The following post was authored by Michael Lotstein, university archivist in Manuscripts and Archives.

This month the University Archives posted a new online exhibit entitled, “We thought of ourselves as architects”: Coeducation and the Yale Campus, 1968-1973.  Co-curated by University Archivist Michael Lotstein and Charlotte Keathley, Class of 2022 (Ezra Stiles College), this exhibit explores how the sudden decision to bring coeducation to Yale College in 1969 impacted the buildings and spaces of the Yale campus, which had been conceived and built to house and educate men for the previous 250 years.

Included in the exhibit are university records, photographs, and digitized audio-visual materials which document how in a few short months university administration planned and reconfigured both Vanderbilt Hall and the residential colleges to safely and comfortably house the incoming women; how the implementation of coeducation impacted student life on campus; how the women, through sheer force of will, successfully carved out spaces for themselves on this previously all-male campus; and how the male and female students united in the face of the mounting social and political changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

For more information about the exhibit, please contact the University Archives at: archives@yale.edu.