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“Yale is Now a Completely Different Place”
Q&A with Frances Beinecke ’71, ’74MFS
September 8, 2009
Frances Beinecke grew up in New Jersey and went to Penn for her first two years of college. She was a member of an old Yale family—her grandfather, father, and brothers all went to Yale—and when Yale became available, “it just seemed like that would be a very good place to be.” She is now the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental advocacy organization, and has served on the Yale Corporation, Yale’s governing body.
Y: Did the Yale experience match your expectations?
B: It’s hard to reconstruct that. Clearly Yale had a great education to offer. But this was also a very complicated political moment in U.S. history. There was a lot going on besides school: the Vietnam War, the draft. That was as much a feature of the time as being at a university. I think of it more as a very political era than as a time of academic pursuit. When I was at Yale, a good deal of the time there were strikes going on. It was a period of great turmoil and activism. For me, it was a political awakening. I’d come from a fairly—not conservative, but not active—small boarding school. It was an eye-opening process. I wasn’t a leader, but I went to Washington, participated in some marches. It was very educational—I would say experiential.
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“Virtually everything was coed. Why was it such a heavy lift?”
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We certainly felt the pressure of the draft and the anxiety it produced across the entire student body. Because we were so outnumbered by the men, their anxiety was communicated very personally. I think that gave a different fix on it than if there had been a more balanced ratio.
Y: Do you think Yale gave you the right kind of preparation and support?
B: I don’t remember any particular preparation, but we'd already been in college for two years. I had a great time. It was a very rich experience. I didn’t feel like, “Why didn’t they do this for women or that for women?” The college system was and is a very welcoming system. I remember just sitting for hours in the dining hall, where people would be sweeping in and out and you really felt part of a community. It was a great way to integrate people very rapidly.
Most of the people I hung around with were the boys—because there were so many of them. It was hard to make friends with women because there so few of us.
Y: If you were Kingman Brewster, what would you have done differently?
B: Earlier? I guess that might be my answer. Looking back, everything [else] was coed—well, virtually everything. You wonder, why was it such a heavy lift?
Coeducation was part of a series of decisions that Brewster and the corporation were making to modernize the university. It was critically important because the whole nation was moving in that direction, and if Yale hadn’t done it, it would have been left seriously behind.
Two of my daughters graduated from Yale recently, in 2003 and 2006. I never heard from them any concerns about gender and equality. The thing that impressed me most was the diversity of their community. Coeducation was part of that. Yale now is a completely different place from what it was in the first half of the twentieth century. People almost don’t recognize it. But I think people come back and are excited by the energy. Yale has done an amazing job of continuing to look ahead: what do you need to do to succeed in the world that you’re going to be part of? It’s not that there weren’t always talents in these sectors. But society wasn’t ready for them—for more diverse leadership.
Y: How did the experience affect you in your later life and career?
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“You think, ‘Oh my God, I’d better go do something great.’”
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B: There’s all this talk about single-sex education and coeducation—which is better for women? I’ve experienced both. I was never daunted in my career development by the imbalance [of the genders] that you eperience in different professional settings. Because I’d experienced that in college, being in a room of mostly men didn’t really matter to me. I was used to it. I think that was a help. Having that as the norm took it off the table for me.
Single-sex education allowed development of the individual without worrying about, How’s this going over in the social setting? But having that experience as a minority in a very fast-paced, competitive setting was a good thing. It prepared you for the future. And as one of those 250 women who were selected, you think, “Oh my God, I’d better go do something great.” The expectations were very high—both internally and externally.  |
