another liberal-arts ideal is "Know thy world," which is why, even as I prize the education I received there, I favor admitting women. Being all male hasn't always been easy for Wabash--especially after it voted down co-education in 1992. Right-wing think tanks, hoping to adopt the college as a mascot, mounted a nasty campaign to roll back the school's long history of multicultural studies, while hard-core feminists stormed the campus with politically correct, male-bashing lectures like "Athletes as Rapists...
...women on the faculty and a graduate of all-female Bryn Mawr College. "I worry that the message the guys get here is that women are just for weekends." She rolls her eyes as a student enters her office wearing a jesting T shirt that reads WABASH DOESN'T NEED WOMEN...
Academic reputation, of course, matters more than male bonding. "I came here in spite of it being all male," says a student who was lured by the demanding pre-med program. But for the time being, Wabash is reaping the rewards of being true to its gender...