Time Machine

Although Yale University would not announce its plans to go fully coeducational until November 14, the college allowed seven hundred young women to visit for Coeducation Week beginning November 4. More than eighteen hundred women had applied in a two-week period for the simple honor of this limited experiment, which did not guarantee admission the next fall but was meant to convince older alumni of the relative harmlessness of coeducation. The visitors were given empty boys’ rooms and permitted to roam the campus as they might as students- hearing lectures, sampling cafeteria food, growing oblivious of the fauxGothic architecture. “This is a really serious thing,” one senior told a reporter. “We hope the sexes will meet over coffee, over lunch or whatever, and just get accustomed to each other.” Women already attended the graduate schools, and after a week of the finest representatives from Vassar and Bryn Mawr touring the undergraduate facilities, nothing terrible seemed to have happened.