Women of the Ivy League Revisited

David Chan, Playboy Contributing Photographer, standing in a stone gazebo just behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art and focusing his Nikon on a University of Pennsylvania coed, was unaware that he was only yards from the steps a boxer named Rocky Balboa had sprinted in his first film. Instead, Chan was mesmerized by the way in which the sunset created pillar-shaped shadows that danced across his model's face. Balboa wouldn't have noticed the shadows. Neither would most of us. But Chan, celebrating his 20th anniversary with Playboy, was concentrating once more on the back-to-school circuit, this time reprising his famed 1979 Girls/Women of the Ivy League pictorial. With a small cluster of assistants in his slip stream, he was bouncing up the Eastern Seaboard, pitching tent in hotel rooms and interviewing women from what some consider to be the nation's most respected campuses.

Back in 1978, when Harvard's newspaper the Crimson refused to run Chan's ad soliciting models--but kept his check--Time gave the gaffe a full page. Coeds--not just from Harvard but from all the Ivies--showed up in droves. But this is 1986--the year of Jerry Falwell and Edwin Meese III. The year of 7-Eleven. So we expected some controversy. What we witnessed, however, was a keen and coherent dialog about morality, sexuality and freedom, conducted by some of our nation's most intelligent individuals: the Ivy Leaguers.

Because it had given us such momentum the last time around, we began at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Again, the Crimson refused Chan's ad, though its rival, The Harvard Independent, ran it, as did The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald. Almost immediately, students sent off a flurry of letters to the Crimson, both supporting and challenging the paper's editorial judgment. But perhaps the most interesting observation came from within the Crimson staff itself. (text concluded on page 166) Ivy league (continued from page 126) According to a Boston Phoenix report, a faction of dissenting Crimson staffers believed banning Playboy's ad on moral grounds was hypocritical. They reasoned that the Crimson runs Citibank ads, even though it's widely known that Citibank does business in South Africa. Only at Harvard could a Women of... pictorial be brought into the international political arena.

While Brown University oarsmen gently paddled up the Seekonk River, something a bit more turbulent was happening on campus in Providence: Brown was going through a sexual-identity crisis. Rocked by national headlines exposing a prostitution ring involving some Brown students, Brunonians were experiencing a public sort of sexual awakening. David Letterman made nationally televised jokes, and Chan's presence on campus did little to still the choppy waters. At the Sara Doyle Women's Center, students were, as expected, protesting Playboy's visit. One senior was putting together a "feminist pornography journal" called Positions that was intended to "allow women to consume pornography in a nonalienated state." In a particularly scathing Providence Journal editorial, David Brussat came to Playboy's defense, declaring that women in the magazine "are not degraded, rather, exalted." He went on to argue that the feminist view garners much of its support from what he called a "paradigm of economics." And all because we wanted to snap a few pictures.

By the time Chan was packing his camera for the trip to New Haven, Yale's Daily News was already being "absolutely flooded with mail from both sides," the managing editor told The New York Times. But at the Yale Women's Center, angry students were taking perhaps the craftiest action yet. Drawing up a budget of $12,000 ($1500 from each Ivy League school), Women's Center members were planning their own Women of the Ivy League publication to be distributed simultaneously with Playboy's. They vowed that their version would be "an innovative and constructive contribution to the Playboy debate," containing poetry, photography and short stories by women. We applauded the Yalies' project, even offered to help them with their budget. They turned us down.

It was a little harder to get Columbia University students riled. New York is a pretty busy city, so only a handful turned up to picket outside Chan's hotel. Action was taking place on the pages of The Columbia Spectator, where the board voted nine to one in favor of placing Playboy's ad. In the end, the finest piece of passion appeared on the paper's editorial page: In just three columns, the author, a Columbia alum now with the Associated Press, quoted Alexander Hamilton, cited a Supreme Court decision and neatly drew upon the United States Constitution--all in an effort to warn students that censoring Playboy would ultimately lead to a denial of freedom.

Next came a surprise: In the usually quiet far reaches of Ithaca, New York, Cornell University was making perhaps the loudest statement of any of the Ivies. When Chan arrived, protesting students were up at the crack of dawn, camping outside his hotel room, putting notes on his door, trailing him to breakfast. They rallied in the rain--even put up a street-theater piece in which a character named Mis Ogyny was auctioned off for $500 (a standard nude-modeling fee). One woman rose above traditional sex-role stereotyping when she replied to an editorial--written by a male--in The Cornell Daily Sun condemning Playboy's Ivy rounds. In a letter titled "Speak for Yourself," she told the editorialist: "Get off our backs. Don't flatter yourself by thinking that the women who pose only want a penis out of life. I'm sure they have more important things to worry about." She also bet him he'd buy this issue.

Things at the University of Pennsylvania were fairly routine. Playboy posters were put up and torn down. The Daily Pennsylvanian ran Chan's ad and chastised the Crimson for pulling it.

By the time the schedule called for Princeton, Chan had to rush off to finish work on last month's Farmers' Daughters pictorial, so he relayed the lens to Staff Photographer David Mecey, who found Princeton's Jersey Girls to be the kind who "roller-skated to class with books in hand." And the ones who posed for him, Mecey noted, proved themselves to be conscientious students, studying during their photo-session breaks.

Last stop was Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where under the instruction of the Women's Issues League feminists took a nonparticipatory tactic: They didn't protest, didn't holler, didn't even write letters to the school paper. Result: Only about a dozen Dartmouth women applied--barely half the expected response.

So that was this year's trip up Ivy Lane. To those who lent us a hand as we roamed the hallowed halls, we give our thanks--we couldn't have done it without you. And to those on both sides of the picket lines and editorials, we thank you, too. It's nice to see that in 1986, the student mind works as well as its body. Especially in the Ivies.

"Only at Harvard could a 'Women of...' pictorial be brought into the international political arena."