While Rosenau fancies himself "the Jackie Robinson of [Moore's] unisex bathrooms," the school's decision to admit men had less to do with brazen barrier-breaking than with a legal mandate. To found a graduate component last summer, Moore had to comply with a 1982 Supreme Court case barring single-sex admission. The roughly 500-woman undergraduate college retains single-sex status as one of roughly 60 programs grandfathered into the ruling.
"Moore is so branded in people's imagination as an all-women's institution," says Ian Verstegen, director of the school's graduate programs, which enroll 33 students. "But we've always been ready for men."
Administrators - many of them male, Verstegen notes - welcomed men into last summer's initial graduate class but failed to secure any commitments. Now, less than two weeks into this summer's session, the novelty has yet to wear off.
"A lot of my friends have joked about how 'groundbreaking' I am," says Panter, of Pennsauken, arms stretched in six-foot air-quotes. "I just want to justify the decision to make it [coed]. You don't want to be a footnote."
With the assimilation in its infant stages, the two men have countered the estrogen surplus in their own ways. (Other than on an orientation day, their programs seldom interact.)
Panter - or perhaps wife, Melissa, his college sweetheart from Rutgers University - planted a his-and-hers coffee cup, festooned with a picture collage of the duo, in his corner of the studio.
Rosenau, according to classmate Tanya Harrison, has begged their lunch group to work the Phillies into a conversation thread once in a while. In one seminar last week, he punctuated a discussion of special-needs education with a reference to the horse's-head scene in The Godfather.
