In the Company of Men

• Share

Forgive my alma mater if the best it can do for a homecoming queen is a student in drag. Wabash, a small, liberal-arts college in Crawfordsville, Ind., is all male--one of only three such schools in the U.S. The student newspaper is called the Bachelor, and freshmen still shout the school song from the chapel steps each fall with more ferocity and face paint than the Scots wore in Braveheart.

But the testosterone level turns from the 1290s to the 1990s when I sit down with students from the Men and Masculinity course. Its wide-open discussions, on books and films as varied as Black Boy and Adam's Rib, dissect their assumptions about manhood. Jimmy Burress, a gay student who took the class as a freshman two years ago, says it helped him come out of the closet. Physics major David Woessner, meanwhile, was inspired by works like Shane to embrace the virtues of chivalry--when there are women around to practice them with. I ask the guys about the less than chivalrous behavior of President Clinton, whose attorney during the Monica Lewinsky mess was a Wabash alumnus, David Kendall. Says Scott Berger, a football player: "I think Clinton betrayed his gender."

Wabash, remarkably, has preserved its gender--and has even made it a trendy selling point. Men's colleges once looked about as viable as castrato choirs. But Wabash, independent since it was founded in 1832, is giving its Georgian campus a $100 million face lift, with modern science and sports facilities, and has just enrolled one of its largest and smartest freshman classes in years. It's a tribute to the college's richly intimate teaching traditions: its fewer than 1,000 students, from all economic backgrounds, often learn as much over dinner and wine tastings at professors' houses as they do in the classroom. But it may also reflect the fact that males are a fashionable subject again. The men's movement, and the rise of male-simpatico feminists like Susan Faludi, have lent quaint Wabash a hip cachet. "An important liberal-arts ideal is 'Know thyself,'" says Wabash president Andrew Ford. "Sometimes you can do that best, or more comfortably, among your own gender, and we offer that choice."

Another liberal-arts ideal is "Know thy world," which is why, even as I prize the education I received there, I favor admitting women. Being all male hasn't always been easy for Wabash--especially after it voted down co-education in 1992. Right-wing think tanks, hoping to adopt the college as a mascot, mounted a nasty campaign to roll back the school's long history of multicultural studies, while hard-core feminists stormed the campus with politically correct, male-bashing lectures like "Athletes as Rapists."