First we need to figure out just what kind of school this is. Thanks to West End Games's World of Indiana Jones tabletop RPG, we have a few details about the school Dr. Jones teaches at in Raiders, Marshall college. It's located in Connecticut, began in 1853 as an all-male college, and became coeducational sometime before 1936. Its name suggests it's a private institution, and we have no evidence to suggests it's a state school. Generally, public and land grant universities were coed by the 1930s, and newer schools like University of Chicago started as coed. They've all got their own stories, but we haven't time to include them.

Connecticut's Wesleyan University, which began in 1831 and accepted its first female students in 1872, is a good match. It, like many other schools of the 19th century, was founded as a Methodist University. Marshall College shows no signs of church affiliation, though other comparable schools like Vanderbilt and Northwestern had severed their Methodist ties by the '30s. This remains an important concern, however, since Methodism had a profound impact on many institutions' decisions to accept women. The story of coeducation at Wesleyan is also much more exciting than other schools', and brings into the open many of the perspectives regarding coeducation in private universities.

As is evident in the number of institutions they patronized, Methodists were heavily invested in public education. Increasing access to schools tied into the personal moral cultivation, social responsibility, and intensive evangelization that figured in the doctrine of many 19th-century American protestant movements. Women had just as much a duty to God as did men. That's not to say that the Methodists shared our values for coeducation. Their arguments supporting higher education for women didn't say men and women need the education of the same kind, just of the same quality. Co-education better prepared women to be good women (read: mothers, Christians), not necessarily to be equal with men. Even into the 20th-century, the prominent Methodist weekly Christian Advocate supported education for women "not in all respects identical to that of men." As an 1853 contributor to The Ladies Repository wrote:

The mothers of America should be qualified to teach their children useful lessons in almost every department of knowledge

Wesleyan's first graduate, Dr. Daniel Chase, similarly wrote:

Divine wisdom has decreed co-education. Boys and girls are born in the same home, to grow and mature together. Legislation decrees it in our common and high schools; academies continue it, and so does married life most emphatically. [...] The most important is the physical, mental, and moral training of prospective mothers.

And Mary Grace Thompson, in defense of Coeducation at Wesletan in 1900, wrote:

The women who enter Wesleyan do so, no with the idea that "the adoption of masculine traditions is essential to female emancipation" - few of them know of the traditions, and none of them care for the emancipation- but with the knowledge that they can get at Wesleyan courses that no women's college offers them [...] will anyone pretend that the others are not better daughters, better sisters, and better church workers than those who attended a woman's college?

Thus, when Wesleyan opened to women in 1872, it was firmly in line with Methodist principals, if not modern sensibilities. Wesleyan's transition was so fully supported by the higher-ups that contemporary papers claimed that if the decision was not unanimous, those who dissented didn't even feel it worth their time to be counted. It was commonly held that the quality of education for women was higher in newly coed schools than in women's schools due to their greater funding, better professors, broader course selection, and newer facilities. Outside of elite colleges like the Ivy League correlates "the Seven Sisters," this was generally the case. Women's colleges were small, understaffed, and rarely financially independent.

Yet not everyone was perfectly happy. Many who believed education was better for women at Wesleyan felt it was worse for the men. An 1873 editorial in the student paper, The College Argus, read:

We submit as gracefully as possible to the decision of the Trustees and Faculty, by which ladies are admitted to equal priveleges in the University with gentlemen; but hold to the opinion that the step was taken without sufficient investigation, and that it is an unfortunate one for the reputation of our Alma Mater in prospectu, and that a large majority of the undergraduates fully agree with us in this opinion.

A few years later, Methodist scholar William North Rice wrote in The Independent of this divide between the administration and students:

The reckless radicalism of alumni, trustees, and faculty has been from time to time rebuked with dignified and paternal kindness by the venerable conservatism of the undergraduates through their organ, The College Argus

Later in his opinion piece he remarks:

However objectionable women in the abstract might be to the undergraduate mind, concrete women, such as these, could be gentlemen be regarded only with respect and treated only with courtesy.

"These" women Rice references were the first four admitted to Wesleyan: Jennie Larned, Phebe Almeda Stone, Angie Villette Warren, and Hannah Ada Taylor. A lot of the commentary in the 1870s, in both camps, designates the four "concrete" ladies as good people before arguing for or against "women in the abstract." An anonymous letter to Methodist publication Zion's Herald, signed "A mother of one of the boys," says:

Of the present incumbents there are no complaints, but when they become more numerous they expect to see all the evil results of the proposed system of collegiate education.

The beginning of this letter is so melodramatic^1 one almost thinks it's sarcastic, but the author is, if anything else, attributing "no complaints" to the disgruntled undergraduates. And by golly were they disgruntled. They regularly vandalized the female dorm, deemed "the Quail Roost," wrote letters to known female applicants to scare them away, and reportedly formed a P D Q Society, in imitation of emerging Greek organizations, that stood for "Put Down the Quails." To quote a later student, who denied all those accusations:

The policy adopted by the students has always been to have no social relations with the girls. This end was secured simply by avoiding opporunities of meeting them in a formal way, and, not having been formally introduced to them, it is certainly no reflection on our courtesy if we refrain from addressing them on the streets. Does that argue an "anti-woman" and therefor anti-Christian attitude in all of the undergradutaes?

Coeducation rustled the undergraduates' jimmies straight into the new century, spurred by the increase in female enrollment. Four admitted women in 1872 grew to 75 women in 1898. In 1900 these complaints were addressed in a statement by the trustees. They did not want to inhibit female education, but did not have the funds for a separate women's college, so some concessions were made. Female admissions were capped at 20% of an incoming class. There was to be a separate administrative office for women to handle their tuition, registration, and housing. Declamation and rhetoric competitions would be gender specific. Women would receive a separate section in the commencement bulletin, and have their own commencement ceremony (the issue that had sparked this conversation.) As a member of the public, you would have heard little of this from the Methodist organization. Writing on the 1900 commencement in Christian Advocate, Rev. Herbert Welch dismissed Wesleyan's issues as peculiar to that institution alone, and explains the separate ceremonies as a disappointing compromise crafted with "prolonged labor" by the trustees and proposed to a perpetually restless student body; Welch hopes that the compromise, however unsatisfactory, is a final say on the issue. A 1903 special on the history of Wesleyan in the Advocate contained a brief paragraph on coeducation, painting the school's decision as "a radical departure" that shocked the older institutions of the Northeast. The Methodist exceptionalism is ever so thinly veiled. The section concludes:

The day has long gone since for the question of coeducation to be seriously discussed.