What was it like to be a woman studying at Bethel? That’s an obviously important question to ask, in a history project that aspires “to tell a version of our university’s story that places women at its center,” and also a difficult question to answer accurately, given the sheer number of students in Bethel’s history, how quickly they came and went, and the sources they did and didn’t leave behind.
So I was delighted — and relieved — to discover that the Bethel Reports collection in our archives includes two internal studies from the early 1990s, both dedicated to documenting the experiences and perspectives of our women students. First, a 1994 report based on interviews with current and former students at Bethel Seminary, which I summarized in last Friday’s post. Today I’ll share the second such document, completed in April 1992 and focused on students at the College, twenty years after it moved to Arden Hills.
Entitled “Bethel Student Culture: an Ethnographic Study of Bethel College Students,” the report was chiefly the work of Student Life vice president Judy Moseman and professors Harley Schreck (Anthropology) and Jim Koch (Psychology), working with Delana Gerber Brinkman (resident director at the Fountain Terrace apartments), Carolina Warner (coordinator of Psychological Services and Testing), and two student researchers, Jon Bloom and Susan Burba. The study’s “ultimate goal,” according to a Clarion interview with Schreck, was “to answer the question of whether or not Bethel is a safe place for individuals to express themselves.”
For nearly an entire academic year, researchers engaged in participant observation of student behavior, assisted by resident assistants who recorded their own weekly logs. In addition, the team collected writing samples from hundreds of new students during Welcome Week, invited ten more students to spend a week keeping journal and time logs, and conducted focus groups with freshmen, missionary kids, residence life staff, and instructors in College Writing, a first-year general education course.
The final report addressed more than themes of sex and gender. It first defined a distinct Bethel “Look” (“suburban, White, and middle class… It connotes being wealthy, happy, active, in control, and successful”) and a “cultural mandate” for a rather “fragile” friendliness. But in a year when the researchers found that over 60% of the incoming freshmen were women, it’s not surprising that the particular concerns of those students stood out. Let me summarize a few of them:
First, “the campus is soaked with romance. It seeps out of the walls and from every direction.” While a preoccupation with forming romantic relationships was not unusual in American higher education, “there is more to this at Bethel College. Students often voice the opinion that many Bethel women come to get a ‘MRS’ degree.” While only 40% of freshmen journals mentioned marriage, all of those authors were women, and researchers found that “a commonly held assumption among many students, faculty, and administrators at Bethel College is parents prefer that their children, particularly daughters, attend Bethel in order to find a suitable mate.”
Not only was this “institutionalized in organized activities like Nik Dag, Gadkin, Roommate Roulette, and the Dating Game,” but the importance of dating was “portrayed in brochures, the college catalog, and other official pictures of Bethel. Students’ journals were clearly focused on romance, or the pain of not being romantically involved.” This overweening emphasis on finding a mate at Bethel could “create feelings of being left behind by women who are not in a serious relationship.” A subsequent section on the problem of stress in students’ lives reiterated that the “lack of a romantic relationship causes a good deal of pain, especially for women,” with those not in relationships often articulating “feelings of inadequacy and self doubt.”
“I think I would fall apart if i had to devote myself to one person right now,” said one interviewee. “I also don’t feel worthy of being someone’s girlfriend. I have too many hidden secrets that I am sure no one would be able to live with.” Another woman complained that the preoccupation with dating skewed student priorities at an academic institution:
Romance. Don’t even get me started. It seems as though to get a boyfriend around here you totally have to flirt without shame and basically commit intellectual suicide. Some girls come here just to find a good Christian husband to settle down with and don’t care much about any intellectual advancement available to them here—as long as they get that good Christian husband by the time they graduate.
In the midst of such challenges, the report also found women developing effective support systems through friendships with other women. I’ll return to that theme in a later post, since it also showed up in our oral history interviews with women on faculty and staff. But to wrap up this post, let me summarize two crucial sections on gender and sexism.
