They’re All Big Men on Campus

The first men to break the gender barrier at Wheaton College--that’s 82 men on a campus of 1,150 students--say it has been a turbulent year, but they will be back. “It was awkward at first, walking into a class of, say, 40 women. You feel like a minority, but by the end of the semester everyone was talking openly,” said Jonathan Hart, a Greenwich, Conn., first-year student at the Norton, Mass., college. Hart is a member of a male rock group named, appropriately enough, the Outnumbered. Another new male rock band dubbed itself the Gentlemen Callers. The decision in January, 1987, to break a 154-year-old tradition and admit men outraged some alumnae and seniors who felt the school was abandoning its commitment to women’s education. In a settlement, Wheaton returned $127,000 to 56 donors who wanted their money back. Still, said Sue Alexander, dean of students, the overall response was encouraging. While enrollment at other women’s colleges is slipping, applications to Wheaton are up 54% and annual donations have risen 18%. About 400 men have applied to enter next year’s freshman class.

--While the men at Wheaton College are beginning a tradition, Robert Hohman was following a longstanding family custom when he received his bachelor’s degree from Creighton University in Omaha. Hohman’s grandfather, mother and many aunts, uncles and cousins preceded him. In fact, Hohman is the 57th member of his family to receive a sheepskin from the Jesuit school. He got his diploma 100 years after his great-grandfather, Val Peter, landed in America from Germany and enrolled his children at Creighton.

--Yevgeny Ivanov, a principal character in Britain’s sex-and-spying scandal of the 1960s, yearns to revisit England. The former Soviet naval attache’s alleged affair with Christine Keeler while she also reportedly was involved with British War Minister John Profumo hastened the end of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s government in 1964. Keeler is in the public eye again since the release of “Scandal,” a British film about the affair. Ivanov, who denies he was a spy or that he had any liaison with Keeler other than “giving her a lift once” to London, said: “I would not care to see this vile creature (Keeler) again.” Even so, he said he does have fond memories of London, where he hobnobbed with VIPs such as Profumo, Lord Astor and J. Paul Getty.