Transitions at Seton Hill and Hood
On the heels of that post, I figured I should share "the other side," especially since I just came across these articles and don't want to lose them:
Changing with the times
By Jennifer Reeger
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, October 9, 2005
Back in the mid-1980s, Seton Hill College faculty held a debate on whether the women's college should go co-ed.
Two faculty members took up the opposing positions.
One of them was Dr. JoAnne Boyle, who just a short time later would become college president.
You would think Boyle, under whom the women's college became a co-ed university, would have been the voice supporting the admission of men to the Greensburg campus.
You'd be wrong.
"I really did not favor it," Boyle said. "I certainly would not have proposed it at the time. We've evolved, and it's almost an irresistible evolvement."
But not only has Seton Hill grown with Boyle at the helm, she has grown with Seton Hill -- from student to professor to president. It's a path she never dreamed of as a little girl in Charleston, W.Va.
Every chance she got growing up, Boyle would read -- sometimes under her covers with a flashlight at night, sometimes instead of doing her chores. She learned about baseball and fairy tales and the semaphore flag alphabet as she read every book in her local library's girls' and boys' department.
At 10, she began working in the library.
"I was there all the time anyway," she said.
Her parents instilled in her a love of words.
"I do think I was born with printer's ink in my blood," Boyle said. "My father was a printer. We kept a dictionary on the table in the dining room because everybody was always looking up words."
Even so, Boyle's reading often got in the way of things her parents considered more important, such as washing dishes and hanging laundry out to dry.
"Reading was actively discouraged at certain times in the day," Boyle said. "My sister learned to cook and to garden. I never had any interest in any of those things."
Her interest in high school was journalism. She wanted to be a journalist after writing about a Charleston newspaperman who had exposed organized crime in his previous jobs.
"He was my hero," she said.
But those aspirations would change after some time at Seton Hill.
Boyle attended a small Catholic high school in Charleston. Her choices for college were limited to schools within a day's drive.
"Those days going from Charleston to Pittsburgh was about an eight-hour drive," she said.
So Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts -- which she mistakenly thought was a Catholic school -- was out. But then, two Sisters of Charity visited her senior class to tout the virtues of Seton Hill. Five of 24 girls in her class came to Greensburg; four of them graduated from Seton Hill.
Boyle started her college career as a French major but that didn't last. She always loved foreign languages but has never been able to grasp them easily.
"I've been (learning French) ever since I was 15, trying," Boyle said. "I'm still trying."
With her love of reading, Boyle thought English literature would be a better major. She wasn't disappointed.
"You couldn't wait to get into class with some of the (professors)," Boyle said. "They were gifted women. They were so intellectual."
She still dreamed of becoming a newspaper reporter.
But Sister Miriam Joseph intervened. She thought Boyle should go to graduate school -- Harvard was strongly suggested.
It's the Seton Hill way, Boyle said. Faculty then, and now, offering suggestions to students or pointing out hidden talents.
"Nobody gets by without somebody saying, 'This is what you ought to do,'" Boyle said. "I think that goes on a lot around here."
Years later, Boyle would do the same for one of her students.
Boyle was Kim Magazine's freshman advisor.
"She drew some qualities out of me I didn't know I had," Magazine, of Greensburg, said. "She definitely had me step outside of a comfort zone and it changed my life. I have often referred to her as my mentor, but I realize now many people call her that."
Boyle convinced Magazine to take a campus trip to New York City. She was asking this of a girl who wouldn't venture into downtown Irwin after 9 p.m.
But by the end of the trip, Magazine decided she would move to New York after her 1987 graduation. She did -- and lived and worked there for 12 years.
"I don't know what she saw in me that she insisted that I make that trip but it truly did change my life," Magazine said. "I have seen a world that I don't think I would have experienced if I hadn't left this area."
It was the same for Boyle. Sister Miriam Joseph'ssuggestion back in the 1950s truly changed the path of Boyle's life. She was accepted to Harvard and graduated with a master's in the teaching of English.
All the while, she had a long-distance relationship going.
She had met Arthur Boyle while both were students -- she at Seton Hill and he at St. Vincent College near Latrobe. Their first date was a St. Vincent football game. He proposed while she was at Harvard.
Sister Miriam Joseph kept tabs on her.
"She offered me the job teaching here when she heard I was getting married and moving back to this area," Boyle recalled.
