Horner to Be New Radcliffe President

Matina S. Horner, assistant professor of Clinical Psychology, will be the new President of Radcliffe.

The Radcliffe Board of Trustees will approve the appointment at 5 p.m. today. The Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers confirmed the appointment this morning.

Today's announcement follows a year-long search by a special committee seeking a replacement for Mary I Bunting. Candy Lee '72, a member of the committee, said yesterday that the committee considered more than 400 candidates and mailed out over 30,000 letters.

Because of the "non-merger merger" that was ratified last Spring, Horner will be President of the remaining Radcliffe facilities and a dean of the University.

The remaining Radcliffe facilities include the Schlesinger Library, the Radcliffe Institute, the Fund Office, the Graduate Career Planning Office and the Agassiz Theatre.

Bunting, who is 62, announced her retirement last year after serving 12 years as Radcliffe President. In March, she accepted a post for next year as special assistant to William Bowen, the incoming president of Princeton University.

"I will be dealing with questions like community access to the university, curriculum changes, guidance for undergraduates, and the relationship between Princeton and the state university system," Bunting said of her Princeton job.

Bunting also will join the board of directors of the Arthur D. Little Corporation.

The search committee reportedly discussed the position of Radcliffe President with at least two other people: Eleanor Maccoby, psychology professor at Stanford, and Marina K. Whitman, economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh and member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Whitman is also a candidate for the Board of Overseers.

Frances Cooper-Marshall Donovan, a Radcliffe Trustee and a member of the search committee, said that the committee personally interviewed a dozen candidates.

Horner will assume office on July 1. She will continue with some teaching and research, Donovan said today.

Horner is best known in academic circles for her work on the achievement motivations of women. In an article entitled "Femininity and Successful Achievement: A Basic Inconsistency", based on studies conducted at Radcliffe and the University of Michigan, Horner speculated that women in our culture have a "fear of success."

This fear, she wrote, is aroused by certain environmental conditions such as direct competition with males. Women often seem to feel that they are compromising their femininity if they compete successfully against men; these feelings. Horner suggested, result largely from the internalization of our society's sex role stereotypes.

Horner is the mother of three children. "It's just incredible," one of her women students remarked today. "Every day she goes home to her children at noon after working all morning, then comes back in the afternoon and does more work. She's phenomenal."

A 1961 cum laude graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Horner holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan. She has participated in a number of research projects, and is a frequent contributor to publications in the field of motivation. In 1966, she was elected to both the Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies.

Horner's teaching experience came first as a teaching fellow and later as a lecturer in psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1969, she came to Harvard as a Lecturer on Social Relations, and became an assistant professor in the Personality and Development field of Social Relations the following year. She currently teaches graduate seminars on motivation and the feminine personality, as well as Soc Rel 100a, "An Introduction to Personality."

Approval of the Radcliffe Trustees, of course, is dependent on a quorum of its membership being present at today's meeting.