D'YOUVILLE UNIVERSITY 45 the college, and only 19 claimed they would leave the school if men attended. “The initial male entrants received psychological and emotional support,” Kelly wrote. “Paul Gospodarski remembered, ‘Father Bill Smith would meet with us each morning and pull out a deck of cards. If he pulled out an ace, we went to class. Anything else, we skipped the day.’” By the fall of 1971, the number climbed to a dozen male students at D’Youville, and by the end of the spring, it was more than 20. CHARLES PRIORE’S MOTHER first learned about D’Youville going coed in an article from the Buffalo Evening News. She showed the article to her son — who had already applied to Buffalo State and SUNY Buffalo — and suggested he give the small campus on the western side of the city a shot. “When I got accepted, it came down to them and Buff State,” he recalls. “The classrooms there were very, very large, and the student body was much bigger. I think the idea of smaller class sizes attracted me to D’Youville. So I sent in my deposit.” He described his female classmates — which outnumbered him and his male counterparts about 100 to 1 — as “optimistically cautious,” meaning they were skeptical at first, but also nice and welcoming. “We had this fundraising event early on where we had this dunking booth, and the men would sit on a little stool, and it was funny because the nuns — there were many nuns attending at the time — would throw these big basketballs at this little paddle and knock us off of our seat and into the tank,” he says. “And they thought it was just the coolest thing ever. Many of the nuns were from other countries, and they’d never seen anything like this before.” If anything, the men were a welcome distraction. They quickly became the “go-to” for on-campus parties, Priore says. His neighbor had a connection with a local Anheuser-Busch distributor who gave him wholesale prices on various domestic beers. “I mean, it was ridiculous what we were paying,” he says. “Our parties were unbelievable. Just wild. That was our ‘in’ with the other students. They looked to us for fun.” As time went on, the special rules attached to being a male student at D’Youville waned. In the beginning, they were not allowed to step foot inside the women’s dorms. Eventually, they were given a 9 p.m. curfew. Soon, they could stay until midnight. “They actually hired a guard for their dormitories,” he says. “And he made sure we weren’t going to get past him. He was tough.” Priore says the novelty of having men around wore off by the end of his sophomore year and entering his junior year — “It was pretty much a given that these guys were here to stay” — as the Vietnam War winded down and more and more male students were taking advantage of GI bills to fund their tuition. If it sounds like it was all play and no work during Priore’s time at D’Youville, that couldn’t be farther The front page of the Jan. 19, 1971, Buffalo Courier Express chronicled the first day of classes with men at D’Youville the day before.