She started teaching in the English department at Seton Hill in the fall of 1959, the year she and Art were married.
Mary Ann Aug graduated from Seton Hill in 1962. She was in one of the first classes Boyle taught and now serves as a member of the university's board of trustees.
"She's a brilliant woman and whatever she turns her hand to she does so brilliantly and conscientiously," Aug said.
But as she and her husband started a family -- which would grow to seven children in all -- Boyle worried about balancing teaching and parenting.
"The sisters who were here on the faculty were really the first feminist support group I ever knew," Boyle said. "They'd always figure out how they could take over a babysitting chore."
They encouraged her to stay even when her own mother thought she should quit. Through it all, she started to work on a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh.
"It took me a long time, and I stopped a couple times," she said. "One good thing about being pregnant all the time is I could read."
By the early 1980s, she earned that degree. She also rose to chair of the English Department, bringing in guest lecturers like the poet Allen Ginsberg and starting Saturday programs for high school kids.
"I guess when it came time to look for a new president someone mentioned me," Boyle said. "I didn't have a career path. I just was very happy doing what I was doing. When the opportunity came and I was invited to apply, I did, but I didn't think it would come to me."
But it did.
"I thought she was an excellent choice," said Seton Hill Professor Albert Wendland, who was a member of the English department when Boyle was appointed president. "JoAnne is a public relations dream. It's not just easy talking to her, it's a delight. I can't imagine her being shy or awkward in any interpersonal situation."
So in July 1987, Boyle went from having a meeting with English department colleagues on literature one afternoon to having a serious meeting with the head of maintenance the next morning.
The boiler was breaking down.
"I said, 'What is a boiler?'" Boyle recalled. "I had no idea what a boiler was, where it was on the campus and what it would look like."
She found the boiler and it needed replaced.
"Sometimes I think being the president of a university is like being a manager of a huge apartment complex because part of it is property management," she added.
Boyle said understanding the various nonacademic aspects of a college has been the hardest part of her job.
"It's called learning on the job. You don't do it overnight. It takes a lot of attention to do it," Boyle said. "One of the formidable parts of the job is learning how to read a balance sheet."
But Aug said Boyle has learned well.
"When she took the place on, it had very serious problems," Aug said. "The era of segregated-sex education really was gone. JoAnne came in and she just brought such determination, such drive, such commitment."
Wendland spoke of her vision.
"She has a fine blend of vision and practicality," he said. "She knows where she wants to go, and she's not afraid to deal with the reality of how to get there. Her eyes are on the stars but her feet are on the ground."
Her vision has led to a university endowment that stands over $10 million for the first time. Seton Hill has operated in the black for the past eight years.
And all the while, the campus has been expanding to an enrollment of more than 1,800 students. There are new dorms, a new recreation center and new practice fields for expanded athletic offerings -- 18 teams in all.
All that took fundraising.
"I think that was very hard for her to do," Aug said. "She is a scholar and to learn how to do that took a huge amount of will, and she did it and now she does it as well as any college president in America."
Seton Hill began its transformation the year before Boyle took over. The board of trustees voted to admit men in certain programs, mainly fine arts.
But 10 years later it was Boyle, the staunch defender of women's colleges, who relaxed the rules further, allowing men into any program.
"Women's colleges had to rethink their reason for being," Boyle said. "It wasn't so much we're abandoning women's education but we're expanding women's education to include men. As president, you have to give up your own personal prejudices and think of the good of the whole."
Still, the college did not officially go co-ed until 2002 when it became a university and began actively recruiting men. The addition of men's sports that year -- and football this year -- has gone a long way to get men on campus.
In fact, 55 percent of this year's freshman class is male.
Seeing all of these men on campus is not strange to former Pennsylvania first lady Michele Ridge, a 1969 alumna of Seton Hill and the chair of the board of trustees.
"This seems to me a very natural progression and very much still in keeping with the organizational mission of the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill," Ridge said. "I feel it's a very natural progression of what the college and now the university was required to do to flourish."
Boyle has also garnered the respect of other college presidents in the area.
"Her longevity is not because of anything but because she's good at what she does," said James Will, vice chancellor and president of St. Vincent College. "She's certainly been a magnificent leader of Seton Hill and has really taken them to a new place."
Dr. Frank Cassell, president of the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, remarked that Boyle has a clear vision.
