Columbia to Open Doors To Women in Fall 1982 Under Pact With Barnard

Columbia College, the only remaining all-male school in the Ivy League, Friday announced its decision to admit women for the first time in the fall of 1983. Barnard College will remain as an undergraduate women's college, according to the agreement announced Friday.

The agreement, signed by the presidents and chairmen of the board of both institutions, is a revision of a 1973 pact, which allowed Barnard to pay Columbia for the use of its libraries, Columbia Dean Arnold Collery said yesterday. The recent agreement has changed the clause of the 1973 agreement in which Columbia agreed not to accept women undergraduates, he added.

The new pact reaffirms that Columbia and Barnard will continue to share courses, faculty, libraries and other resources, Collery said. But Barnard has now been granted increased control over the appointment of its tenured faculty members, he added.

Ellen V. Futter, president of Barnard, called the decision "a tremendous triumph," adding that "for the first time, we can look forward to a long-term stable relationship with Columbia without the sword of possible merger hanging over our head," according to an article in Saturday's New York Times.

Bx Sci Alum

Michael I. Sovern, president of Columbia University, expressed similar enthusiasm, and said that "Columbia College can now double its applicant pool in one stroke," the Times article said.

"The first thing to try was to create one coeducational institution like Harvard/Radeliffe," Collery said. A year and a half of negotiations between Columbia and Barnard attempted to create what Sovern called "de facto" coeducation by increased cooperation between the two schools, the Times article said.

These negotiations were prompted by complaints from the Columbia faculty that "the institution was jeopardizing its academic quality by excluding half of the possible pool of academically able students," the Times article said. Columbia students also complained that "despite cross-registration and the integration of some dormitories, they rarely see women in classes," the article added.

But the recent agreement put an end to these talks, and Collery said that he doubted that a merger between Columbia and Barnard colleges will be reached "in the next century or two."

The new arrangement is similar in some ways to the Harvard-Radcliffe agreement, President Horner said yesterday.

Radcliffe has remained separate from Harvard since Radcliffe's inception in 1879, except for a five-year partial merger which took place between 1972 and 1977. During that time, Radcliffe gave all of its income to Harvard, and consideration of a complete merger was proposed, Horner added.

Both Worlds

But while women at Harvard-Radcliffe are accepted to Radcliffe College and receive a degree from Harvard College, women at Barnard are admitted to and receive a degree from Barnard, Horner said. She added that while Columbia founded Barnard in 1889, Radcliffe founded itself, against the will of Harvard.

As with Barnard and Columbia, Horner sees the present arrangement between Harvard and Radcliffe as final, "at least in the foreseeable future."