<p>Hey curmudgeon-- I cought that and it was duly noted a few posts later-- but thanks for the clarification.</p>
<p>Guys, I have a couple of questions for you. Why are you making the assertion that male oriented schools are unintellectual/career-driven/athletic/hard-partying while female oriented schools are more intellectual/tolerant/cooperative/etc? Doesn't anyone find this a little bit sexist to say that men are less intellectual and more party/sports driven than women? I find it to be very biased. I know plenty of vapid, alcoholic, varsity athlete females as well as intelligent and tenaciously curious males who aspire to careers in academia yet know nothing about sports. This is something to think about here...maybe you guys didn't mean to characterize masculine/feminine schools in that manner. </p>
<p>I would have to say though that I agree with the masculine/feminine "personalities" that schools seem to have. Yale, Brown, Swarthmore and a few others are distinctly female. MIT, Duke, Williams, and Dartmouth seem to definitely be male.</p>
<p>Reading this thread brought one pair of adjectives to mind - cooperative (F) vs competitive (M). An oversimplification of course, and as one poster notes, subcultures at schools can be radically different. </p>
<p>The division of opinion on Kenyon is a good example. There appear to be at least three strong subcultures there prep/greek careerist types, English & theater aesthetes, and a bunch of genial, earnest Midwesterners. Remarkably they seem to get along pretty well, perhaps due to the isolated location.</p>
<p>There are males who are in touch with their feminine side (Many on this board). There are females who are in touch with their masculine side. Schools are similar since they are made up of people.</p>
<p>So the male side is mentally dull/alcoholic? and the female side is intellectual/unathletic? hmmm.</p>
<p>I would say the male side is more physical, and rough around the edges. The female side is more refined, quieter, nurturing and more in touch with her feelings.</p>
<p>That doesn't necessarily mean that the female side possesses an intellectual vitality that the male side doesn't, or that it isn't partial alcohol/athletics (not that athletics are a bad thing, or anti-intellectual!!).</p>
<p>Cavalier, what you gleaned from this thread is exactly what I feared someone might think we were talking about. Don't get hung up on nomenclature. Call the two disparate concepts of college environment whatever strikes your fancy. What we are discussing is that there appears or may appear to be a way of classifying schools by feel into two categories. We are struggling with what to name them, but feel Carolyn is on to something. Actually I think most of us posting are invested because we ,too, believe that a dichotomy of "feel" exists.</p>
<p>I never thought of UChicago as feminine before, but I suppose if a campus full of people earnestly talking to each other about their ideas is feminine then so be it.</p>
<p>I tried to talk about this thread while driving to dinner tonight with TheMom and D and got roundly hooted at over the nomenclature...I was surprised, verging on shocked.</p>
<p>TheMom suggested different terms: Warthogs vs. Songbirds. D concurred.</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, what another concidence: there are some forms I have to sometimes fill out as a self-employed person, forms that are also filled out by large corporations. They ask for my title and I sometimes write "Grand Poohbah." I don't <em>think</em> I've had the nerve to do this with the IRS yet as I believe them to be a thoroughly humorless bunch.</p>
<p>Hey,TheDad at least we disagreed a little on Cangel's thread. That was a good sign,huh? At least we aren't sharing the same slightly askew noggin. I was pretty pleased by that development as I had convinced myself that you had received the larger and more attractive slice. This is just slightly frightening.</p>
<p>Male personalities-Notre Dame, Dartmouth, Colgate, Holy Cross, Duke, Stanford, Williams. Female personalities-Oberlin, Haverford, Swarthmore, Kenyon, Bates, Wesleyan.</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, dear God, if you share anything of my noggin you have the worst of the deal.</p>
<p>Well, I'm still "hung up" over the nomenclature. (It's too early in the morning for me to ponder what exactly that idiom references.) I feel as if nothing has been accomplished in the last 40 years if it's still acceptable to equate touchy-feely with feminine and goal-oriented with masculine. Nomenclature, words, names--they're always important, and I don't see a compelling reason to make this thread an exception.</p>
<p>Random thoughts- How about:</p>
<p>1) Those with Tea time and those with tee times
2) Innies and Outies (those spending more time in their heads vs those spending more time in outside activities)
3) Thought and action
4) soft, medium and hard boiled (allows for those middle "falls in both categories" schools</p>
<p>It's hard to stay away from words that dont have "pink" and "blue" connotations</p>
<p>How about Venus and Mars, or that still too close to the male/femalr thing. We might get sued for copyright or something</p>
<p>So what happens if you have a masculine-type applicant to a feminine college but in a major that is part of the masculine subculture of that school but with an advisor who eventually guides him/her into a feminine aspect of that masculine subculture? Is it a feminine or masculine experience? The permutations and possiblities are endless.</p>
<p>I think the whole concept of adding another "category" which is based on perceived campus culture is unnecessary and may be actually detrimental. I am afraid that many schools would be lumped into an arbitrary category by folks with no direct knowledge of a particular school. These folks should not be promoting a school because they think it falls in to a certain category and therefore assume that is has a certain culture. I really think that it should be up to an individual student to decide what a campus culture may or may not be based on their own research without any pre-conceived bias based on someone else's opinion. I also firmly believe that all campuses are made up of individuals. These individuals are all different. Each class within the same college may have a different "personality" from the next. </p>
<p>This thread reminds me of the one about fraternities and sororities. There are a lot of people passing judgement on these organizations without any direct experience. For example, I would hate to think that a 17 or 18 year old would pass up a great opportunity at a school that was deemed by some to have a campus culture conducive to "unintellectualism" because the school has an active greek community and good athletic program! I would also hate to think that a male student would ignore an opportunity at a school that someone on the cc board thought had a "feminine" twist. I would also never tell my daughter to only consider schools where everyone was exactly like she was. I think an important part of the college experience is the exposure to different views and cultures.</p>
<p>sokkermom-
If someone is looking at the top tier schools, for example, would you really think they would assume that because it fell on the "active-physical" side, that it was de facto non-intellectual?? The Williams-Amherst debate has been interesting, as to which side people see them, but I doubt anyone would think that either is "unintellectual" (in your terms). I see this personality style rating as being in addition to the current data on a school-- not instead of. The Yale Daily New's "Insiders Guide to Colleges" has been doing this for years. It gives you a great feel for what it is like to be at each of these schools. It describes the culture at each school and we found it incredibly accurate and extremely helpful. When my s. was putting all his data together about each school (and he was very organized about it), he was able to make some additinal decisions about whether or not he wanted to visit a school with the info from the Insiders Guide. And again-- for those we did see (13 schools), the book matched his experiences remarkable well. As an aside, I read about my undergrad and grad schools, and was amazed that the schools still maintained a lot of the core personality, the feel, that it did many years ago when I was there. I hope this doesn't mean that they haven't changed with the times, but that rather certain core traits endure.</p>