From Radcliffe to Ruin

Mixed Education and the Unmaking of Harvard

Source: Harvard University (edited)

As the very idea of the university risks disintegration into a mere credential factory or vocational training center, it becomes imperative to reconsider what it means to educate. Modernity has gifted us, as the Achaeans gifted the Trojans, the proliferation of coeducation, a seemingly innocent and inevitable step in the pursuit of equality between the sexes. Yet this development, far from an unqualified progress, is a profound transformation that touches the essence of education itself, and with it, the very possibility of cultivating virtue, intellect, and spirit in the young man and young woman alike.

Harvard College, proud scion of a Puritan lineage, stands at the crossroads of this cultural and moral malaise. Once a bastion of rigorous all-male moral, social, spiritual, and intellectual formation, it now enrolls men and women, melding together two fundamentally different natures and modes of flourishing. In the process, it has sacrificed the very conditions that made possible the Harvard Man—a figure of honor, intellect, and moral fortitude—and the Radcliffe Lady, equally noble but formed according to a complementary design.

I do not seek to diminish the rights or dignity of women, nor to suggest that their intellect and moral capacity are inferior. On the contrary, it is precisely because men and women are sublimely complementary—each distinct in nature, in ends, and in the ways they learn and grow—that the university ought to revisit the wisdom of separate education. Harvard, along with every great institution of learning from antiquity through the medieval era to now, was made even better by this fundamental principle.

The philosophical and theological foundations for separate education lie deeply embedded in the Western intellectual tradition. Aristotle, whose teleology remains a cornerstone of natural philosophy, teaches that all beings possess an end toward which their nature tends. Man and woman, though sharing in human nature, are not identical in their natural ends or modes of perfection. They are not merely two varieties of the same template but complementary forms, each fulfilling what the other lacks.

St. Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotelian insight and Christian revelation, articulates that the difference of sexes is part of the created order, willed by God. He writes in the Summa Theologica that men are naturally inclined to certain virtues and vocations, as are women, and that these differences are harmonious rather than hierarchical in a simplistic sense.¹ The complementarity of sexes extends to the intellectual and moral domains; the way men reason, learn, and mature differs from the female mode. The university, charged with the formation of the whole person—integrum hominem—must therefore respect and cultivate these distinct potentials.

From a theological perspective, the Creator’s design of the sexes as complementary echoes through Scripture and tradition. The Church’s ancient rites, the priesthood reserved to men, and the emphasis on woman’s unique vocation within the family and society are testimonies not of inferiority but of a divinely ordered harmony. The Virgin Mary, the model of womanhood, is no pale echo of man but a wholly other glory, illuminated by Grace.

A glance at history reveals the consistent pattern of educational separation. The great academies and universities of the last two and a half millenia were, for the most part, institutions of male learning. Women were educated in separate spheres: convents, households, or specially founded colleges devoted to female education. This was not mere prudery but an acknowledgment of the different purposes and environments best suited for each sex.

At Harvard itself, the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the rise of Radcliffe College, a sister institution dedicated to the education of women alongside, but apart from, the male Harvard. Radcliffe did not represent an inferior track but a complementary model, respecting difference while striving for similar excellence. The mingling of sexes was circumscribed by separate classes, dormitories, and social life, enabling each to flourish in their own way.

The single-sex colleges fostered the kind of fraternitas—or, more properly for the women, sororitas—that is impossible in a coeducational setting. Within these enclosed brotherhoods and sisterhoods, men and women formed bonds of loyalty, discipline, and mutual challenge that prepared them for their respective roles as leaders, thinkers, mothers, fathers, and citizens.

The dissolution of this structure in the name of “equality” and “integration” has had consequences beyond the immediate social sphere. Coeducation forces men and women into a shared educational experience calibrated to the lowest common denominator, often the female mode of learning or the requirements of avoiding gender conflict. The result is a homogenization that thwarts the fuller cultivation of either sex’s natural potential.

The male student, historically honed by rivalry, camaraderie, and all-male discourse, now faces the constant presence of the fairer sex, a presence that alters the dynamics of classroom discussion, dormitory life, and healthy competition. Male friendships are no longer forged in the fires of unalloyed fraternity but are mediated by social caution and the ever-present threat of scandal or misunderstanding. Female students, for their part, are often compelled to perform in traditionally male-oriented spaces and disciplines without the supportive sisterhood that once helped navigate the distinct challenges of their sex. The rich educational environment that nurtured women’s unique intellectual and moral growth has been supplanted by a leveling ethos that prizes uniformity over excellence.