"She certainly has served us all well by the partnership she has put together with the city of Greensburg, which has led to new building, new cultural opportunities and new educational opportunities," Cassell said.
The partnership to build a University Center for the Arts in Greensburg is one of the things Boyle, a woman with a long list of awards and positions of authority, finds great pride in.
"Weaving us into the fabric of the whole of this area, I think has been important to us," Boyle said.
The university is partnering with the city, the state, the Redevelopment Authority of Westmoreland County, the Greensburg Salem School District and the Westmoreland Trust to build the 70,000-square-foot University Center for the Arts. Construction of the center -- with a flexible theatre, recital hall, rehearsal spaces and classrooms to be used by the university and community groups -- will begin in the spring.
Cynthia Magistro, president of Seton Hill's faculty senate and a psychology professor, said Boyle always has the community at large in her plans.
"She is really mindful of the impact that Seton Hill has on the community and especially the economic benefit that Seton Hill brings to the community," Magistro said. "I think we're lucky to have a president who's so tied into the region."
A few years ago, the faculty senate established a World Affairs Forum in Boyle's honor, recognizing the work she's done with the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh. The forum brings speakers knowledgeable about international events to campus several times a semester.
"That certainly represents the esteem the faculty hold her in," Magistro said.
Magistro said personally, she regrets that so few women's colleges remain.
"However, I appreciate that Seton Hill's stability and vitality were dependent on changing with the times," she said.
Boyle herself regrets not being in the classroom.
For the past decade, she's worked with a group of students every year. She takes her public policy interns on lobbying trips to Harrisburg and Washington D.C.
"It's so rewarding to see those students grow and develop and move on after they leave here to some responsible role or position," Boyle said.
And Magazine, the alumna who said Boyle changed her life, said her mentor never forgets the students who have spent time on campus.
"When she connects with you on such a personal level, it's easy to establish trust with someone like that. And I think that speaks to her character," Magazine said.
"I think she's doing that for the university right now. She sees something that the university needs and would benefit from and maybe initially people don't share that vision with her because it is a big change ... but she hasn't lost any of the foundation, the heritage that made it what it was."
Seton Hill may be different now, Magazine said, but it's in good hands.
"Thanks to JoAnne my beloved Seton Hill will carry on," she said. "Hazard yet forward, that is our motto, and what a legacy she will leave behind."
Jennifer Reeger can be reached at jreeger@tribweb.com or (724) 836-6155.
Coed Dorms Raise Enrollment at Frederick's Hood College
Updated: Monday, Oct. 3, 2005 - 5:46 AM
FREDERICK, Md. (AP) - The decision to allow men to move into dorms at Hood College in Frederick is being credited with boosting enrollment.
The college was once nearly all-women. But since the dorms were made coed in 2003, enrollment has grown from about 1,700 to 2,100, the biggest ever.
The student body includes about 550 men, and applications from women are up as well.
Dorms are full for the first time in years, and so are classrooms.
"It was a school that was right on the borderline, and now there's a whole new mood. There's a much more upbeat energy," Finn M. W. Caspersen, chairman of a major financial contributor to the college, told The (Baltimore) Sun.
Besides ordering bigger beds for the men and hiring more sports coaches, officials say, they have had to make relatively few adjustments.
"I'm surprised at how little difference I feel," said biology professor Craig S. Laufer.
Hood was founded in 1893 as the Woman's College of Frederick. In 1912, the school changed its name to Hood College in honor of a citizen who donated 28 acres.
Hood was part of a thriving community of women's colleges. By the 1960s, there were about 300 women's colleges nationwide, according to the Women's College Coalition in Washington.
As more students wanted a coeducational experience, women's colleges began disappearing, even though the number of women attending college kept rising. Nearly 60 percent of college students are women, the most ever. About 60 women's colleges remain.
As enrollment dwindled, Hood officials were aware that surveys showed 97 percent of college applicants preferred a coed school. Hood's location on the outskirts of a small city didn't help. Many successful women's colleges are in large metropolitan areas or partner with a nearby coed campus. Hood has no academic partner, and the nearest four-year, coed college, Mount St. Mary's, is about 25 miles away in Emmitsburg.
School officials were concerned that having more men would change the campus culture. Males had been allowed as commuter students since 1971, but professors worried that a sudden influx could drastically change the school's dynamics.
"There were some studies that suggested males could dominate, so we wanted to be careful," Volpe said.
