BY NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY AAUP CHAPTER
On September 13, the Notre Dame of Maryland University (Baltimore, MD) community was notified by email of the decision of its board of trustees to admit male undergraduates to its women’s college. A task force of the board worked privately for a year. Faculty at NDMU have repeatedly expressed how the administration’s secretive leadership style undermines shared governance and is in violation of the NDMU faculty handbook. A supermajority of the tenured faculty and our newly reformed AAUP chapter both sent letters to the president and board anonymously for fear of reprisal. Refusing to respond to these letters, the board instead directed the president to work “with the representative body of the faculty” [faculty senate]. The open letter from our AAUP chapter is below.
On September 12, the Notre Dame of Maryland University board of trustees voted to admit men to the women’s undergraduate college and announced the change in policy by email the next day. The College of Notre Dame was founded in 1895 by the School Sisters of Notre Dame as the first four-year-degree-granting Catholic college for women in the United States.
From the vantage point of our AAUP chapter members, the announcement came as a shock. The vast majority of us believe in women’s education and in maintaining the undergraduate college as a place for women and other gender marginalized folks (non-binary students, transgender men, and queer folks generally) to thrive. This institution-altering decision was made without consulting the faculty, students, staff, or alumnae or even informing us that it was under consideration in advance.
We live in a “half-changed world” in the term of Peggy Orenstein, one in which the gains of feminism are still checked by what is left to accomplish. In 2022, this includes a full-throated backlash against women and other gender marginalized folks. In societies structured to disadvantage women and queer folks, women’s higher education promotes their academic excellence as well as their leadership, serves as a refuge—a time apart to learn—and creates a space to examine what gender is and how it operates in society. Although the number of women’s colleges has diminished (we are—were—the last in Maryland), there is still an important role for them to play, as the 2017 study produced by our faculty based on a year of research, “Women’s Education in the 21st Century,” attests. Campus leadership, from the university president and the president of student government to the captains of the sports teams, head of the honor board, and the student representative on the Board of Trustees is feminine-identified and/or queer. Women’s college classrooms benefit gender marginalized students in male-dominated fields like math and engineering. All the sports budget and all the community support goes to women’s sports and to women/non-binary athletes. Among women’s colleges, which have historically been small liberal arts colleges, in most part white and wealthy, we have a different role; elite women’s colleges have generally been better places to be queer, but less welcoming places for Black, Brown, first-generation, or low-income students and those who are queer and Black, Brown, first-generation, or low-income. Liberal arts education, with its emphasis on educating the whole person and the development of good citizens as well as broad-based study that includes philosophy, religion, and languages, is often the reserve of the privileged. Our college in 2022 primarily serves historically marginalized students of low-to-middle income. We have a demography atypical of the elite Seven Sisters, and we receive high marks for social mobility in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. While community colleges and lower-tier state schools offer opportunities to similar groups, our college provides intimacy, attention, security, and community; women and other gender-marginalized students thrive with us who would struggle elsewhere.
Other than the intimate size of Notre Dame, with fewer than 400 traditional undergraduates, and our beautiful campus in a privileged part of a major East Coast city, our women’s college structuring is our major distinction as a college and has created the heart of our institution. As the founding mission of the School Sisters of Notre Dame put women supporting women at the core of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, the expansion of the college into a university in the past decade was guided by their central tenet.
Even now when the number of graduate students in co-educational programs outnumbers undergraduates, our orientation towards women and gender justice has determined the shape and character of the university: Our graduate schools are in the caring professions—nursing and teaching, both feminine-dominated. Our newest school, pharmacy, distinguishes itself from other schools of pharmacy by its focus on women’s health and social justice rooted in gender justice.
