A week or so ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article in the Indy Star about Wabash College.
The title of the article reads Steeped in tradition or stuck in the past? with the subtitle Wabash College's all-male heritage is a point of both pride and introspection, and it's not a bad little article. It opens with a poor quoting of the Gentleman's Rule - the only code of conduct enforced at Wabash:
The student is expected to conduct himself at all times, both on and off the campus, as a gentleman and a responsible citizen.The article continues to do a decent job of exploring some of the issues raised in Wabash's continued existance as a single-sex institution - all from a decidedly liberal slant, leaning toward the side of "why stay all-male?" rather than from a "what is good about staying all-male" angle.
Brian's simple question to me was Thoughts?, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to throw down my general thoughts about Wabash specifically as relates to its status as an all-male institution of higher learning.
In the abstract, I am probably pretty opposed to the concept of single-sex education. Any group that excludes people on a wholesale basis - be they whites, women, hispanics, Muslims, plumbers, or left-handed gay accountants, is anathema to the very spirit of these here great United States of America, and I went to Wabash as a stupid freshman who was probably in favor of Wabash becoming a co-ed school - as are at least some of the former students and at least current faculty member certainly still echo this sentiment, going so far as to refer to the current single-sex environment of Wabash College as An Albatross Around Our Necks.
And, in spite of all of that, I will fight for the continuation of Wabash's grandest tradition - its all-male identity - with every ounce of my spirit and hope until my last breaths.
Wabash is a unique place, one that is more special to me than is nearly any other place that I have every been lucky to know. I spent three years (one year spent overseas in Aberdeen) at Wabash and would struggle to find a place that I can imagine being more important in shaping who I am as an adult, a man, and a person. I was challenged intellecutally more at Wabash - inside the classrooms, at late-night discussions back at the fraterntiy house, and around campus - than I ever was before and in ways that I rarely have been since.
I learned about friendship at Wabash - admittedly, friendship with other men, primarily - and what it means to be able to lift up your brother and friend while at the same time challenging his way of thinking or going about his life without tearing him down. I learned how to challenge thoughts instead of the thinker behind them. And I was pushed more academically than I ever have been since or even remotely was before my time at Wabash.
Wabash is a place that can foster the most base instincts of young men - drunken frat parties, immature hazing, and sadly misogynistic jokes of the worst kind. It is the culture of the male sports locker room stretched over a four-year education, and there is little hope that every aspect of such a culture could possibly be positive.There are, without a doubt, asses at Wabash. I knew a number of students - some of whom were certainly fraternity brothers of mine - who I would be loathe to say were on their way to becoming the gentlemen that Wabash purports to produce. This would certainly be the case at any institution - be it of college-aged students or much older "adults".
But Wabash made me, and it has made a great number of other outstanding men who would not be who they turned out to be if they had not been given the opportunity to attend Wabash College. For that reason alone, I will join the chorus of voices who long sing thy praise, Old Wabash!
If you're interested in knowing what Wabash College truly is like, take a while and visit the campus. Ask around what the professors and students think make it unique, why they think the college should stay all-male or why they think it might be better as a co-ed school.
I'll place money that the answer to "what makes Wabash unique" won't be the all-maleness, the local bars, the social scene, or anything that you might expect to hear. It'll be the tradition, the familial atmosphere, the common cause of 850+ men joined in a common pursuit of making themselves into the best that they possibly can be.
I doubt that many of my friends who went to Purdue or Indiana University would give similar answers. You might hear about better basketball teams than we had at Wabash or bigger bar scenes or more famous faculty, but I don't know that I signed up for those when I went to college.
I have a ton of new websites that are relevant to my topic today, and I couldn't fit them all into my above post, so I'll just give a slightly annotated list of them here:
- My brick - on the same patio as the Go Co-ed brick
- Why choose a single-sex college article
- Wikipedia's article about Wabash - as always on Wikipedia, take it with a grain of salt
- blog post about the next article
- NYTimes article about the last four all-male schools
- Wabash Magazine article "Defending All-Male Education" from four years back and from a Wabash prof
- Forum on the Indy Star article - a very interesting discussion between people who claim to know and sound to me like they really do know
- Article about Wabash students looking at other all-male schools to see how they do things well
- Mention of a Details Magazine article about Wabash - I own the article but have never seen it online
- Princeton Review's Wabash pages
- Wonderful surveys about Wabash College as answered by Wabash students...very well-written, balanced sketches of the college
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