Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., announced that due to severe financial troubles, it’s going to open its educational doors to men.
The result?
All current students will be deprived of their education because of the new arrivals.
Well, not really. But that’s the way Randolph-Macon students have been acting, according to descriptions from the “New York Times.” Diana Jean Schemo authored a descriptive article that clearly illustrates how the Randolph-Macon community is feeling.
The article opens with the description of the college’s interim president, Ginger Worden, who is looking at a “distraught student protester” who has “tears rolling down [her] face.”
Worden silently mouths, “I’m sorry,” to the student, while crying herself. Then the two share a watery embrace.
Schemo describes the embrace as a “quiet
commiseration over the demise of single-sex education.”
Why do these women care so much about getting their college education in the absence of men? National surveys show that women enrolled in same-sex colleges are “more engaged and successful academically” than women at mixed institutions. Yet according to the article, David W. Strauss, a partner at a Baltimore marketing firm, said that women’s colleges use research like that to present themselves as places where women can “thrive without having to compete with men.”
Even if they wanted to, women shouldn’t be in environments where they are allowed to compete without men. That’s not what the real world is like, so a college shouldn’t create a false world where women only have to work alongside other women. Furthermore, the fact that women create schools exclusively for their gender so that they won’t have to compete with men is not a very feminist action. They are stating that, if placed among men, they fear they would not succeed as much. A true feminist would feel confident against any demographic.
Randolph-Macon senior Anne Haley told the “New York Times,” “Every student on this campus has a leadership position in something.”
Men arriving on campus shouldn’t mean that has to change. If it did (which it wouldn’t), that would mean that women simply crumble in the presence of men – that they’re just inferior beings. That’s not true, and such a thought process is painfully archaic.
Yet that’s not the only archaic thought process going on in this subject. It is undeniable that the idea of keeping men and women separate in educational institutions parallels black and white segregation. We’re still working to overcome that injustice so let’s not add gender segregation to the mix.
When colleges like Yale and Princeton opened their doors to women, they were happy about it. Men definitely protested, but it happened anyway. It’s hypocritical to react like Randolph-Macon’s students, given that women were once excluded from certain school, when now men are eligible to attend.
There’s something severely wrong when students protest and alumni threaten to cease donations when men are being permitted to attend a previously all-female college. Such events warrant a rise in masculinity like this country has never seen before. We might even start burning our boxer shorts. But then we’d be acting just as ridiculous as the students at Randolph-Macon College.
Wrong school! Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia has been coed since 1971, when the all male school established in 1830 first began admitting women. The school you are referring to is the former Randolph-Macon Women’s College(at one time controlled by the same governing board as R-MC),now Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.