CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF COEDUCATION
CO E D U CAT I O N L E T T E R 4 0 Y E A R S O N by James MacGuire ‘70 “With nearly all colleges and universities becoming coeducational today and many independent boarding schools looking in that direction….the future of Portsmouth in this regard was considered at some length…. It was unanimously agreed that Portsmouth should not consider becoming a coeducational school.” This quotation is from last fall’s Portsmouth Bulletin and reflects the opinion of the School Committee in conjunction with the Parent’s Committee. The question of coeducation in boarding schools does not deserve such abrupt dismissal, for just as most other comparable schools are studying the matter, Portsmouth too must look into it further. Most boys’ schools have found that the concept of co-ordinate education is inadequate, because the schools which are geographically accessible are also academically inferior, and, sad to say, we find that to be a problem here ourselves (with the possible exception of St. George’s – and they’re no fun to dance with anyway.) What we are left with then is coeducation to one degree or another. Experimental programs between St. Paul’sDana Hall and even Canterbury-Noroton have been largely successful although in both cases the exchanged boys did not find their work too challenging. This fall, Exeter will initiate a full-time coeducational program, shortly to be followed by several other schools. “What,” one may ask, “does Portsmouth stand to gain from coeducation?” And at this time I would like to pass over the biological advantages of coeducation in order to point to a less obvious financial one. The point was made in the same Portsmouth Bulletin referred to above that the School might very well be able to add fifty students without enlarging its faculty or facilities, thus deriving the optimum amount of use from its expenditures. All boarding schools today, however, are plagued by declining applications (even Andover had 24% fewer applicants this year than last and added fifty students who were not up to the present quality of the school). Were the School to become coeducational, however, the number of potential applicants would be vastly increased. For instance, a family of two boys and two girls, formerly able to send only two of its children to the School, could now entrust all four – an increase of 100%. And since these co-eds would be more probably from a Portsmouth family, there would be no particular difference in intellectual caliber. In this way the School could forestall the financial crisis which is overtaking all private education. Coeducation at Portsmouth might inspire all sorts of delightful side effects as well, and perhaps the day will come, not too long after the School itself becomes co-ed, when a Convent of the Sacred Heart is annexed onto the monastery. – Jamie MacGuire Beaverboard – May 12, 1970
(Jamie reviews his Beaverboard article from the perspective of 2010.) I hadn’t looked at this in decades, but I seem to remember writing it somewhat tongue-in-cheek and without ever imagining that the School would indeed someday become co-ed. The last, wiseacre line strikes me as gratuitous now, but mightn’t we all benefit from a few nuns living in the girls’ houses and adding to the School’s academic, social and spiritual life? Needless to say, I was a prophet without honor in my own School at the time, at least to the administration. May 1970 was the month that four protesters at Kent State were gunned down by members of the Ohio National Guard, and I remember the pall that cast over our discussion in Jim Garman’s History AP the morning the news hit the newspaper headlines. It made for a grim finale to the turbulent years of war, racial conflict and assassinations we had lived through in the late 1960s. The Student Council that year had offered many proposed changes to School life, including the abolition of morning prayers, one voluntary athletic season, optional attendance at breakfast, extending lights out for IV Formers to 10:30 PM, optional attendance at Saturday night movies, foreign study programs, and more places on campus to entertain girls. None was well received, but all came to pass in time. Interestingly, the Student Council that year did strongly support the continuation of a two-year Latin requirement, and I am glad for today’s kids that a one-year requirement was reinstated some years ago. “The only thing more boring than taking Latin I was teaching it,” Father Julian once remarked, but the benefits to one’s grammatical and vocabulary skills over the long haul are well worth it. In my lifetime I would have to say that coeducation has been, along with the design and building of the Belluschi Church and campus, the two most constructive changes at Portsmouth. They have both in their different ways added beauty, sensitivity, harmony, and a greater ability to experience the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The truth is that the single- sex, 1960s Portsmouth was often a hard-bitten, cold and sarcastic place. The kindness and genuine care today’s students show to each other and everyone else is what most strikes this time traveler to the campus of today. Much credit has to go to Nancy Brzys, Geri Zilian, and all the other dedicated faculty members, male and female, monastic and lay, who made the transition to coeducation work so wonderfully well. Portsmouth today is a better, more Benedictine place as a result. Perhaps Father Peter Sidler put it best when he told Dana Robinson ‘64, “Before coeducation the School may have been more intellectual, but after coeducation it became more intelligent.” Jamie is a senior development officer at Portsmouth Abbey School and the founding director of the Portsmouth Institute.
WINTER BULLETIN 2011
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