President Creighton's letter to the Daily Hampshire Gazette

On Friday, May 29, President Creighton joined other letter writers in responding to a May 23 opinion piece in the Daily Hampshire Gazette arguing that women's colleges are sexist and should open their doors to men.  The piece is available on the paper's paid subscription Website at http://www.gazettenet.com/story/234298. President Creighton's letter, as edited by the paper, is below:

To the Editor:

Don't tell the more than 600 women set to enter Mount Holyoke this fall - our largest class ever - that the school should go coed, as William Pohl asserted in his May 23rd Daily Hampshire Gazette opinion column, "Time for women's colleges to go coed."

They believe, as do the record numbers of women applying to leading women's colleges these days, that these institutions are powerful and transformative learning environments that offer them a distinct educational advantage over coed colleges. That advantage is evident in the confidence and competence with which graduates of our colleges go out into the world determined to make a positive difference. While they represent a tiny percentage of the total number of female college graduates, alumnae of women's colleges are significantly overrepresented in the academy, the professions, and public life.

True, American women have made tremendous progress over the past several decades in gaining educational equality - thanks in no small measure to the formative role of women's colleges in forwarding that agenda - but women are far from achieving equity or parity in the workforce or in positions of power and influence in our society.

Women still earn on average 78 cents of every dollar of their male counterparts. While women compose nearly 47 percent of the total US work force, the percentage of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is a dismal 2.4 percent. While women are more than half of the electorate, they hold only 17 percent of the seats in Congress.

But slow as progress is here, the opportunities for women in many other parts of the world are much more limited. At Mount Holyoke, nearly 20 percent of our students are international, coming from over 70 countries. Many have made astonishing journeys - from a refugee camp in Algeria, or a village in Tibet, or a township in Zimbabwe - and their life stories and passion for learning enrich the education of all of our students and reenergize our commitment to women's education and advancement worldwide.

As President Mary McAleese of Ireland told Mount Holyoke graduates Sunday, "Every woman who does what you are doing and takes the opportunity to develop her talents and fulfill her potential is making a statement of intent that freedom and human dignity will prevail."

At Mount Holyoke, the oldest women's college in the world, we are all about instilling in women that freedom and human dignity. We have an unparalleled 172-year legacy of putting women first.

Joanne V. Creighton is president of Mount Holyoke College.