Smaller Can Most Definitely Be Better

I’m just back from a delicious, envigorating, visit to Bay Path College in Longmeadow, Mass. Suzanne Strempek Shea (whom some of you may know from her exquisite writing in Sundays in America and Shelf Life, amongst other things) had arranged for me to give a talk on the six archetypes, and to visit four other classrooms in a less formal fashion.

Bay Path is, it turns out, one of those gems of education that we tend to forget about. It’s an all-women college at the undergrad level, with both sexes at the Master’s level, and one of the things one notices right away is that small size and single sex combine to produce an atmosphere that is most definitely conducive to real learning and personal empowerment. Perhaps it’s because women, living together, tend to settle to working at what feels important to them. I suspect that in our highly commercialized world a co-educational college, where the boys (who are often trying to impress each other) are chasing after the girls, and where the girls are also trying to achieve status (so they’ll be more attractive) - well this tends merely to add stress to their lives. Sex or the prospect of sex often does. It gets in the way, often. Real self-awareness and learning can get pushed aside when subjected to these forces.

Which is perhaps a long way round to saying that the atmosphere at Bay Path was respectful, friendly, open, and immensely inspiring. I was invited to classes in which students and professors were engaged in a level of dialogue I found refreshing, and Suzanne’s Saturday writing class was of a quality that quite took my breath away.

And that brings me to the point. Single sex colleges have been criticized from the politically correct viewpoint that life is not single sex. Therefore there must be something amiss, goes the reasoning. Yet what I observed at Bay Path was a college where the educators had succeeded in creating a hugely successful educational environment, where there was a community of learners who were becoming empowered and aware so that they could take what they had learned out into the world again, and make a real difference.

Smaller can most definitely be better.