Getting Together

HARVARD'S marriage to Radcliffe has already been solemnized by the national press. Though the Harvard corporation and Radcliffe College Council have so far agreed only to talk about merger, everyone seems to assume that it is only a matter of time until we get the real thing. And remarkably neither President Pusey nor Mrs. Bunting has done anything to dispel this impression. For once, the Administration seems to be acquiescing to change before rather than after prolonged agitation and the inevitable Faculty study committees.

But the Faculty committees are coming. They will probably be formed in either April or May, depending upon how long the Faculty spends debating the Wolff Report at its next meeting. And they will find that the merger creates, from Harvard's point of view, a number of complex problems whose solutions are not at all apparent.

Assuming that Harvard's lawyers can contrive ways to mingle the endowments of the two institutions an combine food service and buildings and grounds, the immediate difficulty will still be a financial one. Radcliffe girls are on the average from much wealthier families than Harvard undergraduates, and Radcliffe scholarships are proportionately fewer and smaller. Last week the Harvard Office of Admissions and Scholarships asked a huge supplementary budget grant to finance a drive to recruit more students from poverty areas. The capacity of the Office to give 300 new female students the same kind o scholarship treatment it gives male undergraduates is open to serious question.

"The most brutal formulation of this problem," Dean Ford said recently, "is that a merger might mean achieving sexual diversity at the expense of other kinds of diversity." Ford added that it is not yet clear how much money would be needed to bring Radcliffe scholarships up to the level of Harvard's; a study on that question will probably be ready by the Faculty's April meeting.

EVEN IF these financial worries turn out to be a false alarm, there is a second, more theoretical problem with Admissions that the Faulty will have difficulty avoiding. One of Harvard's most conservative but least questioned practices is graduating four times as many males as females from the College each year. That tradition is hard to question as long as Harvard and Radcliffe stay separate and have an inflexible number of spaces in their respective dormitories. But once the two schools merge, the tradition will be very hard to uphold. It is not even certain that Harvard could legally discriminate against female applicants at a four to one ratio, but more fundamentally it is hard to defend philosophically an educational system in which males and females are given equal treatment in every way except admissions.

On the other hand, a free competition for 1500 places in the Harvard-Radcliffe freshman class would be sure to reduce the number of male graduates, and such a reduction, say several Faculty members, is "unthinkable." One administrator in fat has predicted that the merger will not be approved if the four to one ratio is changed, without a concurrent expansion of the College. And expanding the College, to judge by the Gill Committee's recommendation that Mather House be used instead for deconversion and the Wolff Committee's more recent conclusion that the size of the graduate school be reduced, is unlikely in the near future.

Admissions policy is necessarily a form of social engineering and many Faculty members will argue that Harvard still has an obligation to produce leaders for American society. As long as most positions of leadership are being given to males, most of Harvard's products ought to be males, the traditionalists will claim. That line of argument has an ugly elitist ring to the large number of people around Harvard who think the University should be reforming rather than playing ball with the establishment. Perhaps the issue can be glossed over with a compromise, but probably not. Thus the merger involves much more than bringing boys and girls together in the Houses--it could force a very fundamental debate on Harvard's purposes.

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THE REST of the difficulties with a merger are a good deal more prosaic. How, for instance, can 800-900 Harvard undergraduates be persuaded to move up a Radcliffe? Perhaps enthusiasm for the idea of coed living will carry a few pioneers up to the inferior quarters at the 'Cliffe and the first two male freshmen stuck in a double in Briggs won't know what hit them. But already a number of House Masters sense a large gap between the number of Harvard students who support coeducational living in theory and the number who would be willing to move out of their relatively posh suites.

A substantial number of Harvard undergraduates (somewhere between 10 and 50 per cent) would prefer to live in all-male houses, and it seems to be assumed that after the merger some of the Harvard Houses and perhaps a complex of Radcliffe dorms would remain unmixed. The problem of providing what Dean Ford calls 'a dignified choice," between the two kinds of housing will have to be worked out though, as well the difficulty of determining which houses go coed and which stay all-male House assignments have always been somewhat arbitrary and when some of the living quarters become clearly inferior that process could cause a great deal more friction than it has in the past.

FRESHMEN present another set of problems since Harvard and Radcliffe presently treat them so differently. Radcliffe freshmen could not be fit in easily to the Yard set-up, and that may be another unquestioned Harvard tradition which the merger will forced to be reexamined.

Talk about the coeducation that is coming degenerates quickly into questions which are now unanswerable. It is hard to distinguish the trivial from the substantive objection, hard even to be sure whether coeducational living will have a major or negligible impact on undergraduates. Many of the reservations reduce to cold assertions of male Harvard's self-interest. One Faculty member compares the merger rather coarsely to "a rich man marrying a poor girl--he had better be pretty sure that he's getting some spiritual benefits before he goes through with it." That spirit has been well hidden in the negotiations so far, but there is at least a chance that this spring the Faculty will not only set up committees to study a total merger, but also try to take the aura of inevitability off the idea.