“Co-education is with us wholly successful. There is no difference of opinion concerning it, either in our faculty or our board. We find no additional difficulty in discipline; our young women do good work, and the progress of our young men is in no way impeded. It does not seem to us to be any longer an open question.
“I believe the character of both young men and women is helped, though the results in this particular are difficult of proof. The advantages of the system are manifold; the evils are none. We have ceased to think about its fitness save as questions from abroad redirect our attention to it.”
Extract from a letter by Joseph Cummings, president of Northwestern University:
“The effect of co-education in this institution, upon the manners and morals of both men and women, is only good. The history of co-education shows that men and women trained under its influence are less open to temptations of the passions than are those trained in separate institutions.
“Women are less inclined to pursue long courses of study, but the average scholarship of those who do persevere and graduate is higher than that of the men; and women here do not retard the progress of men.”
In more than 200 letters from presidents and professors in co-educational colleges, a part of which were written during the Adelbert College controversy, and a larger part of which have been received by the writer of this chapter within the last three months, there is not one which does not give testimony to the value of the system, similar to that above quoted.
I have chosen to quote from letters written in 1884 because the controversy then pending impelled the writers to a fuller and more specific statement of their experience than would be elicited by a series of questions propounded at this date. It is only necessary to add that in every instance letters dated in 1889 or 1890 fully accord with those written in 1883 and 1884.
Presidents Angell, White, Bascom, and Cummings, and Professor Tyler are quoted because of their distinguished reputation as educators, because their experience has been in institutions universally acknowledged to rank among the highest in our country, and because, as no one of them has ever taken the position of an apostle of co-education, their words will be received as the testimony of witnesses, and not as the pleadings of advocates.
THE SOCIAL EFFECTS AND TENDENCIES OF CO-EDUCATION.
But few of all the 165 colleges in the West now open to men and women have compiled statistics which present the records of their graduates, prior or subsequent to the admission of women, in reference to health, domestic state, occupation, social position, official place, financial or other form of success. Perhaps the most important and successful attempt to obtain such statistics is that made by the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, whose inquiries were limited to the women who had graduated from the small number of institutions for either separate or joint education, admitted to that association.