In many ways, women students flourished at the Bethel College of 1991-92. The ethnographic study found them more likely than men “to expect to make good friends, study hard, have an active social life, and to find a Christian atmosphere on campus.” Dorm staff reported that women generally made better leaders than men, both because they were more reliable and more committed to involvement in “the common life of the college.”
But while women “look like they fit the picture of the ideal Bethel College student,” they also “walk a dangerous line at Bethel College. For example, a woman who is seen as too ‘pushy’ or assertive is deemed an unlikely candidate for dating. A woman has to be low key until she has found a steady boy friend. Given that the window for this is short (one semester), women face heavy pressure to take on a more low key, traditional feminine role.” In many ways — from the symbolism in events like Gadkin to the relative scarcity of women in administration and faculty — Bethel reinforced a message that most students had already received in the “conservative social and theological nature” of their upbringing: “Women are enablers. Men are leaders.”
As a result, “women and men at Bethel College live distinctly different lives at Bethel.” The same semester the ethnographic study was completed, professors Mary Ellen Ashcroft (English) and Margie Koch (History) organized a series of six forums on gender. “Gender issues at Bethel are very powerful, but often times not talked about,” Ashcroft told The Clarion. “We felt that by the time students leave Bethel, they should have thought about a whole range of issues relating to gender.” Indeed, that series started with Schreck sharing some preliminary findings from the ethnographic study.
One final theme to emerge from that report: researchers found evidence of sexual aggression among men leading to sexual harassment of women. First, they pointed to an incident earlier that year, when two male students had been caught videotaping two female students dressing and undressing in their dorm room without the women’s knowledge or consent. “Attitudes expressed on campus in response to this incident greatly concern us,” wrote Moseman, President George Brushaber, and other administrators in a March 18, 1992 letter to the Bethel community. “Some have suggested that ‘boys will be boys’ and/or that the women ‘deserved’ this. The women did not deserve this and ‘boys will be boys’ is not an excuse to violate the privacy and rights of women on our campus… We are all made in God’s image. Harassment in any form will not be tolerated at Bethel. Bethel must be a safe place for women and for all of us.”
The ethnographic study found that the problem went deeper than two guys with a camcorder. “No, I am not a ‘boy,’” wrote one student that year on Bethel’s community bulletin board,
I am a woman, and I feel very threatened by those of you who are male and who feel that because you are, it gives you full license to use women in whatever way you please. I feel very threatened by those of you who see women as nothing more than objects to be used in fulfilling whatever power-hungry sexual gratification you might desire.
Another woman wrote that she refused “to be treated by my brothers in Christ as less than what I was created to be—which is equal.”
I’ll have more to say in a later post about Bethel’s years-long debate over sexual harassment policy. But it’s worth noting here that several months after the ethnographic report came out, Bethel’s governing board adopted a plan to prevent sexual harassment and sexual violence on campus. For example, the 1992-93 academic year featured a series of community forums “designed to explore gender and race issues on campus, with the objective that Bethel’s climate improve as community members become better equipped to treat others as they would be treated.” In May 1994 Moseman led a community forum on date rape. “Our research became part of campus-wide strategic planning goals at the time,” she recalled in an oral history interview last summer. “It did help to change some policies, some attitudes, and probably some functions.”
But in the spring of 1992, she and other authors had to conclude that Bethel College students were “children of their time,” displaying cultural characteristics that were both typical of white middle class America at the end of the Cold War and “anathema to a Christian, liberal arts college like Bethel which stresses community and commitment, self discipline and hard work, and a rigorous form of academic and spiritual integrity.” They celebrated that Bethel’s distinct Christian heritage also fostered expectations for spiritual growth and “patterns of support,” but warned that the College remained unsafe for some populations, including students of color, those from Christian backgrounds other than evangelicalism, and “women with feminist viewpoints.”
One goal of this blog is to help involve members of the Bethel community in doing the history of Bethel, so comments are always welcome! Given the topic of today’s post (or the one last week on the Seminary), I’d be especially interested to hear from women alumni about their own experience as students. Just know that if you leave a comment at the project blog, I’ll take that as expressing your permission to quote it in the project.
The Women of Bethel 
