Women of the Ivy League

When outsiders imagine what the Ivy League is like, they tend to dream about small worlds of leather chairs and English shoes and oarsmen named Saltonstall rowing their sculls down unpolluted rivers at sunset. The men in these dreams are either John Kenneth Galbraith or Ryan O'Neal. The women are always Olive Oyl.

Ivy Leaguers know better. They say their once gentlemanly schools are now pre-professional jungles, where bookaholics vanish into libraries in September and emerge only in May. This epidemic of careerism, they continue, has blurred the old class differences so effectively that you can no longer tell the few remaining Saltonstalls from the potential Solzhenitsyns. But while Ivy League men will hold forth on this turn of events as long as you're willing to listen, they are curiously silent on the subject of their social lives. And because of their reticence, the notion that Ivy League women are brilliant but rarely bountiful has somehow survived the most demystifying century in the Ivy League's long history virtually intact.

Or did, until recently.

Veritas came to Harvard, for example, last November 29 in the person of David Chan. A soft-spoken, non macho wisp of a man who stands 5'5" short and punishes the scales at 120 pounds, Chan attracted no great attention as he strode along Massachusetts Avenue toward Plympton Street. Wearing his usual Shetland sweater and corduroy pants, he might have passed for an assistant professor as he stepped into the office of The Harvard Crimson and asked to purchase a two-column display advertisement.

It is a matter of record that when Chan slid his text and a check for $188.72 across the counter, no one screamed.

Because Harvard was the first stop on an eight-campus tour, Chan returned to the Crimson the following afternoon to inspect the printer's proofs of his ad. They were flawless. But the myth of Harvard's excellence began to crumble a few hours later, when a Crimson representative telephoned Playboy's Chicago offices in search of Chan. At that moment, as the most cursory glance at either the ad copy or the insertion order would have indicated, Chan was sitting in his Cambridge motel room, no farther from his Crimson caller than a hefty Frisbee toss. The Playboy operator passed the message along to Chan, who returned the call. Moments later, Crimson president Francis J. Connolly personally informed Chan that his ad would not appear in the paper because it was "simply too offensive."

Chan was puzzled. Not only had the ad been the very model of understatement--"Playboy is scanning the Ivy League for a cross section of women for the upcoming September 1979 issue," it read--but in his 14 years as a Playboy photographer, he had successfully placed ads like it in college newspapers across the country. Never had his copy been refused. Yet now the Crimson, which owed its reputation in part to its long-standing defense of free speech, had decided to censor an advertisement from a magazine that owed its reputation in part to its long-standing defense of free speech--and for reasons that Connolly later described as "contrary to all established principles of journalistic ethics."

As the majority of the Crimson staff explained in an editorial a few days later, the paper's policy of refusing ads that contribute to economic or (text continued on page 166) political oppression was the basis for its rejection of Chan's ad. A Playboy pictorial featuring women of the Ivy League would, the editors claimed, contribute to the exploitation of American women. This oppression might be less clear-cut than South African apartheid, for example, but it was no less real, they said.

The Crimson editors understood that they would be accused of denying Playboy legitimate access to its advertising columns. And they were aware that many would find their ruling to be paternalistic--or outright sexist--because of its implicit assumption that Harvard/Radcliffe women are intellectually enfeebled bimbos who are incapable of judging Playboy's intentions for themselves. But their reasons for turning down Chan's ad, they said, were so simple they couldn't concern themselves with these trifling criticisms: "The Crimson does not want to be party in any way to Playboy's exploitative tactics." Their strategy, they concluded, was an effort to distance themselves as completely as possible from that exploitation: "The decision to avoid participating in any way in the production of Playboy assures the Crimson that it will not have any influence whatsoever on the magazine's editorial content on a national level."

Whatever the philosophical merits of the Crimson's argument, the journalistic naïveté of that conclusion will stand, in retrospect, as one of the most boneheaded editorial opinions of recent years--for if anything guaranteed the success of Chan's mission, it was the controversy sparked by the Crimson's unexpected moralizing. If Chan's ad had run for four days, as planned, and produced no response at Harvard, Playboy would then have abandoned the entire Ivy League project; but thanks to the Crimson, the case of David Chan was featured in every major Boston newspaper, on every Boston television news broadcast and in newspapers around the world. As a result, some 80 Harvard/Radcliffe women contacted him--and an estimated 20,000,000 Playboy readers get to experience the photographs here.

(As a corollary to the controversy, Playboy's editors got their own consciousness raised. This Ivy League feature is but the latest in a long string of pictorials starting with October 1960's The Girls of Hollywood and marching on through geographical areas and college athletic conferences. Always the pictorials had been titled The Girls of ... whatever. Chan and a Playboy news consultant, Dan Sheridan, who accompanied him on his Ivy League foray, soon discovered that, in the Ivy League, at least, the word "girls" raised a lot of feminine hackles. It was a point well taken. So make that "women.")

