Host of New Appointees To Put Radcliffe in Action

WHEN A NEW administration takes office in an atmosphere of high expectations, its first year generally closes on a sour note of fturstrated hopes, even a sense of betrayal. By the middle of its second year, however, it has a better feel for the lay of the land and has learned from its early mistakes. Then, once its newness has worn off, it can settle down to its business. So it is with Radcliffe.

This Fall Radcliffe enters its second year under President Horner's leadership, sporting a new look in its upper echelons. Structurally it is now minus two offices, plus two new ones and plus even more new faces. On balance, the new lineup completes a transition from the days when Mary I. Bunting was president to the era of Horner's tenure. The new group will lead Radcliffe toward fulfilling the many roles it has claimed for itself.

Horner's concerns run the gamut of issues affecting women and are hardly limited to the fate of female undergraduates at Harvard. Last year she had to wrestle with more general problems of Radcliffe's budget and of the 1971 non-merger contract defining the Harvard-Radcliffe relationship. Yet she also found time to initiate several privately-funded research projects she hopes will have national repercussions. Her lack of public visibility left many women confused by her priorities and disappointed by her performance. The deluge of new appointments over the spring and summer, however, reveals more clearly what Horner has in mind for Radcliffe.

Most significant for Radcliffe students is her new Office of Admissions, Financial Aid and Women's Education. The "office" is actually embodied in a person, its dean, who will coordinate the functions of three separate directors working under her.

Last Spring the Harvard Corporation appointed Alberta B. Arthurs, formerly an associate professor of English at Rutgers, dean of the three part post. Working with her as director of admissions is Mary Ann Schwalbe '55, who has worked in the office for the last eight years. Sylvia T. Simmons will continue as director of Financial Aid and as an associate dean of admissions. The Office of Women's Education (OWE) is the competely new component in Arthurs's office. As yet it has no director, although a search committee has been interviewing candidates for several months. Arthurs said last week that she hopes the new director will be at work by the end of this month.

In other areas of the Radcliffe administration, the new appointments include Patricia M. King at the Schlesinger Library and Charlotte Davis as director of a new Radcliffe office of Program Development. Susan S. Lyman, Chairman of the Radcliffe Board of Trustees, has been serving as acting dean of the Radcliffe Institute since June and will continue to do so until a permanent dean for the Institute is found. In fact, the dean's post at the Institute and the directorship of OWE are the only appointments still unfilled.

ARTHUR'S POSITION makes her a key person in the Radcliffe administration. She will be executing many of Horner's projects and supplying the Radcliffe governing boards with much of the concrete data that will figure in their decisions concerning the Harvard-Radcliffe relationship.

In addition to her Radcliffe responsibilities, Arthurs will sit on the Administrative Board and the Faculty Committee on Educational Policy. The English department has given her a courtesy appointment and this Fall she will teach an undergraduate seminar, "The Country House in English Literature."

Radcliffe is new turf for Arthurs and she has enthusiasm and ideas aplenty. Like Horner, Arthurs stresses that her office is not meant to duplicate existing Harvard agencies. "I am committed to the idea of utilizing Harvard's resources for all students," she said in an interview last week. "We shouldn't be seriously separatist but should work in the broader community to force and challenge the available sources to work their damnedest for women."

Although many projects she plans for the OWE will have to wait until after the appointment of its director. Arthurs said that the office will function as an "ongoing, undramatic, insistent and assertive advocacy group for women." She explained that the OWE will work on small investigative projects and liaison efforts to "identify the points where women can exert pressure on the University."

Arthurs said that when she assumed her post on August 1, she expected the admissions office to occupy a small part of her time. Six weeks later, she has found that all three offices to be equally demanding. In fact, she has begun to feel that admissions is a touchstone for dealing with all the questions in her purview.

"I really didn't guess at the magnitude of questions arising out of the admissions procedure. They key into central administrative questions about the size of the college, the size of different departments," she said. Accordingly, she said, many of her studies will involve both the offices of admissions and of women's education.

ONE OF OWE'S initial projects will be a study of the distribution of women in academic concentrations, and of how departments in which women are under-represented treat their female members. Arthurs said that her office will work closely with secondary schools to encourage women with natural aptitude in mathematics, economics and the natural sciences to pursue their interests. Simultaneously. Arthurs said, the office will work with Harvard departments so that (1) female applicants with these interests will choose Harvard over colleges such as Stanford or Yale which already have special programs, and (2) once here, they will continue in non-traditional areas of concentration.

