Parsons interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Parsons: Let me add a footnote to what we were talking about on the other side about this article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. I wouldn't be surprised if Bob Huntley's view on coeducation was vastly different from mine, which simply is I wish, speaking for my own self, I think I did well at Washington and Lee partly because there was not the distraction of young women around. I find the company of young woman very pleasant, not that I studied so hard when I was here or anything like that, but I think I could have been very easily distracted as a student. So I think that there is a place for single-sex education. I regret the fact that the imbalance that was spoken to in this Princeton article became so severe. The Princeton article mentioned the fact that you had to have a certain number of men's colleges to make this work, that when it got down to a precious few, that they became unusual. In other words, they were out of the mainstream of education, appeared to be out of the mainstream of education. Bob Huntley said essentially the same thing long before we ever saw the Princeton article. He said that Washington and Lee should never permit itself to be perceived as quaint. So when you get down to just a few colleges doing something as narrow as to say, "We're going to only teach men," well, that can perceived as being quaint by others, and he said we shouldn't embrace quaintness. [Laughter] Later on, when President Wilson was under severe criticism among many alumni for having brought up the coeducation issue and appearing to advance it in a way that made everyone think that he thought it was the best idea for Washington and Lee, which I think he did, but John Wilson was under severe criticism, and I saw some of the mail that would come to him. He would share it with me. I was his assistant at the time. I remember him reading excerpts to me from letters, and he would say, "I can't survive this," and I would try to reassure him that, indeed, I thought he could survive it. At that time, Bob Huntley was a member of the law school faculty and occupied an office over in Lewis Hall, and I dropped in to see him one day. I either volunteered the information, knowing that he was interested in it, or he may have asked me. Bob was always very circumspect about inquiring about how John Wilson was conducting his presidency. The last thing he wanted to do was be intrusive or be perceived as overly interested. But we got to talking, and Bob gave me some advice that I should implement as the president's assistant, and one was, "Don't let the president or the trustees get concerned about the monetary costs of converting the campus in ways to accept women." I can almost remember his words. "You and I both know that these buildings will not require much modification," and also he said, "John Wilson must not lose this fight." He said, "If he does, he's done as president." I'm not sure he used exactly those words, but that was the sentiment, that John must not be permitted to fail in this initiative, because he felt that should the trustees vote him down—I think Bob Huntley had a very high regard for John Wilson, and he did not want to see his presidency end on that note, but I think he felt that John would have had a tough time to be then a forward-moving, assertive president after that. Fortunately, none of that happened. The trustees did support the coeducation initiative and they did so under rather rigorous rules. I've often said that if Jack Warner wanted to lead the fight against coeducation, he should not have resigned from the board, he should have stayed on, and with a little bit of persuasive power, he might have won at least one other trustee, and that's all it would have taken, his vote and somebody else's, because the trustees decided that this issue was too important to be settled by a simple majority, as most issues are before the board. So they said it had to be a two-thirds vote. Again here I'd want to check my records on this, but by their rules it was a narrow vote. It was substantially wide. I'll just say fifteen to eleven or something like that, but it would have only taken two votes to swing it around so it didn't work. Fifteen to seven, maybe. But it was by a two-thirds majority, but not much of a cushion for that majority. So we made the transition. I was looking over the ways in which I tried, as the editor of the alumni magazine, that was my role—in addition to being assistant to the president, I also was the person in charge of our public relations office and publications office. Warren: What time period are we talking about? Parsons: This is in the early eighties. Warren: You've had so many hats, Frank, you have to keep them straight. Parsons: This was a strange situation. When I became Bob Huntley's assistant, even though it defied all the other orderly tables of organization that most colleges have, ours, for good reason, at least we thought it was good reason at the time, members of our staff who had been hired by me and who worked for me up to the time I became Bob Huntley's assistant, they continued to report to me, and they did not want to report to somebody else. So Bob Huntley, in his wisdom, said they didn't have to; we could work this out. We didn't have to follow any rigid table of organization, and it worked quite effectively. Bob Huntley also had the good sense to sit down with me and to make certain that I had the good sense to be aware of the fact that the new president coming in might not want me as his assistant, so that my long service to Washington and Lee could continue, that maybe we ought to figure out something else for me to do. I thought about it, and I said, "Well, what I can do, I could go back to being in charge exclusively over the PR, the publicity office and the publications office." At that time, too, I was also responsible for the print shop, which was sort of a back-shop wing of the publications operation. It no longer was part of the journalism department in ways that it used to be, ways that it came