Mills College Will Begin Admitting Men : Education: Officials insist that ending women-only status is necessary to boost enrollment and ensure financial health. Students protest the move.

Nearly drowned out by students’ embittered howls of protests, officials of Mills College announced Thursday that men will be allowed to enroll in 1991 at what long has been considered the premier women’s school in the West.

Switching to co-education is the only way to ensure that Mills’ student body will grow from the current 772 to the 1,000 needed for financial health, said Warren Hellman, chairman of the school’s Board of Trustees. Enrollment has generally declined since its peak of 907 in 1971.

Hellman’s announcement to about 400 students and faculty gathered on the college’s lush central lawn produced instant chaos. Young women shrieked and sobbed and student leaders angrily called for a boycott of classes at the 138-year-old school.

“We have been betrayed. This is a women’s institution and we will not accept this,” shouted student body President Robyn Fisher. The crowd took up the chant: “Strike! Strike! Strike!”

The change will leave only two women’s colleges west of the Rockies: Mount St. Mary’s in Los Angeles and Scripps, part of the Claremont Colleges consortium. Nationally, the number of women’s schools will drop to 93, compared with 298 in 1960, and that may decline further by next fall when Chatham College in Pittsburgh is to consider a similar decision.

“We did not turn away from the past lightly. It took a lot of soul-searching and a lot of hard-headed looking at the college’s future,” Mary Metz, Mills’ president since 1981, told a press conference. That briefing, after the terse on-campus announcement, was held in a downtown Oakland club about five miles from Mills to avoid student demonstrators.

Competition from state universities in California hurts Mills, where tuition and fees, excluding room and board, is $12,700 this year, compared to $1,700 for a state resident at a University of California school. Moreover, a very small percentage--some say as low as 3%--of high school girls even consider attending an all-female college.

But many students and professors contend that Mills never did a good job recruiting applicants and that trustees are painting too bleak a portrait of the school’s finances. Mills has a $72-million endowment, respectable for a small institution.

“Not one student believes they are telling us the truth,” said junior Anne Johnston of Palo Alto. She said some students may transfer to other women’s colleges in protest.

However, Mills officials contend that too much of the endowment income is being used for operating costs and that not enough money is set aside for building maintenance. Mills will have to spend $7 million to repair damage from last October’s earthquake.

A few hours after the announcement about co-education, students held a large nighttime rally Thursday to plan a human blockade of administrative offices today and Monday and to prepare for possible arrests. Student leaders also urged the crowd to jam the telephone and fax lines of Hellman’s investment firm in San Francisco.

Asked about the school’s response to such possible student action, President Metz said: “We’ll take it second by second.”

Muffy Thorne, president of the Alumni Assn., predicted that alumni donations would drop sharply with the admission of men. However, she said she did not expect lawsuits seeking to retrieve donations, as happened at Wheaton College in Massachusetts when it went co-ed two years ago.

Research shows women can be intimidated by men in the classroom. And students fear the arrival of men will destroy what they call the nurturing atmosphere at Mills. But Metz stressed that Mills will strive to “make women and men equal beneficiaries of the learning process.”

Other than saying it was a strong majority, she and Hellman refused to disclose the trustees’ actual vote count for co-education taken at the end of a five-hour meeting Thursday. Women outnumber men on the 32-member board, they said.

Mills trustees also studied the possibility of staying a women’s school by recruiting more transfer and foreign students and by moving business and computer courses to evenings in hopes of attracting part-timers. Under that plan, enrollment might grow to 974 in five years, but a $100,000 annual deficit would remain, officials said.

With the admission of men, enrollment is projected to increase to 1,117 by 1995, creating a $2-million budget surplus. Metz said she expects about 15% of the first co-ed class to be men, with that increasing to 40% by 1995. “It will take a pioneering spirit,” she said of prospective male students.

Some formerly women-only schools, such as Sarah Lawrence in New York, which went co-ed two decades ago, have never gotten male enrollment higher than a third of their students. Metz declined to speculate whether Mills could achieve sexual parity.

Mills’ picturesque 135-acre campus, where trees far outnumber people, was bedecked Thursday with signs against co-education, and many students wore the now-familiar T-shirts proclaiming: “Better Dead Than Co-ed.” The faculty voted 57 to 26 recently to remain a women’s college. Trustees, however, decided, in the words of one professor, “Better co-ed than in the red.”

The largest wave of women’s colleges going co-ed or merging with men’s schools occurred in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. But in the last three years, four other schools began to enroll men: Wheaton College in Massachusetts, Goucher in Maryland, Marymount in Virginia and Colby-Sawyer in New Hampshire.

To accommodate undergraduate men, Mills will have to add about $1 million in extra sports facilities as well as renovate dormitory bathrooms, Metz said.