Despite this increased emphasis on pre-admissions recruiting. Arthurs said that Radcliffe is not moving to a point where a potential science major has an edge over an applicant interested in English.

"It is a very ambitious scheme but it is important if we are going to persuade the departments that we can 'woman' them with students," she said. "It is a question of bringing both the students and the departments together, and in this sense, we will be acting as a special agency for women."

This year, the Harvard and Radcliffe admissions offices will share quarters in Radcliffe's Byerly Hall. Arthurs predicted that cooperation between the two offices will be quite substantive. "The staffs will be traveling and probably interviewing for each other," she said. "I think that working more closely together will be to the advantage of both--for Harvard because it needs women and for Radcliffe because it can profit from the expertise and links to the University's intellectual community which Harvard's admissions officers have enjoyed for a long time."

Also for the first time this year Radcliffe admissions officers will have House affiliations and will act as freshman advisors, a step Arthurs described as "not at all difficult to effect." In fact, Arthurs said that so far she has found Harvard "eager to be pressured" into treating female students on a par with male undergraduates.

ARTHURS SEEMS less convinced than Horner that women have special needs that must be met in special ways. Even though she will be over-seeing studies on how current ratios affect women, she said that some of her liaison efforts with the Houses and with Harvard agencies may be informal since she is not sure how necessary they will be.

"Most of the evidence shows that a coeducational population is the healthiest and happiest, and that the students themselves like it best that way," she said. Arthurs said she views her role as insuring that women are included in ongoing Harvard studies of undergraduates, and that they can be candidates for any new fellowships that are made available to men.

Arthurs said that through OWE-initiated projects and through studying Radcliffe's archives, the colleges administrators will study the experience of Radcliffe students and their career patterns after college. However, these studies may only serve to satisfy their curiosity, she said. "I expect the really concrete things will come out of Harvard's Office of Instructional Research since it now collects the same information on women as on men," she explained. "We have stopped asking questions just about Radcliffe students: it doesn't help us to know how many women graduated magna or summa unless we know how many men did the same."

"I would call it a policy of cooperation with caution," she said. "Not to cooperate is not to have much to offer, and I think Radcliffe has a great deal to offer. I think it is alive and well and extremely important to the life of the University. It is a locus, Radcliffe's operation, including joint fund raising;

that the Radcliffe Houses become part of a unified House system under the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and

that Radcliffe retain control of the Schlesinger Library, the Radcliffe Institute, the Alumnae Office, and its admissions and financial aid office.

The non-merger merger was financially attractive to Radcliffe: Harvard absorbed all of its debts. But for Harvard's sake, the compromise side-stepped the key issue--the total absorption of Radcliffe women into the Harvard mainstream, a situation that many observers felt could only be brought about by the admission of equal numbers of both sexes.

And, in fact, male faculty and administrators had feared a legal merger would eventually require a one-to-one male-to-female ratio.

Committee members who drew up the non-merger recommendation admitted freely that their proposal intentionally avoided the ratio issue--which was not in keeping with their report's repeated emphasis on "full and equal participation of Radcliffe students in the intellectual and social life of the University."

In the last couple of years, Pembroke and Jackson women have officially become Brown and Tufts women, respectively. The mergers at those institutions paved the way toward equal admissions.

But in 1972 the most President Bok would do was to offer a plan for a 2.5-to-1 ratio of men to women, and this only by expanding the colleges.

The non-merger merger that went into effect in June 1971 is renewable after four years. In June 1975 Radcliffe can recover its holdings, a move that will be virtually impossible since the school would have to reabsorb its debts and face a University for which coeducation has become a way of life.

Therefore, when the issue of Radcliffe's status arises again in a little less than two years, the two alternatives will be renewal of the non-merger merger accord or adoption of a total agreement.

Many Radcliffe (Harvard?) women sense a schizophrenia that follows from our experiences with the non-merger. Technically we were all admitted to Radcliffe: we filed our applications with the Radcliffe admissions office, and our letters of acceptance bore the Radcliffe crest and the signature of a Radcliffe dean.

But as it worked out, we came to Harvard. At Harvard we carry on the pursuits that make us students: we registered with Harvard men to take Harvard courses, we live in Harvard Houses, we pay our bills to Harvard, and we receive our walking papers from Harvard.

So, where the Radcliffe experience ends and the Harvard experience begins remains unclear. Apparently our affiliation with Radcliffe ends with the letter of admission we received when we were still in high school. And if the dividing line between our associations with the two schools was back in high school, maybe the issue of merger isn't an issue at all