But he and others say men have blended in almost seamlessly.
Changing with the times
By Jennifer Reeger
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, October 9, 2005
Back in the mid-1980s, Seton Hill College faculty held a debate on whether the women's college should go co-ed.
Two faculty members took up the opposing positions.
One of them was Dr. JoAnne Boyle, who just a short time later would become college president.
You would think Boyle, under whom the women's college became a co-ed university, would have been the voice supporting the admission of men to the Greensburg campus.
You'd be wrong.
"I really did not favor it," Boyle said. "I certainly would not have proposed it at the time. We've evolved, and it's almost an irresistible evolvement."
But not only has Seton Hill grown with Boyle at the helm, she has grown with Seton Hill -- from student to professor to president. It's a path she never dreamed of as a little girl in Charleston, W.Va.
Every chance she got growing up, Boyle would read -- sometimes under her covers with a flashlight at night, sometimes instead of doing her chores. She learned about baseball and fairy tales and the semaphore flag alphabet as she read every book in her local library's girls' and boys' department.
At 10, she began working in the library.
"I was there all the time anyway," she said.
Her parents instilled in her a love of words.
"I do think I was born with printer's ink in my blood," Boyle said. "My father was a printer. We kept a dictionary on the table in the dining room because everybody was always looking up words."
Even so, Boyle's reading often got in the way of things her parents considered more important, such as washing dishes and hanging laundry out to dry.
"Reading was actively discouraged at certain times in the day," Boyle said. "My sister learned to cook and to garden. I never had any interest in any of those things."
Her interest in high school was journalism. She wanted to be a journalist after writing about a Charleston newspaperman who had exposed organized crime in his previous jobs.
"He was my hero," she said.
But those aspirations would change after some time at Seton Hill.
Boyle attended a small Catholic high school in Charleston. Her choices for college were limited to schools within a day's drive.
"Those days going from Charleston to Pittsburgh was about an eight-hour drive," she said.
So Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts -- which she mistakenly thought was a Catholic school -- was out. But then, two Sisters of Charity visited her senior class to tout the virtues of Seton Hill. Five of 24 girls in her class came to Greensburg; four of them graduated from Seton Hill.
Boyle started her college career as a French major but that didn't last. She always loved foreign languages but has never been able to grasp them easily.
"I've been (learning French) ever since I was 15, trying," Boyle said. "I'm still trying."
With her love of reading, Boyle thought English literature would be a better major. She wasn't disappointed.
"You couldn't wait to get into class with some of the (professors)," Boyle said. "They were gifted women. They were so intellectual."
She still dreamed of becoming a newspaper reporter.
But Sister Miriam Joseph intervened. She thought Boyle should go to graduate school -- Harvard was strongly suggested.
It's the Seton Hill way, Boyle said. Faculty then, and now, offering suggestions to students or pointing out hidden talents.
"Nobody gets by without somebody saying, 'This is what you ought to do,'" Boyle said. "I think that goes on a lot around here."
Years later, Boyle would do the same for one of her students.
Boyle was Kim Magazine's freshman advisor.
"She drew some qualities out of me I didn't know I had," Magazine, of Greensburg, said. "She definitely had me step outside of a comfort zone and it changed my life. I have often referred to her as my mentor, but I realize now many people call her that."
Boyle convinced Magazine to take a campus trip to New York City. She was asking this of a girl who wouldn't venture into downtown Irwin after 9 p.m.
But by the end of the trip, Magazine decided she would move to New York after her 1987 graduation. She did -- and lived and worked there for 12 years.
"I don't know what she saw in me that she insisted that I make that trip but it truly did change my life," Magazine said. "I have seen a world that I don't think I would have experienced if I hadn't left this area."
It was the same for Boyle. Sister Miriam Joseph'ssuggestion back in the 1950s truly changed the path of Boyle's life. She was accepted to Harvard and graduated with a master's in the teaching of English.
All the while, she had a long-distance relationship going.
She had met Arthur Boyle while both were students -- she at Seton Hill and he at St. Vincent College near Latrobe. Their first date was a St. Vincent football game. He proposed while she was at Harvard.
Sister Miriam Joseph kept tabs on her.
"She offered me the job teaching here when she heard I was getting married and moving back to this area," Boyle recalled.
She started teaching in the English department at Seton Hill in the fall of 1959, the year she and Art were married.
