Queering Institutional Milestones in Elite Higher Education: Queer Perspectives on Princeton University and Coeducation (1960–1980)

ABSTRACT A new archive of oral history interviews from LGBTQIA‐identified alumni, faculty and staff reveals the complex ways that queer and transgender students understood, experienced and remembered the long transition from single‐sex to coeducation at Princeton University. Engaging with this oral history collection, as well as literatures on single‐sex higher education, and queer and trans activism, this institutional case study ‘troubles’ Princeton's history of coeducation and recounts the concurrent history of queer activism at the university. Such a perspective reveals that (1) some transgender students took advantage of the institution's single‐sex education prior to the inclusion of cisgender women, although they could not outwardly express their true gender as students; (2) Princeton's admission of cisgender women opened, at least in part, spaces for queer students to form community, become a visible constituency, and later demand recognition and protection and (3) Princeton's male‐dominant ‘masculine tradition’ persisted, even in newly formed queer spaces 1 .