Whew! This trip definitely keeps me on the road... I have to leave any minute for my 3+ hour trip back to New Jersey to meet with students at Rider University. But I wanted to make sure that I got a chance to blog before I left my easily accessible Internet!! But basically, this trip has consisted of driving, presenting, and sleeping, driving, presenting, and sleeping. There hasn't been a whole lot of time for anything else.

Last night I spent time chatting with a group of women from Hood College here in Frederick, Maryland. Historically an all-women's school, the college went co-ed about two years ago for financial reasons and women there are still dealing with the aftermath. Their story was a case study about how the presence of men affects social dynamics and campus culture.

Some of the changes were kind of funny-- the women present complained mightily about how noisy men were in the newly co-ed dorms, bouncing basketballs in the halls at 2 am. But the transition went deeper, too. One student talked about how before the campus went co-ed, women used to go to the library in their pjs-- they really didn't care what anyone else thought of them. Now the new students on campus dress up for class, mainly to look good for men. Women's ways of doing things, their slow, deliberate, emotionally sensitive responses to tragedies on campus such as 9-11 or deaths of students, was making way for decisive "act now" decisions. The switch has changed the whole climate of campus.

Now the group admitted readily that change was needed for the college to stay alive. But how do we embrace nescessary changes while also retaining our own traditions as women? It is interesting how this campus feels a need to change to accomodate and attract male students-- do they really have to change the fundamentally open and nurturing environment that they were before? It is a larger question for women, as we attempt to involve men further in our work for justice and to transform the larger male-dominated society around us into one that better accomodates the values of women.

Perhaps rather than catering to men in society, it is time for us to demand that they cater their traditional institutions to us.

Kelsey

Another interesting situation is at Tulane. In order to survive financially post-Katrina, they have restructured their academic colleges, including eliminating Newcomb College, the coordinate Arts and Sciences college for women. The response to this has been interesting: some women glad that they are no longer placed in a certain college "because of their genitalia" while others lamenting the loss of a female-friendly environment.