Keeping Track

By a three-to-one margin, women undergraduates polled this week said they would vote to keep the $5 charge on their term bill that currently funds the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) if a referendum on the issue is held.

With the new undergraduate council forming this fall, administrators have said they plan to hold a referendum to see if women undergraduates still considered a separate student government for women necessary.

In a poll conducted by The Crimson in all the residential Houses last Saturday, women students said by a 263 to 81 margin that they would vote to keep RUS.

Although many women said they wanted to hear more about RUS, those who favored it said that women need a separate group to promote issues like rape awareness, sexual harassment policy, and women's tenure.

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It's been decades since anyone rose through the ranks of the English Department as swiftly as James T. Engell '73. In 1978, the year he received his Ph. D. from Harvard. he joined the department's faculty as an assistant professor. After only two years, he was promoted to the rank of associate professor. And next July, department members said this week. Engell will take up a tenured post in the department.

Engell's appointment is an unusual one on two counts: no junior faculty member in English has been promoted to tenure since 1964, and no one as young as Engell--who is 31--has been tenured in English in 22 years.

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Many Lowell House and Winthrop House students filed claims totalling approximately $14,000 last week for belongings which had been damaged by flooding in a storage company's containers.

Harvard officials met with the owner of Henry F. Owens, Inc. this week to discuss the arrangements for reimbursement for the students who had stored clothing, books and other materials with the company. Renovations in the two Houses prevented storage in basements.

An Owens official said that heavy June rains which had flooded the company's lot and seeped into some bins caused the damage.

Some students in Eliot and Leverett met with even more misfortune. The downpours flooded the basements of those Houses and damaged some stored belongings, but there will be no reimbursements for the ruined materials because students store at their own risk.

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Amid growing concern over decreased enrollment, administrators in the Department of English and American Literature and Language are beginning their first major review of the department in ten years.

The review, which will include meetings with professors and tutors as well as undergraduate concentrators, is aimed at "making [the department] more attractive," the head tutor said.

A curline which appeared on the News in Review page last week incorrectly identified the sponsors and location of a demonstration staged to protest the massacre of Palestinians in refugee camps within Lebanon. The protest was organized by the Spartacus Youth League and took place outside of the Freshman Union.