Mary Ann Aug graduated from Seton Hill in 1962. She was in one of the first classes Boyle taught and now serves as a member of the university's board of trustees.
"She's a brilliant woman and whatever she turns her hand to she does so brilliantly and conscientiously," Aug said.
But as she and her husband started a family -- which would grow to seven children in all -- Boyle worried about balancing teaching and parenting.
"The sisters who were here on the faculty were really the first feminist support group I ever knew," Boyle said. "They'd always figure out how they could take over a babysitting chore."
They encouraged her to stay even when her own mother thought she should quit. Through it all, she started to work on a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh.
"It took me a long time, and I stopped a couple times," she said. "One good thing about being pregnant all the time is I could read."
By the early 1980s, she earned that degree. She also rose to chair of the English Department, bringing in guest lecturers like the poet Allen Ginsberg and starting Saturday programs for high school kids.
"I guess when it came time to look for a new president someone mentioned me," Boyle said. "I didn't have a career path. I just was very happy doing what I was doing. When the opportunity came and I was invited to apply, I did, but I didn't think it would come to me."
But it did.
"I thought she was an excellent choice," said Seton Hill Professor Albert Wendland, who was a member of the English department when Boyle was appointed president. "JoAnne is a public relations dream. It's not just easy talking to her, it's a delight. I can't imagine her being shy or awkward in any interpersonal situation."
So in July 1987, Boyle went from having a meeting with English department colleagues on literature one afternoon to having a serious meeting with the head of maintenance the next morning.
The boiler was breaking down.
"I said, 'What is a boiler?'" Boyle recalled. "I had no idea what a boiler was, where it was on the campus and what it would look like."
She found the boiler and it needed replaced.
"Sometimes I think being the president of a university is like being a manager of a huge apartment complex because part of it is property management," she added.
Boyle said understanding the various nonacademic aspects of a college has been the hardest part of her job.
"It's called learning on the job. You don't do it overnight. It takes a lot of attention to do it," Boyle said. "One of the formidable parts of the job is learning how to read a balance sheet."
But Aug said Boyle has learned well.
"When she took the place on, it had very serious problems," Aug said. "The era of segregated-sex education really was gone. JoAnne came in and she just brought such determination, such drive, such commitment."
Wendland spoke of her vision.
"She has a fine blend of vision and practicality," he said. "She knows where she wants to go, and she's not afraid to deal with the reality of how to get there. Her eyes are on the stars but her feet are on the ground."
Her vision has led to a university endowment that stands over $10 million for the first time. Seton Hill has operated in the black for the past eight years.
And all the while, the campus has been expanding to an enrollment of more than 1,800 students. There are new dorms, a new recreation center and new practice fields for expanded athletic offerings -- 18 teams in all.
All that took fundraising.
"I think that was very hard for her to do," Aug said. "She is a scholar and to learn how to do that took a huge amount of will, and she did it and now she does it as well as any college president in America."
Seton Hill began its transformation the year before Boyle took over. The board of trustees voted to admit men in certain programs, mainly fine arts.
But 10 years later it was Boyle, the staunch defender of women's colleges, who relaxed the rules further, allowing men into any program.
"Women's colleges had to rethink their reason for being," Boyle said. "It wasn't so much we're abandoning women's education but we're expanding women's education to include men. As president, you have to give up your own personal prejudices and think of the good of the whole."
Still, the college did not officially go co-ed until 2002 when it became a university and began actively recruiting men. The addition of men's sports that year -- and football this year -- has gone a long way to get men on campus.
In fact, 55 percent of this year's freshman class is male.
Seeing all of these men on campus is not strange to former Pennsylvania first lady Michele Ridge, a 1969 alumna of Seton Hill and the chair of the board of trustees.
"This seems to me a very natural progression and very much still in keeping with the organizational mission of the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill," Ridge said. "I feel it's a very natural progression of what the college and now the university was required to do to flourish."
Boyle has also garnered the respect of other college presidents in the area.
"Her longevity is not because of anything but because she's good at what she does," said James Will, vice chancellor and president of St. Vincent College. "She's certainly been a magnificent leader of Seton Hill and has really taken them to a new place."
Dr. Frank Cassell, president of the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, remarked that Boyle has a clear vision.
"She certainly has served us all well by the partnership she has put together with the city of Greensburg, which has led to new building, new cultural opportunities and new educational opportunities," Cassell said.