into being. So I proposed that I have the title of university editor, and that this would give me some influence over the alumni magazine and other publications, the catalog, and would continue to enable these individuals who worked for me before to continue in a happy relationship, one that they were comfortable with. I'll speak here not for the record, but I was dealing with three very unusual, very talented persons. I was dealing with Bob Keefe [phonetic], who had his own perspective on things; I was dealing with Rom Weatherman, who also had some difficulties that he made no secret of. He suffered greatly from depression and was either riding a high or riding a very deep low. He was a roller-coaster man from day one. Then we had the irrepressible Sally Mann [phonetic] as our photographer, who brought with her certain sensitivities that had to be dealt with. Warren: Oh, not Sally. Parsons: [Laughter] But these were three immensely talented people, and I go back and look at the alumni magazines that we turned out with those contributions from those three persons, well, I always feel very proud that I was involved with bringing them to bear on Washington and Lee's publications. Well, anyhow, I was university editor at that time, and one of the things that I set out to do very purposely was to let the magazine be a forum. At that time we introduced the Letters to the Editor column to be a forum in which alumni, in addition to writing specifically to the president, they could express their views where they'd be seen by other alumni. And I wanted to give Jack Warner a forum in which to express his views, and I wanted an opportunity for the president and others here, who wanted to support coeducation, or at least to identify the issues. If they didn't come out and support it, we wanted at least to be able to identify the issues as to why it was timely to think about this. I wanted to have a forum for that. I alluded earlier to this article I did on the history of coeducation. We kept the alumni updated. At that time, the alumni magazine came out six times a year, every two months, and this was a frequency that helped us keep the issue before them. I invited Marshall Nuckols, former rector of the board, to permit me to write something for him that he'd be willing to have printed over his name, which addressed the responsibilities the trustees have. So what we did, literally we printed the names of all the trustees who were going to have to bear this burden of making this decision, and we did that so that alumni out there who wanted to get in touch with them, they could. They knew who was on the board; they wouldn't have to wonder who was on the board of trustees. In this little statement by Marshall Nuckles, former rector, he pointed out how the trustees should perceive themselves as individuals holding in trust the future of this institution. So we did that, and we reported on the results of our survey of alumni, tried to present, although if there was a failing in these efforts, we somehow didn't stress enough that this survey of alumni attitude wasn't a referendum. People would say, "Well, we voted it down, didn't we?" "Well, no, you didn't vote it down. It wasn't a yea/nay voted up or voted down thing. We were simply trying to find out what you thought about it, and the purpose of the survey was to establish the climate in which the trustees would make the decision." We wanted the trustees to be aware of the climate in which they were making the decision, so that survey, I think, helped them in that regard because the survey, first of all, it went out to all alumni for whom we had good addresses, and out of some sixteen thousand—I'm speaking in round numbers here—we got back somewhere between six and seven thousand returns. The questions were very carefully worded, trying to avoid questionnaire bias. We engaged a firm experienced in this, and as I recall, in their first effort, they did not do as well as we wanted to do in that. We could read into it biased. I remember working very hard trying to rephrase some of their questions, and I think we were successful in doing that. The reason I think we were successful was that when I would try to respond sometimes or to help President Wilson respond to letters that would come in, about as many people claimed we were biased in favor of coeducation as claimed we were biased against the other side. So we offended people on both sides of the issue, so therefore one interpretation you could put on that is that it was an unbiased questionnaire. It spoke to a lot of things. But we asked them, "If you had your druthers (and I'm paraphrasing here), should Washington and Lee remain all male or become coeducational?" And the majority, not an overwhelming majority, but a majority of those responding said they'd like for it to remain all male. Then we asked them, "Would you want this condition to prevail if it meant the university's academic quality would be lessened?" Then it flipped around. No, they would only want to remain all male if we continued to be the best institution of which we were capable of being, and that if we were going to be less than that, then their attitude toward coeducation as a remedy was changed. And there were other questions that began to draw the fine distinctions of conditions. We've never used, in my opinion, that study in ways that we could benefit from it. There was an awful lot of good information in there about how they perceived the institution and their general attitudes from the alumni perspective. As you know, our alumni are spread all across the United States, and we take great pride in attracting students from all over the United States, and these same students, as alumni, tend to disperse themselves all over the country. So our alumni magazine very often is the most convenient and perhaps the best medium for communication we have with the rank and file alumni. Not all of our alumni are associated with chapters. They may live within a circumferential circle that would draw them into a chapter, but if you lived sixty miles away from a chapter—there is a chapter in