Dartblog

It appears that the senior senator from the Bay State has quit his hahlf-century-long membership to the Owl Club, which was a tight-knit coterie of Harvard gentlemen who loved Hooters Restaurant but wouldn’t want to be caught in the society pages there, and so banded together in bloodbrotherly solidarity to feast on buffalo wings disguised as slovenly Boston University students, and after gawking at the waitstaff, they’d burry noses in art history textbooks because the stodgy old dean wouldn’t let the fluff-bird club meet on campus, and they were being open-minded rebels, you see. Or it was a way for the rich white guys to have a club so that they could all say decades down the line that they had a club that time, and it was swell. Maybe they had a fort, too, I don’t know. One thing was for certain: No girls allowed.

I’ve heard higher reports, but the luminous office of Kennedy himself admits that the dues were at least $100. Having conscripted himself to the hooters in 1954, that puts him, at the bare minimum, $5,100 in the bigot hole he started digging for Judge Samuel Alito.

Except that Teddy Kennedy, while he may be a bigot, isn’t a bigot because he was a member of the all-men Owl Club. (Although his taste in predator birds is suspiciously unpatriotic.) And neither is Sam Alito any sort of prometheus because he once belonged to Concerned Alumni for Princeton, an anti-affirmative action and, I understand, anti-co-education political action group. Kennedy’s McCarthy-worthy performance at the confirmation hearings may have lost the Democrats the battle, and it certainly put a good barrel or two of tar on the old senator’s face. (I’d continue on about how he then ate some crow, but it just wouldn’t make sense given when we now know about his love for owls.)

But out of Kennedy’s embarrassment came a small victory for the far-left agenda of absolutist equality and genderlovin’ elimination of sex. In order to attack Alito, Democrats insulted a group to which he was once, long ago, partly involved in an ancillary sense. And in order to defend against that crude sally, Republicans agreed with the premise but took issue with the association. That was the right political move, beyond question. Except now it’s left us, perhaps, with a new Conventional Wisdom: That private clubs cannot be sirs-only. That isn’t so, both from a legal standpoint and a moral one. Private entities like social clubs can discriminate as they wish. Most such clubs are birthed purely because the likeminded or likemoneyed salivated after such discrimination. Else, everyone would just be at the YMCA.

The same goes for opposition to co-education. For a private institution with a great mass of historicity behind it, opposing co-education was a perfectly legitimate position to take when those institutions were considering the change. It didn’t (and doesn’t) mean advocates are anti-woman. It means they attach some great value to the unique and careful circumstances that led their college to preeminence, and did not want the radical shifts in budgeting, size, policy, physical plants, social situation, or academic atmosphere attendant in radically altering the student body.

But of course, die-hards won’t accept that argument. To die-hards (not the Bruce Willis kind; the spell-‘women’-with-a-‘y’ kind) any net increase in chromosomal X-pairs is some heavenly rapture unequaled by all the collective collegiate knowledge, music, and poetry mankind ever wrote down. The corollary is that anyone opposed to co-education is a woman-hating bigot because he must be doing it for the unique and exclusive reason that he thinks women ought to be kept dumb, barefoot, and pregnant in the kitchen.

In order to counter that, I’ve got to employ an old standby. I’m going to do a sarcastic, “Oh, no. Wait.”

In 1987, Wheaton College, one hundred and fifty-two years old at the time, was in the midst of an internal struggle. It was considering admitting the opposite sex. Going co-ed. The student body brayed and shouted and protested. Why change? What we have is unique. Don’t spoil it. You’re pandering. This is an outrage. But in the end, Wheaton became a co-educational facility, and for the first time, in the bright Fall of 1988, women entered the classroom, forever changing the longstanding social and academic mores of the college.

Oh, no. Wait. Wheaton was an all-girls school and they didn’t want men be permitted to matriculate.

Or how about just over one year ago? Nestled amidst New York’s Finger Lakes, the Wells College administration was having a rough go. In the face of enormous pressure, it had decided to go coed for the next Fall semester. The students were in a frenzy. Magazines reported that students were crying, saying “I was crushed.” It was the school’s largest (and practically only) controversy to the date. The streams of alums and current stock of young students simply didn’t want their school to change. They felt it was seismic, dangerous. A severe derogation of the contract they signed by paying the school’s hefty tuition. When the sun set, though, Wells’ administration and trustee board prevailed over the passionate cries of the undergraduates. Women would be allowed in.

Oh! No, no. Wait a minute. Why, those weren’t men at all howling about co-education. They were women, demanding that the other sex be stopped at the gate.

And I could go on and on. The point isn’t that men-only colleges are better on the merits. Or that Princeton or Dartmouth or any other grand old college’s decision to accept women was wrong. Some schools benefitted greatly by going coed. Others have not—there are a lot of failed schools in the annals of American history, many there simply because they tried to change quicker than their joints would allow. The point is that opposing the decision to become co-educational when Princeton was considering it does not make Judge Alito one more whit the misogynist than does Ted Kennedy’s membership in a Jackets Only social clique.