The partnership to build a University Center for the Arts in Greensburg is one of the things Boyle, a woman with a long list of awards and positions of authority, finds great pride in.
"Weaving us into the fabric of the whole of this area, I think has been important to us," Boyle said.
The university is partnering with the city, the state, the Redevelopment Authority of Westmoreland County, the Greensburg Salem School District and the Westmoreland Trust to build the 70,000-square-foot University Center for the Arts. Construction of the center -- with a flexible theatre, recital hall, rehearsal spaces and classrooms to be used by the university and community groups -- will begin in the spring.
Cynthia Magistro, president of Seton Hill's faculty senate and a psychology professor, said Boyle always has the community at large in her plans.
"She is really mindful of the impact that Seton Hill has on the community and especially the economic benefit that Seton Hill brings to the community," Magistro said. "I think we're lucky to have a president who's so tied into the region."
A few years ago, the faculty senate established a World Affairs Forum in Boyle's honor, recognizing the work she's done with the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh. The forum brings speakers knowledgeable about international events to campus several times a semester.
"That certainly represents the esteem the faculty hold her in," Magistro said.
Magistro said personally, she regrets that so few women's colleges remain.
"However, I appreciate that Seton Hill's stability and vitality were dependent on changing with the times," she said.
Boyle herself regrets not being in the classroom.
For the past decade, she's worked with a group of students every year. She takes her public policy interns on lobbying trips to Harrisburg and Washington D.C.
"It's so rewarding to see those students grow and develop and move on after they leave here to some responsible role or position," Boyle said.
And Magazine, the alumna who said Boyle changed her life, said her mentor never forgets the students who have spent time on campus.
"When she connects with you on such a personal level, it's easy to establish trust with someone like that. And I think that speaks to her character," Magazine said.
"I think she's doing that for the university right now. She sees something that the university needs and would benefit from and maybe initially people don't share that vision with her because it is a big change ... but she hasn't lost any of the foundation, the heritage that made it what it was."
Seton Hill may be different now, Magazine said, but it's in good hands.
"Thanks to JoAnne my beloved Seton Hill will carry on," she said. "Hazard yet forward, that is our motto, and what a legacy she will leave behind."
Jennifer Reeger can be reached at jreeger@tribweb.com or (724) 836-6155.
Coed Dorms Raise Enrollment at Frederick's Hood College
Updated: Monday, Oct. 3, 2005 - 5:46 AM
FREDERICK, Md. (AP) - The decision to allow men to move into dorms at Hood College in Frederick is being credited with boosting enrollment.
The college was once nearly all-women. But since the dorms were made coed in 2003, enrollment has grown from about 1,700 to 2,100, the biggest ever.
The student body includes about 550 men, and applications from women are up as well.
Dorms are full for the first time in years, and so are classrooms.
"It was a school that was right on the borderline, and now there's a whole new mood. There's a much more upbeat energy," Finn M. W. Caspersen, chairman of a major financial contributor to the college, told The (Baltimore) Sun.
Besides ordering bigger beds for the men and hiring more sports coaches, officials say, they have had to make relatively few adjustments.
"I'm surprised at how little difference I feel," said biology professor Craig S. Laufer.
Hood was founded in 1893 as the Woman's College of Frederick. In 1912, the school changed its name to Hood College in honor of a citizen who donated 28 acres.
Hood was part of a thriving community of women's colleges. By the 1960s, there were about 300 women's colleges nationwide, according to the Women's College Coalition in Washington.
As more students wanted a coeducational experience, women's colleges began disappearing, even though the number of women attending college kept rising. Nearly 60 percent of college students are women, the most ever. About 60 women's colleges remain.
As enrollment dwindled, Hood officials were aware that surveys showed 97 percent of college applicants preferred a coed school. Hood's location on the outskirts of a small city didn't help. Many successful women's colleges are in large metropolitan areas or partner with a nearby coed campus. Hood has no academic partner, and the nearest four-year, coed college, Mount St. Mary's, is about 25 miles away in Emmitsburg.
School officials were concerned that having more men would change the campus culture. Males had been allowed as commuter students since 1971, but professors worried that a sudden influx could drastically change the school's dynamics.
"There were some studies that suggested males could dominate, so we wanted to be careful," Volpe said.
But he and others say men have blended in almost seamlessly.