Lexington, but, for instance, if there were none here and Roanoke was the closest chapter, it would take a little effort on my part to get down for events that they would plan. Warren: Who has the study? Parsons: It's right in this box. Warren: John Wilson alluded to that, so that is definitely something I'm very interested in looking at. Parsons: Want me to say anything about how the special meeting to decide the issue came about? Warren: Sure. Parsons: It was held in mid-July. Actually, the decision was made on Bastille Day. [Laughter] It was a very interesting meeting. Warren: The board normally meets in June? Parsons: The board had met in May, late May. Normally meets three times a year, usually in October, sometimes in late January or February, sometimes as late as early March, and then again in late May. But this was a special meeting. They did not want to have to deal with the issue of coeducation in a climate of other distractions, such as budget for next year and things of that kind, so they agreed that they would address the issue in mid-July. They came, and it was a two-day meeting. It required some careful planning. We had at least one member of the board, maybe two, who could not be there, but, nevertheless, we arranged for their vote to come in, in one case by transatlantic telephone, so that the vote would be on the table. Lots of press attention. We set up a plan that once a decision was made, there would be a press conference. Since the result of the vote was in favor of coeducation, there was some discussion among the board about how to put our best face forward—the phrase I want to use is "to a man," but indeed I think there were at least one or two women on the board then. Again I'd have to check and make sure. But to a person, once it had been decided. It was like where you go back and make the decision unanimous retrospectively. It was agreed that one of the trustees who had made one of the more eloquent statements in favor of remaining all male agreed to appear as part of that press conference and was represented to the press as having been an opponent and on the other side of the question, but we wanted to assure people that he spoke for those who had been on that side of the issue, that now the issue was decided, we would put it behind us, and we were all going to work to making Washington and Lee succeed in this venture, and that there were no bad feelings among those whose viewpoint had not prevailed. So I think we did a real good job, as I look back on that, of both informing the alumni constituency of the issues that were at stake, keeping them apprised of developments, and then in the follow-up, when we welcomed our first class of young women and stayed with how they were doing. I think we did a pretty good job of saying to the alumni, "Things have not changed for the worse here, they've changed for the better. Your fears, which probably were legitimate fears of what might happen, have not come to pass. We are dealing with a much improved educational institution. Our students are happy. Let's address other questions." Warren: Were the students happy? How did the males react? They met in July. When did women arrive? Was there a year in between? Parsons: Yes, there was a whole year between. Warren: So what was the mood on campus? Parsons: The mood on campus was disgruntlement among students, rejoicing among the faculty. [Laughter] But the students, they had done a number of things in the course of the study to make their positions well known, the most famous of which was draping Old George with a sign that said, "No Marthas." [Laughter] Disgruntlement. There were lots of low-key resentment on the parts of some students. T-shirts, "Coeducation at Washington and Lee: The Beginning of an Error," E-R-R-O-R. Various things like that. The women themselves, when I think about those 104 young women who came in here in that first class, your admiration has to go out to them, because they were coming into unknown territory, but they were tough. One of my funnier remembrances of the first year of coeducation was the effort made by the Coeducation Steering Committee, of which I was a member. The Coeducation Steering Committee had been called into existence to plan the transition, so that committee's work actually filled up the year that intervened between July of 1984, '85. I lose track of the year. But it wasn't the following September, it was the September after that when we had the first women come. We spent the year addressing issues that we would need to study and changes we would have to make, such as the physical modifications we made in the dormitories to take what had been men's restrooms and bathrooms and modify them for the women. Again, we thought we were very clever. We didn't rip out plumbing; we just simply boxed it in, recognizing we might have to shift around, might want to make that a men's restroom again, toilet. So we did things like that. Over in the gym, we made some rather substantial modifications over there to provide the women with the physical education classes where they were required to take physical education, put in locker facilities and shower facilities, again trying to acquaint ourselves with the sensitivities of women. We were blessed by the fact that on our faculty and the staff and in the law school, we had an unusual number of persons who had been present or even involved in coeducation transitions at other colleges, and they were invaluable in being able to tell Washington and Lee things we'd have to be aware of. And even so, we missed a couple, but we picked up on it. One of the things that the Coeducation Steering Committee did in that intervening year, we sent teams to Davidson College and another team up to Franklin and Marshall College to pick their brains as to what they had done that they thought was good, and what they would like to do over again if they could, and we came away with some very good, new perspectives on things that we would have to do here. For instance, at Davidson, we discovered when we went down there something that just hadn't occurred to us here. It might