Co-educational living is a standard of college life today, as male and female students alike walk the halls in disheveled pajamas without batting an eye. But while most Stanford dorms currently house students of both sexes, the 1967 opening of the Grove House — one of the first co-ed houses at an American university — was so radical that Grove was dubbed the “Grove Project” or “Grove Experiment’ in campus magazine articles at the time.

Saturday morning, the original residents of Grove House held a breakfast reunion forty years after the house first opened. Grove was most famous for mixing men and women in the same house on campus for the first time, but it was also the first to mix students of different class years.

Grove House opened in January 1967 when the Phi Delta Theta fraternity was deprived of housing for campus rule infractions, wrote Phil Taubman ‘69, a resident of the house during its inaugural year, in an email to The Daily. When faced with an empty house, the Stanford administration and Board of Trustees agreed to set up a social experiment in which a select group of men and women would live together. The focus of the house would be on academics.

Ultimately, 43 candidates — 31 men and 12 women — were selected from a pool of applicants. Efforts were made to ensure that residents came from a variety of backgrounds and concentrations to fuel an intellectual interchange.

“Dinner was always a very important event at Grove,” Taubman said. “There were wine and white tablecloths and we had our own chef. It was all to ensure that dinner would be a formal time for intellectual conversation.”

“The name of Grove actually came from the metaphor ‘groves of academia,’” said Jon Reider ‘67, another resident.

The politically-charged atmosphere of the campus during the Vietnam War had a strong presence at Grove House, where one resident posted anti-war posters all over the front hall. The posters attacked the University’s involvement in the war, Reider said.

“The population at the Grove House was disproportionately protest-oriented and left-leaning,” said active environmentalist Lenny Siegel ‘70, the student who put up the poster that initiated the “Great Poster War.” “If you haven’t noticed, a lot of us here at the reunion are now activists.”

“To me, Grove was special because of the people,” Taubman said. “The professors that lived there or visited treated us as adults and equals. We were always on first-name basis.”

Marjorie Cohn ‘70 cited the close proximity of the male and female students as a reason for the mature atmosphere at Grove.

“Before Grove, men and women were kept strictly separate,” Cohn said. “Each gender saw the opposite as incomprehensible. The only way for men and women to meet was through a ridiculous ‘Dating Game.’ At Grove, men and women learned to see each other as people.”

Despite its choice to open the Grove House, the University was nonetheless concerned about co-ed living. Male and female students were only allowed to visit each other at certain times of the day, and a door that only opened one way separated the male and female wings of the house.

“All the boys and girls treated each other solely as brothers and sisters,” Reider said facetiously.

Two couples who met at Grove are now married.

The success of the “Grove Experiment” paved the way for additional co-ed housing at Stanford. Within five years of the house’s inception, most University dorms were co-ed.

“It was the beginning of a trend,” Reider said.