Senate Bars Sex Discrimination In Public Colleges, Universities

The Senate voted Monday to require nearly all public colleges and universities to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex or face loss of all Federal funding.

The Senate's sex-discrimination ban applies to student admissions, the granting of financial aid, and all hiring, pay and promotion of faculty members.

The provision exempts undergraduate admissions at all private institutions--including Harvard--from compliance.

It does, however, require admissions to private graduate schools to be sex-blind. All Harvard graduate schools say they already maintain sex-blind admissions.

The Senate move also provides for a study to be completed by the end of 1973 to consider whether the exemption of private undergraduate admissions is justified.

The provision is the result of an amendment introduced by Senator Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) to the higher education authorization bill, which must pass through a House-Senate conference and obtain presidential approval before enactment.

The Senate bill goes a step further than the House version passed last November, which does not require any undergraduate admission--either public or private--to become sex-blind.

Charles U. Daly, vice president for Government and Community Affairs, said yesterday that he did not lobby on the University's behalf to insure the bill would not apply to Harvard. Bayh's office said, however, that several other private universities, including Dartmouth, had lobbied against a blanket anti-sex discrimination proposal that would have affected undergraduate admissions.

In the fall, Daly successfully lobbied for the deletion of a provision originally contained in the House bill which would have required sex-blind undergraduate admissions at Harvard.

Daly said he had been conacted by Bayh's office and had reiterated the position he had taken in the fall. He told Bayh that he "would be in favor" of the amendment if it did not apply to private undergraduate admissions, he said.

Commenting on the passage of the amendment, Daly said, "It shows once more in very clear handwriting the direction in which we're moving. I hope this institution can read the handwriting."