Equalize Admissions

IF GRADUAL CHANGE is a tradition in which Harvard prides itself, the still uncompleted process of integrating women into the undergraduate community most certainly exemplifies all the University's magnificence and splendor.

It is over three decades since Harvard took over from Radcliffe the responsibility for educating undergraduates without regard to sex. Yet, the Administration began considering a proposal to admit students on a similar basis only last week.

The recommendations made by the Committee to Consider Aspects of the Harvard-Radcliffe Relationship That Affect Administrative Arrangements, Admissions, Financial Aid and Educational Policy (the Strauch Committee) must be viewed in this context.

A report of this scope and dealing with these questions is so long overdue that it could easily pass for the one that led to co-education in 1943.

True to the academic traditions from which its members were drawn, the Strauch Committee did not seriously deliberate any proposals that would offer immediate solutions to the College's 2.5 to 1 admissions bias in favor of men.

Suggestions that equal admissions for men and women should be mandated were discarded because of a general distaste for all quotas and a feeling that a student body so "constructed" would be nearly as artificial as the present one. Instead, the Strauch Committee opted for a policy of equal access admissions, deeming it "natural and compelling" because Harvard has already accepted responsibility for the education and housing of men and women on an equal access basis.

The ideas of quotas and artificially engineered student bodies were rejected by the committee when there finally came a chance to put these "tools" to constructive use: instead of recommending equal access admissions as a gradual means of lowering the male-female ratio, the Strauch Committee should have called on the College to immediately institute 1 to 1 admissions as the best way to prepare for a viable equal access policy within several years. By accepting equal numbers of men and women to the Class of 1980, the University could demonstrate its serious commitment to educating men and women on an equal basis today, instead of its intentions five or ten years hence. Equal access admissions only works when numbers of men and women applying are similar. And this will only happen when men and women are accepted in similar numbers. Increasing women undergraduates now would be the quickest way to move to a working equal access process because this step would logically lead to a large increase in applicants over a short time.

EQUAL ACCESS admissions for the Class of 1980 will not mean any significant increase in the number of undergraduate women because Radcliffe's applicant pool is still less than half of Harvard's. The speed with which the admissions ratios are equalized under this policy will depend upon the success of increased recruiting of women applicants by the admissions office and alumni(ae) clubs. Since Harvard's alumni recruiting network is much larger and more widespread than Radcliffe's, a large part of the task of increasing women applicants will fall to Harvard alumni.

The Strauch Committee also agreed that the size of the undergraduate student body should not be "substantially" increased at this time because of the strains that would be placed on the "quality of education." So, as the number of undergraduate women goes up, the number of men will fall in the College. Unfortunately, it is difficult to believe that many Harvard alums will work hard to recruit women at the same time they are being told that, as the women applicant pool increases, the chances of their sons getting into Harvard will drop.

Even if the applicant pools equalize in a few years, it is difficult to imagine an admissions committee gradually doing away with its emphasis on "male characteristics." Many of the activities regarded with favor by admissions officers are weighted toward men for the simple reason that a variety of pressures operate to keep women from becoming, for example, student body presidents or captains of football teams.

The 12 major recommendations offered by the Strauch Committee, the most important of which is the institution of equal access through a combined admissions office in time for the Class of 1980, are still landmark steps for the Harvard-Radcliffe community. If they are approved by the Faculty, the Governing Boards of Harvard and the Radcliffe Trustees, both institutions will have finally taken the steps that make total corporate merger and the eventual equality of women inevitable. Progress toward these two goals will undoubtedly continue to be all too slow, but the Strauch proposals would at least commit Harvard to a program that must eventually have equality as its outcome.

Much of the Strauch report deals with the need for more financial and: better athletic facilities, more women faculty and administrators, the opening of all prizes and fellowships to men and women, and major improvements for the Quad House In the end, the committee pointed out the desirability of having one united University as soon as will of these problems could be worked out.

But instead of calling on the University to take the quickest and most effective steps to reach these goals the committee chose only to set bounds to gradually ensure the attainment of them someday in the all too distant future. The Strauch Committee recommendations demonstrate that equality for women at Harvard will only come after continued struggle and concerted action and that merger will only occur after Radcliffe has been gradually stripped of everything that made it a separate educational institution.