Coeducation at Tuck Turns 40

Martha Fransson T'70 was used to tough interview questions. By the spring of her senior year, the Radcliffe undergraduate had applied to four business schools and received letters of acceptance from three.

Along the way, she endured credulity-straining questions from interviewers who weren't sure what to make of a prospective female MBA student. It was, after all, 1968. "You're trapped in a burning room. The door's locked and the phone's dead," went one. "What do you do?" (Correct answer: Use your stiletto heel to break the window.)

Then came Tuck. The school had recently announced it would be opening its doors to women. Fransson applied and, at incoming Dean John Hennessey's urging, traveled to Hanover and spent a day shadowing a group of first-year students. "I did three or four classes, a coffee break, lunch," recalls Fransson. "At the end, we all sat down and I told them how much I'd enjoyed it." Then one of the students asked, "'Well, are you going to expect us to open doors for you?' I said, 'Whoever gets to the door first opens it.' And they breathed a big sigh of relief."

A lot has changed at Tuck in the last 40 years. Today, more than a third of students are women—a development "so far outside my experience, I have difficulty identifying with it," says Fransson. Her iconic class photo explains why; Tuck's first female graduate was also the sole woman in the class of 1970. Fransson originally intended on standing off to the side for the picture, but her classmates would have none of it. "They said, 'you're coming over here and standing in the front row,'" she adds. "They created the picture."

Fransson was back on campus in October, along with several of the school's earliest female graduates to mark the 40th anniversary of coeducation at Tuck. She was pleased to see some things haven't changed. "The faculty's commitment to academic excellence is still there," Fransson says. "We thought they would never be as good as the ones we had," adds Noreen Doyle T'74, who was also at Tuck for the anniversary. "It's refreshing to learn that today's professors are just as interested in the students and in good teaching."

Doyle, a Tuck overseer, was one of four women in her class. Apart from the occasional non-PC remark—the day they discussed a case on disposable diapers was referred to as "ladies' day"—she remembers the lopsided gender balance as having its benefits. "It was not an unpleasant social situation," Doyle hastens to point out. "By day two, they all knew our names."