Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/111

Rh practices. This interference is resented by them, and this resentment shows itself in the use of the offensive term 'coed' and of more offensive words in vogue in more rowdyish places. I have not often heard the term 'coed' used by gentlemen, at least without quotation marks. Where it is prevalent, it is a sign that true coeducation that is, education in terms of generous and welcome equality—does not exist. I have rarely found opposition to coeducation on the part of really serious students. The majority are strongly in favor of it but the minority in this as in many other cases makes the most noise. The rise of a student movement against coeducation almost always accompanies a general recrudesence of academic vulgarity.

A little more worthy of respect as well as a little more potent is the influence of the athletic spirit. In athletic matters, the young women give very little assistance. They cannot play on the teams, they can not yell, and they are rarely generous with their money in helping those who can. A college of a thousand students, half women, counts for no more athletically than one of five hundred, all men. It is vainly imagined that colleges are ranked by their athletic prowess, and that every woman admitted keeps out a man, and this man a potential punter or sprinter. There is not much truth in all of this, and if there were, it is of no consequence. College athletics is in its essence by-play, most worthy and valuable for many reasons, but nevertheless only an adjunct to the real work of the college, which is education. If a phase of education otherwise desirable interferes with athletics, so much the worse for athletics.

Of like grade is the feeling that men count for more than women, because they are more likely to be heard from in after life. Therefore, their education is of more importance, and the presence of women impedes it.

A certain adverse influence comes from the fact that the oldest and wealthiest of our institutions are for men alone or for women alone. These send out a body of alumni who know nothing of coeducation, and who judge it with the positiveness of ignorance. Most men filled with the time-honored traditions of Harvard and Yale, of which the most permeating is that of Harvard's and Yale's infallibility, are against coeducation on general principles. Similar influences in favor of the separate education of women go out from the sister institutions of the East. The methods of the experimenting, irreverent, idol-breaking West find no favor in their eyes.

The only serious new argument against coeducation is that derived from the fear of the adoption by universities of woman's standards of art and science rather than those of men, the fear that amateurism would take the place of specialization in our higher education. Women