Admitting Women

There is a bit of a backstory to Princeton’s decision to welcome women. The story was told to me by Marvin Bressler, my old Graduate School professor, quite a few years after I left Princeton.

Professor Bressler was the chair of the Commission on the Future of the College, and this is the little story he told me with a satisfied chuckle. It seems that there was no major expansion of the faculty when women became students at Princeton. And the number of male students was not decreased.

Professor Bressler was pleased because, as he noted, if it had not been for women, there would have been resistance to this increase in the student/teacher ratio. Is this little factoid in Professor Malkiel’s book?