Committee to Ask Faculty To Continue Coed Housing In Some Harvard Houses

The Kagan Committee will recommend Tuesday that the Faculty continue coed housing next year with a two-to-one ratio of upperclassmen to women in the coed Harvard Houses and Radcliffe dorms.

The committee will also propose that President Pusey appoint an impartial committee to select which Harvard Houses will be coed.

The high two-to-one ratio would not permit all of the Houses to have women residents. The new committee would have to decide if a few of the large Houses or more of the small Houses should be coed, Jerome Kagan, head of the Faculty Committee on Residential Living, said yesterday.

Kagan said that he favors making all but one or two dorms at Radcliffe coed, so that girls who do not want to will not have to live in a coed dorm.

Karl Strauch, professor of Physics, will present an amendment to the Kagan Committee recommendation, proposing that the Faculty not fix a two-to-one ratio of men to women in the coed units.

More Women

Mark Kaplan 71, chairman of the Dunster House Committee, asked Strauch to present the amendment because he felt that all the Harvard Houses should be coed, which would be impossible with a two-to-one ratio. "The only long term solution to it is having more women," Kaplan said.

Strauch will suggest instead that the committee which selects the Houses also set the ratio of men to women after fully investigating the questions and seeking the advice of coed-exchange students.

Freshmen

Kagan will also propose to the Faculty that Harvard freshmen continue to live in non-coed dorms in the Yard. Radcliffe freshmen would live at Radcliffe with an option to live in either a coed or non-coed dorm.

A Faculty decision on coed housing for next year is overdue, Kagan said, since Harvard upperclassmen flied room preference cards last week. Cliffies in the coed houses were not asked to apply for rooms at Harvard next year. Kagan said that the Houses will decide which of the present residents will move next year.

Kagan also said that he sees no reason why coed housing would not be approved for next year even if the merger of Harvard and Radcliffe is not completed before June President Pusey said recently that he does not think that the merger will be accomplished by 1970.

Questionnaire Findings

Kagan will also report the findings of the questionnaire distributed by his committee to Harvard and Radcliffe students this fall. The results show that over 90 per cent of the students favor coed housing. A slightly smaller percentage said they were willing to move to make coed housing possible, Kagan said.