have occurred to someone here, but it hadn't reached our attention, and that was this very severe problem among young women; that is, eating disorders. We ran into, at Davidson, a very definite awareness there that you have to be very sensitive to this, that sometimes it's undetectable until it's gotten to a very serious stage in a young woman's life. They had set up certain peer support groups there that worked from within. It wasn't anything that the administration itself did to identify young women suffering from anorexia and bulimia. Usually your best source of information would be their classmates who are concerned about them and might even be aware of some of the eating habits that they were pursuing. So I think that this has helped us here in dealing with it, through our counseling and peer support groups. So these were good visits that we had. We discovered another thing that I felt like was very worthwhile. We quickly became aware of how dark the campus was at night. To the credit of our law students, most of whom come in with litigious chips on their shoulders, women over there have been very tolerant of the fact that the main campus over here is pretty dark. We did a little better of lighting the law school, but if they ever came over here at night, it was pretty dark. So what we did, we got our master planning representatives from a landscape architecture firm in Pittsburgh to come down, and Mr. Arthur, the superintendent of buildings and grounds, joined us. I got three volunteers from the law school, women's classes at the law school, to meet with us one dark November evening, didn't have to be very late because it gets dark very early in November, and we had dinner together and then we went out and we walked the campus, and wherever they told us that they felt unsafe or they felt that more light would help, we took note of that and we then proceeded to light the campus in an acceptable manner. There are still some areas that I think are a little dark and we ought to do some more changes. You can't do it all overnight. It's been some years now, ten years, but in the main, I have tried to get Washington and Lee to follow the way in which a man down at Davidson, their director of planning and buildings and grounds, he says, "If one woman comes to me and says they think we ought to have a light here, I'll put a light there. I don't fool around. We found some clever ways to run conduits and things, and we try to put the light where they feel unsafe." So in the main, we've been, I think, successful in doing that. Warren: You've alluded numerous times to these women at the law school, but you haven't told me about their arrival on campus. Parsons: Their arrival was compelled by different forces. There, the American Bar Association and the American Association of Law Schools, AALS, they do make a part of their accrediting process that you do not discriminate on the basis of sex, so we had to take the women there. We didn't have any choice on it. Warren: Was there resistance? Parsons: No, no. Well, I'm sure that there must have been, but I'm not familiar with how it manifested itself. I think it was just taken as a given. Also I believe the federal law exempts undergraduate institutions but does not treat graduate schools with the same exemption with regard to discrimination on the basis of sex or gender. So the law school really didn't have a choice. As I said, we began receiving our first women applicants and women students in the law school before we moved to the new building, and then later as we got over there, then the percentage of applicants and percentage of students enrolled sought pretty much its own level and runs about a third to 40 percent over there as well. Warren: Another transition that happened while you've been here is the arrival of black students. Did that have an impact? I'm sure it had an impact socially, but did it have an impact academically? Parsons: Unfortunately, the numbers involved here have never been sufficient to make an impact. Warren: Tell me what you mean by that. Parsons: We would welcome as many young men and women black students, Afro Americans, that could quality to get in here, but the difficulty is that we are competing with so many other colleges who are also seeking to have more black students, and so the competition among colleges for students capable of doing our work without special tracking for disadvantaged students, we do not succeed in that competition as often as we'd like to. So we're dealing with relatively small percentages of entering classes, small percentage of the student body who are minority students. That applies not only to Afro American students, but applies to Asians, applies to Latin Americans. So the great majority of our students are white, upper middle class, and that's just a fact. There are different views on whether this is good or bad. There are members of our board of trustees who think that we should seek vigorously greater diversity in our student body, and there are others who think that one of Washington and Lee—and indeed there are places in American higher education where you're not badly served by having a homogeneous student body. I'm not able to quantify how many trustees have these differing views, but I do know that these differing views do exist within the current makeup of the board. Keep in mind, too, that the decision to accept black students at Washington and Lee was made before we had these enlightened changes in the structure of the board. I remember during that self-study of the mid-sixties that the self-study committee recommended that we accept black students and, beyond that, to recruit them with certain vigor. I remember that the report that we submitted to the Southern Association had to have the endorsement of the faculty and the board of trustees. We had to purge those remarks from our report that went in, because the trustees were not willing to accept black students here at that time, and they didn't want us—I don't want to use the word "fouling up" our self-study report by taking that point of view. So that was a real setback. Warren: