During the summer I turned 12, I embarked on a college odyssey with my family. My older sister was a rising senior in high school, and to prepare her for college applications, my parents dragged us through every campus on the East Coast. Or at least that's what it felt like to me, anyway. As a budding seventh-grader, I was supremely uninterested in all this and, for the most part, the college visits remain a blur.
But there is one episode of that journey that I will always remember. Sitting in a classroom of a North Carolina school - which will remain nameless - my family was listening to the dean of admissions give the usual prospective-student spiel. I had been tuning her out for the majority of this speech until a horrific phrase suddenly jumped out of her lips and caught my attention:
"And ladies, you know this is a great school for you to find a husband," she said.
Even at such a young age, my mouth fell open in shock at these words. Cringing, I looked up to see my mother's reaction. It was like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. I could see the giant anger vein pulsing away in her forehead, and I just knew that steam was going to start coming out of her ears any second.
My family left the information session in utter disbelief. How could the dean of admissions at a major university, a female dean no less, imply in this day and age that a woman would come to college with the goal of finding a husband? Needless to say, that school was immediately removed from my sister's potential list.
When my own college search began, I expected no such shenanigans, and indeed not a single dean of admissions at any college I visited mentioned matrimony. Such archaic thoughts as women going to college to get their "M.R.S. degree" were furthest from my mind when I came to the University. Without thinking, I was certain that all the other students were here for the same reason as me - to expand their horizons, find out what interests them and prepare for a successful future.
For the most part, my expectations of my fellow students, both male and female, have proven true. But as I began my years as an upperclassman at the University, I noticed a disturbing trend develop among a small group of students. I have encountered a few more women than I wish to say who are more concerned with finding a husband than getting a degree.
I am totally floored by this idea, not least because some modicum of intelligence is usually required to get into the University. To me, this small but frightening population of women is throwing away what our mothers and grandmothers worked for years to accomplish. We finally have the opportunity to be educated at the same universities as men, to compete with them for jobs and to claim our own success. So why would any woman actively spend her time looking for a man to be dependent on when she is perfectly capable of standing on her own two feet?
Now let me hop down from my soap box for a minute to clarify something. I am not talking about people who date in college or even those people who do happen to encounter their future spouse while at school. I am neither anti-dating nor anti-marriage in any way. I am anti-coming-to-college-with-the-goal-of-getting-married. That is not what school is for.
I take comfort in the fact that the women who are wasting their college years husband-hunting are in the minority. For the most part, all the protests and bra-burning of our foremothers was not in vain. But sometimes the idea that there are a few June Cleaver disciples walking around Grounds sets my own forehead vein pulsing, and has me itching for a set of matches and a push-up.
Katie's column runs weekly Tuesdays. She can be reached at k.mcnally@cavalierdaily.com
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