Originally Posted by Val
It's a good thing to end practices that deliberately exclude people because of their religion (e.g. Jews and Asians faced quotas at US universities in the past) or gender (e.g. no women allowed at Dartmouth or Yale!) or whatever.

Not just in the "past" -- many of the selective private universities effectively have quotas today. If they think a "diverse" institution must have at least x% blacks and y% Hispanics, that places a ceiling on how many whites and Asians can be admitted. An NYT reporter on the college beat, Jacques Steinberg, discussed how this worked in his 2002 book "The Gatekeepers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gatekeepers .

Although I don't think state universities should be single-sex, there is a case for allowing men's and women's colleges (Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, etc.) to exist.