I grew up in Virginia on 600 acres dotted with Georgian brick buildings, and I spent many childhood days playing among the oaks in summer and skating on Chalgrove Lake in winter.
My family wasn’t wealthy. My father was a professor. But because he taught at Hampden-Sydney College, that campus and its riches were my backyard.
I raced down snow-covered hills with Hampden-Sydney students using dining hall trays as sleds. I hung out at the soccer field to watch Dad coach and played in the theater while Mom and Dad rehearsed their lines for Ten Little Indians or Anything Goes. Students babysat me, read to me, comforted me when the horse was hauled off to the glue factory in the film version of Animal Farm, and tossed me into the air to my shrieks and giggles.
Life was good.
I thought this was college life and I thought this was who men were: Bright guys who went to class, read their Plato, played ball, acted, played with kids, graduated college in four years, and then went off to med school, law school, the military, and got jobs.
I fancied that women must have their own place to do the same things. As I grew older, though, and applied to college myself, I found the single-sex college on the endangered species list, with the liberal arts curricula not far behind. I did not understand the need for business classes or professional studies. College kids should study the classics, math, science, and language.
Although I came to the world with what some might call an 1870s impression of college life, I opted to earn my degrees from large coed universities. However, I returned to the all-male environment as I began my career in higher education serving as an academic counselor at Hampden-Sydney and as associate dean of students at Wabash. So I am one of the few individuals to savor day-to-day life on both the Wabash and Hampden-Sydney campuses, as a child and then as a working woman. Those experiences—and my research for my dissertation on single-sex education—lead me to believe the liberal arts at an all-male college is the ideal way to educate many young men. For the sake of those men and our society, we who understand young men and the benefits of all-male education need to get the word out and tell our stories.
One of my favorite childhood stories is about Andy East, a Hampden-Sydney senior who babysat me for an entire weekend when my parents attended a conference. We were watching TV when the phone rang. As a “grown-up” 11-year-old I immediately answered the call from campus security: Our three horses had escaped and were grazing behind Venable Hall. Smokey, who had learned to use his long lips to pop the gate, had triggered the adventure.
“We need to get them,” I told Andy. His eyes grew wide as he asked, “What do we do?”
We gathered flashlights, halters, and feed and then headed up the road to Venable Hall to find nearly 30 students gathered around the horses, keeping them calm and in place. We haltered the three “runaways” and led them back home.
A chained lock on Smokey’s stall prevented any repeat performance, but I never forgot the gentle patience of those guys, their
tenderness toward my animals, Andy’s sense of responsibility to a little girl, and his willingness to let her lead when the time came.
I returned to Hampden-Sydney after I earned my master’s degree to serve as the academic counselor, advising, teaching study skills, and steering the guys, now younger than I, through academic probation. I had no background in higher education but my colleagues told me, “You know the faculty, the curriculum, the Southern culture, and you get men. You know the all-male environment.”
True enough, I thought, but don’t most people understand men?
I had worked at Hampden-Sydney for several years when Wabash hired me as the first female Associate Dean of Students. During the two-week period between my accepting the position and starting the job, Dean of Students Tom Bambrey ’68 overnighted me everything from “Old Wabash” to the rich story behind “Wabash Always Fights.”
But one of my fondest memories of Wabash speaks to the gentler side of Wabash men, which I believe the all-male setting develops. A couple of our Muslim students had never decorated holiday cookies, so not long before winter break I invited the RAs over and hired a local caterer to bring in sugar cookies in the shape of snowmen, footballs, and stars along with icing, colored sugar, and candy glitter. In true male tradition, the RAs turned the seemingly simple task into a competitive event: Who could decorate the most cookies, and whose cookies were the most festive? Think of it as a precursor to the Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars.” Two years later when I prepared to move, I still found glitter and colored sugar scattered into the crevices of my kitchen space.
I’ll never forget Fall 2002, when we heard that Jeff Espino ’03, our head RA, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Jeff’s family drove from Texas to Crawfordsville to assess the situation and wait for test results. Unsure of how long their stay might last, family members checked in to the most economical motel in Crawfords-ville. Not the place for a family facing crisis. So the Dean of Students office found rooms for the family on the Wabash campus and provided meal vouchers for the dining hall.
The next day we were surprised to hear that the dining hall would not accept the vouchers. Sodexo fed Jeff’s family at no expense to the College. The food service company considered Jeff part of their family, too, so they absorbed the costs of multiple meals.
When doctors decided Jeff should seek treatment in Texas, he had to withdraw. The College refunded his tuition and federal aid without hesitation. The RA staff, also without hesitation, supported my decision to have Kip Chase ’03 assume the role as head RA, with the provision that Jeff would resume his duties when he returned the following fall. No need to discuss the matter, no need to suggest whether we should employ a more democratic process, just support and respect.
Jeff graduated from Wabash two years later and went on to become a high school teacher and basketball coach with a wife and two children.
After four years I left Wabash to pursue my graduate studies and come home to Virginia. Returning to a coed college community only affirmed my faith in single-sex education. Male students seemed marginalized, outnumbered by females in both undergraduate and graduate schools.
So I set about researching single-sex education. I discovered that men graduate at higher rates from the three remaining all-male schools compared to men from coed institutions. Perhaps it’s because the males “harass and tease each other to do their work” as the Hampden-Sydney students reported to me. Perhaps because, as the former dean of faculty noted, “It is just a different dynamic when it is a bunch of guys. There is something different about what they do and how they interact.” Perhaps because these schools have high expectations of their students, one of the “best practices” identified by landmark education researcher George Kuh. Regardless, several Hampden-Sydney faculty reported, “Our kids learn more from when they start to when they finish. My jaw drops at the strides they make between freshman and senior year. It is simply remarkable.”
At Wabash, I’m told that Professor Emeritus of Religion Raymond Williams puts it this way: “We take our students further.”
I wonder if other institutions have feminized education to the point where men grow less engaged. Few male role models serve in student affairs on coed campuses. Few courses address war, teach Hemingway, or discuss men’s issues. We seem to have figured out how to successfully engage the female student and rightly so, though a case can be made that coed campuses do not educate them as well as they might either. But have we lost the art of teaching men? Have we forgotten the means to engage the male student?
Do Hampden-Sydney, Wabash, Morehouse, and the secondary all-male prep schools offer something unique simply by their all-male nature, which engages, educates, and produces the human capital that our economy, our society desperately needs? Former Wabash President Pat White may have put it best when he articulated what he believes sets Wabash apart: “What we do that is distinct is to notice, nurture, and develop young men inside and outside the classroom, teaching them to take themselves and their biggest dreams seriously. In a society that is not taking men seriously, Wabash takes men and their full ambition seriously. This is not happening at large universities to be sure, but it is also not happening at many co-educational liberal arts colleges.”
So perhaps society should take all-male colleges seriously, study them, and rediscover why they continue to graduate such successful, confident citizens who lead with honor and integrity. As a feminist, I want well-educated men as my colleagues and partners in that common struggle to tackle the global and day-to-day issues that affect all of us. Maybe it’s not simply that these schools teach men only. Maybe it’s the combination of liberal arts and the commonality of one gender: the memories of my childhood where men played football, studied chemistry, sang in the Glee Club, and played with kids.
That worked well then and still works today.
A former associate dean of students at Wabash, Edith L. Simms is the learning resources specialist at Lynchburg College.