After the Harvard episode, Ivy campuses had different reactions to Chan's presence--and all of them helped Playboy. In Providence, a feminist group calling itself Brown Educated Women Against Rape and Exploitation (BEWARE) urged women to make appointments with the photographer and then not show up. "We have brains and we have brawn, we're not here to turn you on," chanted the protesters at Princeton, where one wag draped a passing dog with a sign that read, Miss September. At Yale, where the editorial board of the Daily News had announced the Playboy ad would be summarily rejected, the paper's publisher decided that Chan's notice would appear after all--to the mortification of some feminists and the paper's editorial writers. And in Hanover, the Student Advisory Committee recommended that students "consider carefully how their involvements in ventures outside of the college reflect on (text concluded on page 257)Ivy League(continued from page 168) the Dartmouth community as a whole." Women at Dartmouth, or WAD, put it a bit more plainly: "We want him [Chan] to leave feeling very unwelcome here," a spokeswoman said.

The debate over Playboy's "sexism" and "exploitation" was especially heated at Cornell. There, The Cornell Daily Sun columnist Debbie Solomon, a professed feminist, riled her already agitated sisters with an article that unequivocally defended the right of women to pose for Playboy. "Why is it," she asked, "that Playboy never seemed so offensive when it was just one of those relics hidden in the back of Father's closet or brother's top desk drawer? Why is it that Playboy never angered us when those lusty centerfold models seemed remote from our own lives? ... The feminist with a Cornell degree arrogantly assumes she is too good for the pages of Playboy, and this smug superiority not only violates any sense of sisterhood but does damage to the entire female sex in its haughty implication that Playboy models--or any women who professionally devote themselves to the cultivation of their physical appearances--are necessarily brainless."

Three hundred and forty Cornell women filled out questionnaires and smiled into Chan's Polaroid for the test pictures from which Playboy editors would select a more manageable number of contenders. At a noontime protest rally, 300 others chanted slogans urging them not to pose. That day was won, however, by fewer than two-dozen Cornell students--a gaggle of fraternity types who streaked the rally, most clad only in their jocks.

Chan watched this demonstration from his hotel room and sighed. "Before I started, I was 6'5"--and look at me now," he joked wearily. In his three virtually nonstop months on the Ivy circuit, he had seen almost 1400 women and made time for hundreds of interviews. At Penn, he'd enjoyed an amusing hour with members of The Mask and Wig Club; a trio of actors from its annual drag musical dropped by, in full female gear, to present him with a bouquet.

Through it all, Chan was able to maintain his focus. Demonstrations, he said, are "healthy for the community, for the campus. Why waste money going to school if you don't express what you learn? I had no objection to any of it." What he did mind was the assumption that the stereotype of the Ivy League woman was preferable to the truth. "People think, even now, that the Ivy League woman is skinny, wears thick glasses, keeps her hair in a bun and, of course, is sexless," Chan said. "I wanted to show that beauty and brains can easily coexist. But you couldn't talk to some of those feminists about that possibility. To me, they were like puppets. They were told when to march, what to do, what to say. That's not liberated."

The women who did pose--for Chan and his Playboy compatriots Nicholas De Sciose and Pompeo Posar--defied all neat stereotyping. Some were ardent feminists--one had been president of her high school women's group but had, she said, "passed out of the stage where you have to blast your mouth off about every little thing"--while others envied their housewife mothers. Two had long careers in girl scouting. One--Dartmouth's Sharon Cowan--has written the first quarter of "a Dostoievskyan novel about a woman who's victimized in her marriage and consciously chooses insanity." Another, Brown's Eliana Lobo, wants to be able to tell her grandchildren that she appeared in Playboy, while Amy Petronis of Brown has a grandmother who's so tickled by her inclusion in this pictorial that she's buying Playboy subscriptions for all her friends. And yet another--Dartmouth's Carrie Margolin--signed on "because, for three generations, there's been a tradition in my family that the women have nude portraits done. I figured with Playboy I had a chance to have one of the best photographers in the country do mine."

What all of Playboy's Ivy finalists do seem to share is a ready explanation of their behavior in the controversy that, for some, will swirl about them for months to come. "TV is horribly stupid and violent, and everybody watches it without much protest," Yale coed Wendy Brewer snapped. "If women feel like cheesecaking it around, it's up to them."

Lisa Bennett Fedors had been friendly for years with the leader of the anti-Playboy campaign at Princeton. "I agreed with everything she said as a logical beginning, but I just couldn't buy her conclusion," she said.

"I don't expect people to come up and say, 'I saw your boobs in Playboy,' " Columbia's Gail Hoffman joked. "But if they do, I know what to say: 'You've seen them through a thin T-shirt, anyway, so what's the difference?' "

Harvard's Lindsey Palmer raised the same question more abstractly. "If looking at a picture of a nude woman is sexual exploitation," she wondered, "is reading a book literary exploitation?"

Ivy League directors of admissions will, no doubt, be plagued by bright young men eager to attend their colleges and answer that conundrum for themselves. Others will be too busy defending some of their most sacred campus organizations--some Harvard final clubs and Princeton eating clubs, Yale's Skull and Bones and Dartmouth's legendary fraternities--from charges that these all-male bastions are sexist and antediluvian. In that scenario, Playboy's pictorial may come to be regarded less as exploitation than as the break shot in a larger drama that might transform the Ivy League.

The Harvard Lampoon, which often has the last word on campus matters, rather doubts this, casting a long, cynical view on these proceedings. Commented a 'Poonie: "The women are going to take this lying down." Surely the Crimson will have something to say about that.

"Brown's Eliana Lobo wants to be able to tell her grandchildren that she appeared in Playboy."