Queering Institutional Milestones in Elite Higher Education: Queer Perspectives on Princeton University and Coeducation (1960–1980)

Abstract

A new archive of oral history interviews from LGBTQIA-identified alumni, faculty and staff reveals the complex ways that queer and transgender students understood, experienced and remembered the long transition from single-sex to coeducation at Princeton University. Engaging with this oral history collection, as well as literatures on single-sex higher education, and queer and trans activism, this institutional case study ‘troubles’ Princeton's history of coeducation and recounts the concurrent history of queer activism at the university. Such a perspective reveals that (1) some transgender students took advantage of the institution's single-sex education prior to the inclusion of cisgender women, although they could not outwardly express their true gender as students; (2) Princeton's admission of cisgender women opened, at least in part, spaces for queer students to form community, become a visible constituency, and later demand recognition and protection and (3) Princeton's male-dominant ‘masculine tradition’ persisted, even in newly formed queer spaces¹.