The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I came to M.I.T. in 1960, only 4 percent of the students were female. Today, it's about 40 percent of undergraduates. At Lincoln Lab, they had 1,000 men and two women. But we had a very good boss, and he treated us just like everybody else.
In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.
When I got into Stanford in high school, I had some friends from school who told me that I just got in because I was black and whatnot.
The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had 29 men and 6 women - those men were all very used to working with women.
I didn't really want to be a teacher, but there was nothing else I could be. Most of those who went to the university became teachers. It was just the racial restriction on Africans.
All the colleges I played, most of the colleges, they were white.
I never had a single female professor throughout my whole education, from the beginning of university to the end. Even all the books were about men; I never really liked reading books about the history of science, and I never really understood why.
The reason there weren't any, I am surmising, is that a lot of Latin kids, Latino kids, in those days didn't have the money to take those kind of classes.
My law school class in the late 1950s numbered over 500. That class included less than 10 women.
Imagine filling a college with the first 1,000 students to get perfect SATs. Whatever the racial composition of that class would be, the notion seems absurd because we know that college in America is supposed to be about creating citizens and leaders in a diverse nation.