Women Protest a Scarcity of IAB Lockers

Co-education and the housing squeeze have again met head on--this time in the locker room of the Indoor Athletic Building.

Several undergraduate women have complained that the locker space available for women at the IAB is inadequate. Approximately 40 of the 3300 lockers in the IAB have been allotted to women. Of these 40, none have locks and none may be rented for the season.

Officials of the Department of Athletics, while promising to look into the problem, maintain that undergraduate men also face a shortage of lockers and that all undergraduates will continue to face an insufficiency of facilities until the present budget situation eases.

Laura Lennihan '74, a member of the Radcliffe swim team who lives at Dunster House and regularly uses the IAB has complained to members of the Athletic Department and the Undergraduate Athletic Council about the shortage, and is presently drafting a resolution to present to the Standing Committee on Athletics on the women's problem.

"It seems to me that the Harvard Athletic Department in no way is accommodating to women," she said last week.

"In confronting insufficient facilities for 6000 undergraduates when identifying who will be given priority to use the facilities, one of the criteria should not be sex," she said.

Roann Costin '74, a member of the Standing Committee on Athletics, said that the Committee would have to determine whether the number of women using the IAB warrants an expansion of locker space at this time before acting on a resolution.

"Up to this point," she said "there has only been a small number of girls using the facilities."

The Athletic Department has been studying the numbers of people using the IAB, according to Eric Cutler '36, assistant director of Athletics. Preliminary figures indicate that the building is used by University women--including graduate students--about 250 times a week. However, the Department has not yet determined the average weekly per capita usage.

"The problem has been created by the University, not the Athletic Department," Cutler said, referring to the increased undergraduate enrollment and the large number of women now living at Harvard.

We'd like to do as much as we can," he said but he added that fiscal problems and the low budget priority of lockers presents the Athletic Department from acting.