“The odds are good, but the goods are odd,” an embarrassed daughter’s dad noted of Harvey Mudd as the Claremont tour guide walked us past the science-and-engineering-focused campus of the five-college consortium. Harvey Mudd, in those days, was still mostly male. Single ladies at Scripps, Claremont’s women’s college, would have their pick of the poindexters—as would young women at coed colleges Pitzer, Pomona, and Claremont McKenna who’d tired of competing for better-sunned boyfriends.
In the 10 years since then, everything’s changed: Women made up 55 percent of Harvey Mudd’s most recent graduating class in computer science, whereas in the approximate era of that aforementioned dad joke women comprised a meager 10 percent of the discipline. (If you’re inclined to weep for the past, take heart that Emma Willard girls are, to the best of knowledge, received as goddesses at the still 69-percent-male Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—although, come to think of it, that was 10 years ago, too.) A corresponding push to recruit more minority students has also changed the makeup of the historically male, historically pale Harvey Mudd—resulting in dramatic demographic shifts over the last half decade. The protest that shut down HMC, leading president Maria Klawe to cancel classes Monday and Tuesday of this week was, evidently, a long time coming.
Demographic overhaul, racial grievance, and disagreements about a burdensome workload boiled over when the student paper published a leaked internal report on March 24—a two-year-old self-study the college commissioned from the Center of Inquiry at Wabash College in Indiana to survey attitudes about student work. In focus groups that contributed to the so-called Wabash Report, some faculty members complained, anonymously, of students’ diminishing capacity for hard work—while students complained of an “oppressive curriculum.”
According to Insider Higher Ed: “Students read the story, and later some of them printed out jumbo-size versions of the more stinging remarks from professors included in the report and plastered them to the president’s house and faculty members’ offices.”
On April 12, a student-led sit-in—backed by demands that the administration ramp up mental health counseling, particularly for minority students—won on two counts. President Klawe will provide additional funding to six student affinity groups: BLAM, SPLS, APISPAM, THEY/THEM, PRISM, and FEMunion (no, really). The college also plans to add to mental health services, the crux of students’ grievances being a disregard for students’, particularly minority students’, mental and emotional needs. So deep is this disregard on the college’s part that they’ve pushed students to protest, at the expense of their studies: “The college perpetuates mental health issues by making it necessary for marginalized students to expend time and energy into crafting statements, holding acts of protest, and demanding increased institutional support at the expense of time and energy being devoted towards the college’s rigorous academic curriculum,” according the students’ list of grievances.
Harvey Mudd, like Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT, has a more competitive admissions rate for men (10 percent) than women (23 percent); of the four, Mudd boasts the broadest gap. The student body as whole is now 46 percent female, up from 31 percent in 2005. An ambitious curricular redesign eight years ago aimed to allow students more time for electives, to make more room for academic and extracurricular exploration—and to entice the feminine mindset into masculine disciplines (h/t Larry Summers). Emphases on group projects made a required introductory course in computer science, key to Mudd’s rigorous Core, a more attractive gateway to the discipline. The same course, formerly so dry that professors drew straws for it per the Los Angeles Times January write-up on Mudd’s gender revolution, was altered to incorporate engaging projects and group work: “In the revamped curriculum, instead of having computer science students write arcane code, professors started giving them fun group puzzles and 3-D graphics to create their own games,” and, “they used algorithms to solve evolution questions and analyze DNA sequences.”
There are those who thrill at the thought of Harvey Mudd’s tripping over itself in a rush to diversify the student body, noting that the original model, made “for white men,” worked just fine for a happy half century—until it had to be altered, to accommodate the unqualified. But to mourn the patriarchy is to overlook an even more modern catalyst for students’ current freakout than the overdue fallout from counting by race and sex. In the leaked report, professors complain of “coddled” students not impelled by a passion for science, but staring out dead-eyed awaiting instruction. One said, “There’s a question about ability vs. motivation. The demographics of our students have changed over time. I feel like our students are not as sold on a discipline in college. They come here and say, ‘I’ll do what they tell me.’ They’re not interested in science body and soul, and they don’t want to immerse themselves.” Math and science for math and science’s sake do not grip them as they once did: These kids need a higher, socially-engaged reason to conduct whatever project.
Are they overworked—or uninspired? Either way, per some professors, they’re over-sensitive and easily cowed under pressure. One noted that, “I spend a lot more time and energy trying to make it interesting for students.” While another said, “Students are different today. They don’t know how to fail; they’re coddled.” Students, for their part, reported callous comments from faculty, typical of the gruff mathematician who is “emotionally unintelligent” per the modern parlance. One said, of a particular department, “They provide negative motivation to learn.”
However the whole mess shakes out, the pale and reliably dateless—the emotionally unintelligent champion mathlete who won’t think twice before asking, Didn’t you learn this in high school?—still has a home at Harvey Mudd, it seems. The faculty, unlike the student body, is still 62 percent male. The public-facing, prettier tech world is also working on its “EQ”—that’s the irritating shorthand for “emotional intelligence” (here’s looking at you, Zuckerberg)—and worrying, but never enough, about gender parity. It’s only natural, really, that an increasingly, ahem, feminine Harvey Mudd would halt for two days in April to talk, oh so uncomfortably, about its feelings.
