Wellesley girls

I've spent some time at Wellesley. The first visit was on a tour of east coast grad schools with some other Caltech guys. A family friend (she turned out to be a charming southern belle from Arkansas) at Wellesley arranged for us to camp out in sleeping bags on an indoor balcony in her residence hall. Pretty amazing, when you think about it. My memory is fuzzy but I think showering was a bit of a challenge. Men were not allowed to move from floor to floor without an escort. "Horizontal motion, but no vertical motion" was the slogan :-) My girlfriend at the time was a student at Scripps College, an all-women's school in Claremont, California. So I was pretty familiar with the scene ... sadly, not quite as salacious as the article below makes it out to be.

I wonder what happened to all the girls we met on that trip.

Rolling Stone Magazine: ... As a visiting student from Wheaton College studying at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, for one year, Ross enjoys the unique position of being the lone full-time male student at an all-women’s school. “I really don’t have to introduce myself too often,” he says. It’s established wisdom on campus that the “token guy” who comes to Wellesley every few years will get as much attention as he can handle. David Kent, who spent a year at Wellesley in the late Seventies, wrote about the experience for Esquire: “I became incapable of talking to a girl without thinking how much she craved me and what she’d be like in the sack.” He dated three women a night, he writes, and rarely slept in his own room. Neil Schiavo, a Connecticut College graduate who spent part of the 1994-95 academic year at Wellesley, says, “The first week, it took me forty minutes to get to classes because people were so friendly. I felt like in this one little area in the world, I was Tom Cruise.”

Ross won’t put a number on how many Wellesley students he’s slept with, but admits he’s been dating “a lot.” One group of students placed bets on who could sleep with Ross, and there was also an informal competition to see who could get him into bed first. “Wellesley women are different from other women,” Ross says. “They plan everything out in their heads.” ...

... “It was a challenge to be straight at a school like that,” says Melanie Herman, a 1999 graduate who now works on Wall Street. So women at Wellesley who do choose to date men but have given up on the “Fuck Truck”—the student nickname for bus that runs to Harvard and MIT, both about forty-five minutes away—have to find whoever is available. The most alluring candidates are the professors. Different academic departments have different reputations. “Some of the departments are a little racy and some are a little more tame,” says senior Sandra North. “Some professors are notorious for having sex with their students. Everyone knows who they are.”

Understandably, professors are not cheered by the sometimes unkind stories that are spread about them. “I knew a guy who used to pick up a baby sitter on campus, and people said he was picking her up for a date,” says professor Aaron Girard, “And it wasn’t anything like that. So you can get injustice done pretty easily.” Many of the rumors are completely untrue, he points out—although he admits he has had relationships with students. “I’ve heard rumors about me and several students that had no basis in fact whatsoever,” Girard says. “And the one that was true, no one knew about.”

For a straight male professor, a women’s college offers obvious temptations. In every class, there are at least a few admirers, especially if he has that “professor sex appeal.” And having that appeal doesn’t necessarily mean he’s good-looking—indeed, says a student, many of the most sought-after professors “definitely do not fall into the good-looking category.” ...