2016 August 26^th

Cal Thomas in his column today finds the gender-neutral statements from Princeton University very disturbing. He is sure this forecasts a horrendous destruction of the national identity. Maybe he’s right.

He is a little late in his concern, though, because some of these gender-neutral statements have been around for a while and have caused no damage, except perhaps to some fragile male egos. For some time now it has been considered appropriate at most colleges to refer to first year students as first year students rather than as freshmen. If this change makes the JV football team feel emasculated, it is not obvious.

Cal Thomas has the prejudices one would expect of an older white man who was once a vice president of the Moral Majority. Jerry Falwell, the founder of that now defunct group, was no supporter of equal rights for women, so Cal Thomas’ opposition to gender-neutral language is no surprise. Perhaps Thomas would buy into the fine old Teutonic notion that for women it should be only kinder, kuche und kirk. (Which translates to children, cooking and church.)

This might have been what the founder of Princeton had in mind because until the 1960s this retrograde outfit did not even admit women. Indeed most of the Ivy League schools did not admit women either. Yale admitted undergraduate women for the first time in 1969.

There were special women’s colleges attached to many universities. My alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, had Margaret Morrison Carnegie College (Irreverently called Maggie Murph by us undergraduates) which opened in 1906 and closed for want of enrollment in 1973. (I should say that the then Carnegie Tech admitted women to all of its other colleges as well as to Maggie Murph.) Women were, by then, no longer interested in a college education for housewifery.

Eventually the ultimate disaster will strike poor Cal, an envelope will arrive addressed to: Mrs.  and Mr. Cal Thomas. Whatever will he do then? Perhaps that will be good for another column.

Thomas makes much of the fact that Princeton began as an institution to train ministers. Most undergraduate liberal arts colleges were started for that reason. I taught in a liberal arts college for thirty years. In its library basement I found a 1906 college catalog. The requirements to enter the college then included a reading knowledge of Greek and Latin. That was a requirement to enter, not to graduate. So where in rural central Michigan did the students come from who could meet such entrance requirements? The college maintained its own boarding prep school and drew its entering class from those prep school graduates.