On courtship, spooning and single sex education

This past weekend, the boys were back in town.

I am referring to the influx of males at the annual alumni gathering. It makes sense, of course, that last weekend brought back mostly men. After all, Princeton was a single-sex university until 35 years ago. Yet thinking about that fact still boggles my mind. How could it be that such a short time ago, our now happily coeducational institution bubbled with testosterone — and testosterone alone? What was it like?

I suspect it's equally difficult for most of my classmates to conceive of an all-male Princeton.

"I can't even imagine what it must have been like with only boys," says Mary Walthall '08. "I'm picturing something Dead Poets Society-esque."

Fortunately, we don't have to imagine. Many of the dinosaurs that roamed campus in the pre-women era are still around and available as primary sources. Conveniently, one such dinosaur is my father, who was a member of the Class of 1969 — the last class to graduate before women were admitted to the University on a large scale.

According to my father, the most dramatic consequences of not having women on campus were social. "Weekends were a much, much bigger deal," he explained. "You either went away to a girls' school or imported a date." On any given weekend, students could always catch a ride to Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr or any other prominent all-girls school.

To me, there is a sort of old-fashioned glamour to those weekend romances. But there were also disadvantages to the way the dating system was structured. "Blind dates could be perilous," my father said. A date, usually arranged through a friend, would arrive on Friday afternoon. If after 20 minutes it was obvious that the match was a flop, the guy still had to host the girl for the remainder of the weekend.

While not all could-be courtships materialized, if you brought a babe to campus she was sure to receive plenty of attention — often in the form of spooning. But not the kind of spooning you have in mind. Let me explain:

Back then, underclassmen were divided into four dining groups. All the boys in one group would eat at the same time. This meant 400 college boys jammed into one dining hall. If one of them entered the dining hall with a visiting date who was especially easy on the eyes, the rest of the boys began to hit their spoons, bottom down, against the table top. The collective clanging would thunder through the hall.

"Girls wouldn't know if it was meant to be flattering or insulting and would get very embarrassed," my father said. "But it was a fun and funny tradition. It wasn't mean to be lewd or salacious."

However, it could be accidentally incestuous:

Boys often began to spoon long before they could see the girl for whom they were spooning. "Why not?" my father asked. "It was either focus on that or the mystery meat du jour." As it turns out, there are, in fact, risks to premature spooning. My father once began blindly banging his spoon only to realize, when the girl came in sight, that it was his first cousin up visiting from Penn.

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What my father told me about the Princeton he attended did not make me wish I went to an all-boys college. The net gain of a coeducational environment is immeasurably valuable. But listening to him reminisce, it struck me that when coeducation occurred at Princeton, many worthy traditions were lost in transition.

Who ever would have thought you needed a single-sex school to spoon? P.G. Sittenfeld is a sophomore from Cincinnati, Ohio. He can be reached at pg@princeton.edu.