When did that change happen, and was it imposed by the government or was it just a change from within? Parsons: It happened shortly after the self-study. Within a year, I think, we had our first black student here. It came from within. The government did not make us take black students. Again, I'm not enough of a lawyer to know exactly what the state of the law was at that time. There were certain conditions being attached to this, that, and the other in terms of if you wanted to qualify for this kind of federal aid, you certainly could not discriminate on the basis of race. That was behind some of the thinking, I think, among board members who, with a certain reluctance, decided, "We're going to have to do it." There were a number of members of the board who did not abandon the traditional white southern attitude toward blacks, and Dr. Cole, when he was president of Washington and Lee, he felt that we had to get into and remain in the mainstream of American education, higher education, and that the social changes that were coming about in the late fifties and early sixties, we had to be a part of that, that we could not exist apart from that. We could not deny ourselves access to foundation support, and the foundations have become very socially conscious, and certainly the government was becoming more and more restrictive in how it was able to share its resources. So President Cole felt it was essential that we do it. He was a southerner, but his perception of the plight of the disadvantaged minorities was such that he was inclined to work very hard to do what he could to overcome that. I don't remember as much about this as I should, but I recall he had good contacts within certain foundations and he had good contacts within the Office of Education. When Prince Edward County, I guess it is, down near Hampden-Sydney, and Farmville and Longwood College, that county in particular balked at integration, and set up private schools for the white students in the county, leaving the public schools with only the black students and maybe white students you could count almost on one hand. I know Dr. Cole worked with these friends of his to do things that would lift the quality of the educational experience at the public black school, including Washington and Lee professors going down to Prince Edward County and helping teach special courses and doing special things to stimulate the learning environment there. He also worked with Hampton Institute to not exchange students, but programs that brought some of those students onto our campus and took our students down there. For this he was often criticized, and he was not universally popular among certain members of our board of trustees, but what Fred Cole did was, in my opinion, a very smart thing. He recognized early the qualities that Bob Huntley had in terms of the brilliance of his mind, his reasoning powers, his powers of persuasion. He was a good lawyer. He made Bob, first of all, the university's legal counsel, and he also then, in order to bring Bob in contact in the best possible ways with members of the board of trustees, he made him the secretary of the board of trustees so he'd be at all the meetings and would have these reasons for talking to the trustees. Bob proved to be very persuasive in working with certain members of the board to lessen their stiffness on this matter of racial integration, so he played a very key role in that transition. Warren: Did the first black student come during Cole's time or during Huntley's time? Parsons: I think he came during Dr. Cole's time. I'd have to check that. Warren: It would be right on the edge there. Parsons: Two local boys. You'd think I could remember their names. I know one of them was the son of Mrs. Smothers, who still works in the co-op. She's been working in the co-op as long as I can remember Washington and Lee. She and I joke about how long we've been here. She is retired, but she also has come back to work in her retirement from time to time. A lovely person. Her son was one of the first black students to come here, and the other was another local young man. Then we began to recruit, and again heroic young men, in my opinion. When we were trying to decide how to communicate this change in admissions posture for Washington and Lee, I was a lot more courageous in those days, and I proposed to Dr. Cole, and with Dean Gilliam's support, that we lay our cards on the table. "Let's say what we've decided, let's tell the alumni what we think the consequences of this decision—" We had this fear among some of our alumni that if we lowered the racial barrier, we would be flooded with black students, just like everyone thought we'd be flooded with women. We knew that was not going to be the case. Warren: They flatter themselves. Parsons: Yeah, they do. And we knew that wasn't going to be the case, so I did a piece for the alumni magazine in which I laid out, in the most objective manner I could, what had been done. I quoted Dean Gilliam at length in terms of his perception of what we would do to recruit, how difficult it was going to be to recruit black students to come here, words to the effect that when we did get applicants here that we could accept, likely they would be unusual persons, because coming to General Lee's college would require a certain amount of steadfastness of purpose that would result in getting nothing but real good people. So I wrote the story. Dean Gilliam thought it was fine. Dr. Cole thought it was fine. But he said, "Well (this may explain a little bit what we've talked about over recent weeks), I think we ought to let the board know what's going to be in the magazine, so I'm going to circulate the story to members of the board. This is not for them to say yes or no to; this is just for their information." Well, unfortunately, three or four didn't want to be that candid, and even though the majority thought the story was fine, Dr. Cole decided, well, he couldn't run the risk of offending the rector of the board and two or three other members. So he asked me to change the story. Warren: I need to change tapes.