US women’s colleges were founded in the late nineteenth century when women were still excluded from, or severely disadvantaged at, men’s universities, and yet there was a dawning possibility of educated women to know more and do more than work in the home. The College of Notre Dame of Maryland was a Catholic alternative to essentially Protestant women’s colleges established in a time of ripe anti-Catholicism. Women’s colleges founded by orders of nuns like ours envisioned higher education fueled by a double mission of uplifting women and education as a means to combat poverty. While in the more than a century of Notre Dame’s existence our students have often been more middle than working class, in the past twenty years the college has renewed its commitment to educating for social mobility, albeit by circumstance more than intention. Our current student body is mostly low-to-moderate income people of color, and with 98% of students receiving financial aid, NDMU still fulfills the Catholic educational belief in affordability.
In the 1970s, when men’s institutions began admitting women and many women’s colleges closed or were subsumed into what had been men’s universities, the College of Notre Dame under the leadership of Sr. Kathleen Feeley resisted a plan to merge with Loyola and reasserted the particular and special mission of Notre Dame and of women’s education.
Faculty and staff at NDMU remain motivated by this mission, based in Catholic social justice teachings and SSND charism, even though very few women religious are still on campus. We accept low salaries, scarce resources, and administrative instability in exchange for what we view as a privilege to educate the kind of student attracted to and well-served by NDMU.
We teach a remarkable group of college students. We serve them well in large part because we are a women’s college. Half of our students are athletes, a percentage much higher than co-ed colleges, and they come to NDMU because they will get playing time and support. Many of our students are shy, sometimes because they come to Notre Dame with higher than average rates of trauma that are often compounded. Thus, the safety of a small campus on a hill with very low rates of crime appeals to them. Some are the children of single moms and find the opportunity to share space with women and queer folks familiar and reassuring as they confront the challenges posed by the unfamiliar world of higher ed. A good number are devout, not only Catholics but often Muslims, many from conservative households that prefer their daughters educated with other women. Many are immigrants and first-generation, among them those from societies in which girl’s and women’s education is the norm. Plenty are LGBTQ+, including a number of trans and gender fluid folks, who find an accepting place among multigenerational queer faculty and staff. Above all, our students are ambitious and hard-working, as well as ethically-minded and service-oriented. This is despite the many obstacles they have faced in their young lives.
Educating women is the central guiding ethos that makes us distinct as a university, what made us a good—even singular—place for the college students we currently teach. We are a community that centers women and that profits from maintaining a women’s college structure; it is this community that the college alumnae remember, that current students value, and that faculty and staff work to help create.
This is what we give up in admitting cisgender men.
The impetus behind the decision to go “co-ed” is that it could better enrollment, which has reached a historic low with no indication of improving. University leadership and the board of trustees are right in seeing falling enrollment as an existential threat to the college and possibly the university. But how will admitting cisgender men solve the issue? We, faculty, staff, students, and alumnae, are anxious to know. We want to save the college and serve our community, and we’re all for making a reasoned decision through collaborative research, dialogue, argument, and discussion. As educators, you might even say it’s our thing. How was the research that indicated co-education would bolster enrollment conducted, and why has it not been shared? What is the plan to effectuate admitting cisgender men, a draft of which should have been part of making a final decision? What would college-aged cis men find attractive about an institution made for and by women that educates mostly nurses, a profession comprising more than 90% feminine identified folks? How are the costs associated with sports team infrastructure, renovations to dorms, professional development for faculty and staff, and increased student life staff and security necessary for cisgender men’s inclusion to be offset? Was the loss of the current students who selected NDMU because it was a women’s college taken into consideration? What other courses of action were considered (for example, selling the college to Loyola and maintaining its mission for women)? Finally, why was the decision-making process done entirely in secret? Why were community stakeholders denied seats at the table?
Without even a gesture towards partnership with the NDMU community, the surprise announcement by email from President Yam was a failure of leadership. Denying us—not only faculty, but also students, staff, and alumnae—a place in this decision left few possible reactions to its announcement from on-high: outrage, resistance, disillusionment. A plan to radically re-shape the character of the institution needed the buy-in of those needed to make it a success. Without the support and trust of staff and faculty, not to mention students and alumnae, what does the board of trustees expect will happen now? We are still awaiting answers.
