It was the year America celebrated its Bicentennial. It was the year the Viking I landed on Mars, the year Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak founded Apple Computer in their Cupertino garage. But for those in whom names like “Benson” and “Stark” strike fear or reverence, and words like “ponding,” “Chez Hub,” and “the Buff” have special meaning, 1976 marked the passing of one era and the dawning of another, as Claremont Men’s College enrolled its first women students. And no one knew what to expect.

            It was just after the Board of Trustees had made their decision that then-president Jack L. Stark reassured a presumably skeptical CMC community in a May 1975 letter: “The coeducational question has been difficult for many. I think the right decision was made and the future of the College has been strengthened.”

            Despite some lamenting among alumni, vocal dissent and harassment among students, and too many excuses on campus, the transition from an all-male student body to a coeducational campus was an unexpectedly smooth one. What helped was the presence of female students from the other Claremont colleges on CMC’s campus and in its classrooms prior to 1976, paving the way for those early CMC “Pioneers.”

            Now, 25 years later, Stark’s belief that going coed would assure the College’s subsequent ascent in quality and reputation has been borne out. Some would argue that by 1976 the handwriting was on the wall for men’s colleges. In 1837, Oberlin College became the first coeducational college in the country. The University of Iowa was founded as the first coeducational state university in 1855. In 1870, nearly 60 percent of the U.S. institutions of higher education enrolled only male students, and by 1982, that number fell to three.

            Going coed was an economic necessity for many colleges in the aftermath of the Civil War. Younger institutions in the sparsely populated West welcomed the tuition dollars female students could provide, while the established men’s colleges of the East could afford to hold out longer as single-sex schools. Still, East Coast colleges that CMC considered “brother institutions”—schools like Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Amherst—began going coed in the early 1970s.

            While the women’s movement undoubtedly broadened higher education in this country, like so many CMC things, it ultimately came down to a matter of practicality and economy. In his May 1975 letter, Stark wrote that the pool of college applicants would likely decline by 1980, and that young men weren’t as interested in attending all-male colleges. As economics professor Procter Thomson put it: “It’s far easier to peddle a coed college.”

Cover photograph from CMC magazine, Spring 2001.
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