in 1970. Fraternities were also phased out during this period, beginning in 1962. Coeducation Though Williams College officially began the process of coeducation in the late 1960s, women integrated the college as early as the 1930s. Beatrice Irene Wasserscheid (née Acly) was the first woman to be awarded a Williams degree after successfully petitioning the trustees to pursue a master of arts degree in American literature. She received her master's degree in June 1931. That same decade, in 1935, Emily Cleland became the first woman to teach at Williams when she finished teaching her late husband's geology course after he died in an accident. The first tenured woman faculty member at the college, Doris DeKeyselingk, oversaw the Russian department beginning in 1958. During his time as president of Williams College, John E. Sawyer officially initiated the process of coeducation. After overseeing the abolishment of fraternities, Sawyer created a faculty-trustee committee, the Committee on Coordinate Education and Related Questions, in 1967 to explore options for coeducation and co-ordinate education. In response to the Committee on Coordinate Education's final report, the trustees voted in June 1969 to regularly admit women undergraduate students in fall 1971. The college welcomed 137 women as first-year students in fall 1971. They were joined by 90 transfer and exchange students from women's colleges who, during their junior and senior year, participated in the Ten College Exchange Program which Sawyer helped to establish in the mid-to-late 1960s. The graduating class of 1975 was the first fully co-educational class to graduate from Williams. The college's admission of women undergraduate students coincided with the diversification of faculty and staff. An affirmative action program, launched in 1972 by President John Chandler, reinforced equal opportunity employment. In addition to facilitating the hiring and retention of African-American staff and faculty, the program prioritized hiring women. As a result of the efforts of the dean of faculty and the provost in collaboration with "Committee W", a women-led group dedicated to fulfilling the program's mission, the number of women faculty steadily rose. From the inception of Williams's affirmative action program in 1972 to its revision in 1975, the proportion of women full-time faculty increased from 4.5% to 11.7%. By 1975, 34% of the first-term assistant professors were women. Throughout the 1970s, Williams College experienced an increase of women in high administrative and advisory positions as well. In February 1970, the college hired its first female