Segregation in the classroom
During a conference I met a nice colleague from the United States at breakfast at the hotel. She told me she moved for her work back to her alma mater, Bryn Mawr College. This set off for an interesting lecture on US politics and a debate on segregation. Bryn Mawr College is a highly selective, private, women’s liberal arts college, and is one of the Seven Sisters. The Seven Sisters is an association of seven liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States that are historically women’s colleges. Five of them are still private women colleges. Seven Sisters refers to The Pleiades, the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas. Bryn Mawr – meaning big hill in Welsh – was the first higher education institution to offer graduate degrees, including doctorates, to women.
Why only women, I asked my colleague and she explained that prestigious institutions at that time – Princeton, Harvard and Yale University e.g. – did not allow women to enroll. These institutions were strictly for men! This reminded me of my primary school period, a school with only boys. The first girls I saw at a school was when I entered ‘Gymnasium’. Institutions such as Bryn Mawr still exist and flourish. My colleague even explained, that the US has some prestigious historically black institutions, such as Howard University in Washington DC.
The idea of segregation by gender is based on issues such as providing female students a physically safer environment and differences in learning style. Some scientists argue that women flourish more in a female intellectual environment when they are not hindered by men who tend to be less critical and less ambitious. This reminded me of the fact that statistics nowadays show – also at Tilburg University- that female students get higher grades and need less time to finish their degree. Would these numbers even rise in an all female study environment? And would female students in the Netherlands even more excel in an all female institution?
Hans-Georg van Liempd (51) is program manager internationalisation at TiU and president of EAIE. He blogs for Univers.
