Common ground: Women's Center director Lisker, right, with sophomore scholars, from left, Aislinn Affinito, Andrea Dinamarco, and Meng Zhou Photo: Les Todd

During the summer of 1923, Duke President William Preston Few interviewed Alice M. Baldwin for the position of dean of women. In her memoir, Baldwin recalls one notable question during their conversation: "He asked me if I could take criticism and disappointment without weeping!"

Baldwin didn't record her reaction to the question and its inherent assumptions. But she does say that she told Few she wouldn't take the job unless she was given a faculty position and was allowed to teach. She refused, she said, to be considered just the female students' "nurse." She wanted "real authority in working with the girls."

Baldwin went on to become Duke's first full-time female faculty member, a professor of history, and the founding dean of Duke's Woman's College, which was housed on East Campus from 1930 to 1972, when the Woman's and Trinity colleges merged.

During her twenty-one years as dean of the Woman's College, Baldwin oversaw the creation of student groups that made it possible for women to explore and build on their interests and talents. She insisted that all academic facilities be open to both genders and urged the hiring of more female faculty members. She hosted sewing nights to discuss etiquette. Her goal was to ensure that her students had the benefits of both the Woman's College and Trinity College, the men's school.

More than eighty years later, Duke's female undergraduates once again have access to similar benefits. Last fall, Duke named its first Alice M. Baldwin Scholars--eighteen first-year students accepted into a women-only program within the university's coed undergraduate experience. The program began in late January at an overnight retreat in a secluded cabin near Chapel Hill.

The new scholars, who barely know each other, are instructed to stand face-to-face in two concentric circles. Then Colleen Scott, the program's assistant director, calls out a question. Each participant tells her partner the answer. Once both have shared, one circle rotates, creating a new set of pairs. At first, the circles are three feet apart, and participants speak in low voices tinged with uncertainty.

"What role do you take in groups?" Scott calls out. One student says she likes to take charge. "What makes you afraid?" Being alone. Being chased. "What's your biggest challenge at Duke?" Regan Bosch, a goalie on the lacrosse team, stands with her arms folded across her chest. "You say something intelligent, and someone else says something more intelligent," she says. As the questions and answers fly, the room fills with shouts and laughter. The circles move closer together. What is your proudest achievement? Meng Zhou doesn't mention that she influenced local school-board policies as a high-school lobbyist or that she earned admission to Duke. Instead, she says, "Baldwin Scholars!"

By the next morning, the scholars are teasing one another and sharing inside jokes, more like sisters or lifelong friends than people who barely knew each other the day before. It's a nascent version of the kind of support network that Donna Lisker, co-director of the Baldwin Scholars and director of Duke's Women's Center, envisioned six years ago when university administrators began serious conversations about creating a women-only academic program.

The idea didn't take hold until 2002, when President Nannerl O. Keohane created the Women's Initiative to study the lives of all Duke women. The findings were disturbing: Women were poorly represented in the faculty, particularly at the most senior levels, and female faculty and staff members at every level were struggling to balance their work and family lives. Equally, if not more troubling, was an undergraduate culture permeated by unrealistic expectations of achievement and physical beauty--a culture in which women often competed against, rather than supported one another and, sometimes, played "dumb" to attract male peers.

To address issues affecting employees, the administration began working to improve child care, mentoring, and other support services. But changing an undergraduate culture that demands that its women be smart, fit, popular, and involved, without visible exertion--what the study called "effortless perfection"--was a thorny challenge.

Part of the answer, Lisker and others decided, was to create a program that would give female undergraduates the opportunity to network with faculty, meet older student mentors, live together as a group, and study in several women-only seminars. The idea, Lisker says, was to give them the tools and the space to explore for themselves issues such as gender, success, and body image.

"These women, especially because so many of them come from privilege, up to this point have not necessarily felt a lot of difference from their male peers," Lisker says. "Being a woman might seem irrelevant to them. Part of our goal is to challenge them to think about this."

Women apply to the Baldwin Scholars program in the fall of their first year; the second class is being selected in November. The program begins in the spring with a retreat and a semester-long seminar taught by three female professors that participants take in addition to their normal courseload. As sophomores, the scholars live together on West Campus and will lead a community-service project. They will intern with an alumna junior year and then gather back on campus senior year for a capstone course.

Although they will explore women's issues, the scholars will not earn a women's-studies degree. Organizers felt the Baldwin Scholars program would be more marketable to a mainstream audience if it was not tagged as feminist. Recruiting materials for the first class, designed to attract a diverse applicant pool, featured noteworthy Duke alumnae, including actor Annabeth Gish '93, aspiring doctor Pooja Kumar '01, and Senator Elizabeth Hanford Dole '58, Hon. '00. Participants bear no extra costs to enroll in the program, but they also do not receive tuition scholarships.

The inaugural group was selected from seventy-eight applicants. The scholars come from twelve states and have varied interests: Duke Republicans, Black Student Alliance, Duke's equestrian team, and Duke Symphony Orchestra. They are studying art, biomedical engineering, and public policy. They perform traditional Indian dance, row crew, play badminton, and volunteer.

When the year started, they felt they had little in common. Even their reasons for joining the program varied widely. Not all came seeking enlightenment on gender issues. Some didn't agree that the campus social atmosphere was as rigid and unfriendly to women as the Women's Initiative report described. Rachel McLaughlin, the first student from her Missouri high school to attend a top-ten university, wanted to continue the leadership training she had begun in high school. Kelley Akhiemokhali wanted a self-esteem boost. She says she didn't feel pressure to dress or act a certain way when she arrived at Duke. But the Houston native had struggled with her self-esteem in high school and had considered attending a women's college. She felt she couldn't afford to lose confidence, and she began noticing the pressure to look good wearing on her friends, she says. At one meal, she recalls, a friend proclaimed unhealthy every food on her plate, including a fruit cocktail.