This is the last spring of Chatham College for Women.
Of course, Fall 2015 won’t be the first time men make their home on campus. We’ve got graduate students. Now, even the School of Sustainability is coed. But there’s still a sense of impending change, and it may not be the men we’re worried about.
Chatham’s undergraduate culture reaches back to 1869. Students traveled Woodland Road in carriages, stuck to curfews and wore dresses to class. Things change, but not everything. We’re still telling variations on the same ghost stories. Students make their home in mansions complete with gleaming wood floors and grand pianos.
Most importantly, we enter as students and leave as sisters.
Her Campus Chatham doesn’t take a formal position on the coed decision, but we are listening. When the February announcement opened the evaluative period, we invited all members of the Chatham community to submit their opinions anonymously. The dozens of people who wrote us – alumni, current students, even a parent – represented conflicting opinions. We saw optimism, anger and resignation in the responses. We also saw the uncomfortable beauty of a community working together to find common ground.
The thousands of individuals who make up the living institution of Chatham don’t agree on the decision to go coed. But what we have in common is a strong desire to retain the intangible: our sense of family.
We will always fight for our family. And for many of us, our Chatham family was, and is, exceptionally formative. The collective conscience of our college is splayed across the walls of Rea Coffeehouse. It is a layered identity, developed over decades together. It is ours.
In the months ahead, we want to become the digital walls of Rea Coffeehouse. We want to hear your vision for Chatham going forward. We want to shape our future together.
We don’t have administrative influence, but we can leave our hopes, fears and memories for the Cougars to come. We can give them one last dispatch from CCW. Something to hold onto, something to guide them as they create a community of their own. It will no doubt be different, but we hope it will protect the values we treasure.
If you want to share your memories of CCW or your hopes for the future of Chatham, please send your reflections or photographs to maraflanagan@hercampus.com. Whether it’s a brief anecdote or a full-length article, we’re looking forward to publishing your work and preserving your voice. Submissions from current students, alumni and all other friends of Chatham are welcome.