Bursting open the bubble

So they invited the girls.

It was the end of a particularly “slow semester” in 1969 when Mier Ribalow ’70 and his roommates decided to turn the ongoing dialogue about coeducation at Princeton into a case study. Their ideas took shape as “Co-Ed Week,” an event held on Princeton’s campus from Feb. 9 through Feb. 14 of that year. Roughly 800 undergraduate women would be chosen from 30 women’s colleges scattered across the Atlantic seaboard to experience Princeton and attend classes as female students.

Backed by the support of peers and student organizations and undaunted by the administration’s concerns, Ribalow, then a junior, and his committee began reading the applications of nearly 2,500 women interested in experiencing classes at what many still called the “all-male Princeton Paradise,” Ribalow recalled in an interview with The Daily Princetonian last week.

Co-Ed Week was intended to give college women an opportunity to experience Princeton like few had before, Ribalow said. A select handful of women had studied cartography at the University during World War II, but never before had so many been offered the chance to attend classes on campus.

“The women had come down on dates at Princeton, but now they could have personalities of their own without having to be attached to anyone,” Ribalow explained. “They were no longer just ‘Tom’s date.’ ”

The response to the invitation, at least among women, was enormous and highly competitive. At Sweet Briar College in Virginia, for example, the student government passed a resolution asserting that their freshman and sophomore women were under far too much academic stress to afford a seven-day hiatus in New Jersey. The passage of the resolution secured more Co-Ed Week spots for eager Sweet Briar junior and senior women.

Once Ribalow and his committee reviewed the applications, they turned their efforts to preparing for the 800 guests. Among the most daunting of the preparations, Ribalow said, was the delivery of mattresses to the dorm rooms. For this undertaking, the committee members created a “flying-bed squad” that coordinated and delivered the sleeping pads.

“This was a military-like operation,” Ribalow explained, “but it was immense fun, and the beds got there.”

Still, despite their careful planning and fine-tuned logistics, the New Jersey weather almost stopped Ribalow and the committee in their tracks. Just as the invitees arrived by bus and train, the worst blizzard in 30 years swept through town. Scores of hysterical parents phoned the school to confirm that their daughters were safe, Ribalow said, but after the weather settled down, Co-Ed Week continued as planned.

“Classes perked up. The women were terrific, and the guys stopped being indifferent,” Ribalow explained. “Teachers came up to me afterwards — teachers who had been reluctant — and said, ‘Boy, you’re right about this.’ And the guys, well, they wanted to impress the blonde in the third row.”

Ribalow viewed this shift in classroom dynamics from a unique perspective. He was, at the time, a recent graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school that remained all-male until 1970. So Ribalow knew first-hand the atmosphere of single-sex education.

“It was a hot house … Fourteen- to eighteen-year-old boys in New Hampshire, and there was only one girl in town to date,” he said. It was Ribalow’s hope that Co-Ed Week could introduce Princeton to a different sort of classroom energy.

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“What I had faith in was that the guys would behave and the girls would be serious,” he continued.

Ribalow recalled that, though Co-Ed Week was met with enthusiasm from students, the planning committee originally encountered only anxiety from the administration. “I knew that we knew what we were doing, but I also knew that [the administration] didn’t trust us,” he said.

Despite that initial skepticism, then-University president Robert Goheen ’40 announced midway through the Co-Ed Week festivities — on Feb. 12, 1969 — that Princeton would be accepting female applicants for the following fall.

“Those of us who were there during the week are now 60. We still get together, and we are still intensely close friends. There’s something to be said about that,” Ribalow said with a sense of accomplishment, but not finality.

Speaking like one who knows the importance of occasionally ruffling feathers, he added, “Risk is natural. Stability isn’t.”

This is the fifth article in a five-part series commemorating the 40th anniversary of undergraduate coeducation at Princeton.