Moreover, the purpose of the university risks being reduced to mere credentialism and market preparation. The liberal arts ideal of educating the whole person—mind, soul, and character—is drowned beneath the tides of vocationalism and globalist managerialism. Men and women are treated as interchangeable inputs for the global economic machine, rather than as persons made for greatness in their respective vocations.

Harvard’s own history offers a microcosm of this broader crisis. The Harvard Man of the mid-20th century was formed in the crucible of an intense, exclusive, and often rigorous masculine culture, one that pervaded classrooms, dorms, athletic fields, or student organizations. He was, for better or worse, a product of a fraternitas that demanded loyalty, intellectual rigor, and a clear sense of purpose.

Radcliffe, though often overshadowed, preserved the sisterhood that formed the counterpart to this brotherhood. Its graduates went on to remarkable achievements, shaped by an education that honored their sex’s distinct virtues and capacities. The absorption of Radcliffe and the full integration of the sexes within Harvard has left the institution less a breeding ground for distinctive male and female excellence, and more a melting pot of individualism and machine for social leveling. The Harvard Man, once a figure of gravitas, self-possession, and cultivated virtue, is today an increasingly endangered species.

Even for those who reject the case for a return to gender-segregated education, there is surely a broad field of common ground when it comes to the question of housing. One need not embrace the full logic of separate colleges to see the prudence in ending coeducational dormitories. There is nothing reactionary about granting men and women the privacy of separate living quarters; it is, in fact, the norm at many institutions that would otherwise style themselves as quite “progressive.” Such a reform would not merely serve the interests of modesty and decorum, but would also diminish the peculiar tensions, moral ambiguities, and distractions that inevitably arise in an environment where the personal and the academic are so thoroughly commingled.

If even that modest proposal raises hackles, then at the very least we ought to be able to agree on the absolute minimum: private, sex-specific restrooms. It is a strange state of affairs that in the twenty-first century, at one of the most richly endowed universities on Earth, there are still houses that lack gender-specific bathroom facilities. No one, whatever their philosophy on coeducation, should be compelled to share such intimate spaces with members of the opposite sex. The absence of such basic boundaries is not liberation; it is, at best, negligence.

The point is not to indulge in nostalgia for a more formal age, nor to heap blame on the young men and women of Harvard. On the contrary, they are largely the victims of a system that has—through inertia, ideological zeal, and misplaced notions of “progress”—over-integrated them far beyond even the expectations of the liberalizers who first brought them together. What was intended as a gentle mingling of the sexes has, in practice, become a wholesale erasure of all distinctions between them. If we cannot agree on restoring those distinctions in the classroom, perhaps we can at least begin by reestablishing them where they matter most: in the daily life and private spaces of students.

The solution is not a reactionary retreat from the modern world, nor a rejection of women’s rightful place in the academy and society. Rather, it is a call to reclaim the wisdom of exclusion as a recognition of nature and a means to greater flourishing. Harvard, and universities everywhere, ought to consider restoring single-sex education in its fullest sense: separate colleges, dormitories, and classes that respect the different ways men and women learn, mature, and excel. Such a restoration would not only honor the dignity and unique nature of each sex but would also revive the conditions necessary for true fraternitas and sororitas without the distracting and often corrosive effects of coeducation.²

The university’s ultimate aim is the formation of virtuous, knowledgeable, and spiritually grounded adults—men and women capable of shaping their families, communities, and nations. This aim is ill-served by the indiscriminate mixing of sexes, and better served by the cultivation of separate but complementary educational paths.

If we accept that men and women are distinct in nature and ends, that education must nurture these differences toward virtue, and that brotherhood and sisterhood are the indispensable soil in which character is grown, then the path forward is clear. Harvard must remember its roots, and through them remember the order of things. It must once again become a house not only of knowledge, but of formation, where the Harvard Man and Radcliffe Lady are each made, in their own way, into noble sons and daughters of a tradition that has shaped American life for nearly four centuries.

CORNELIA

A version of this essay originally appeared in Fraternitas, the September 2025 print issue of The Harvard Salient.

1. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 93.4

2. The only obvious problem not addressed by this return is that it does little to abate the presence of practicing homosexual students. This, however, is a distinct issue, with potential solutions to be explored in a future essay.