In Urgent Meeting, RUS Plans Merger Response

At what they dubbed an emergency meeting of the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS), undergraduate women leaders unveiled three demands they intend to present to Harvard administrators this month. Fifteen women attended last night's meeting, as well as Harvard's Acting Assistant Dean for Co-education Julia G. Fox.

A petition circulated at the meeting calls on Harvard College to "conduct a thorough investigation into the status of female undergraduates" next year; to continue funding and administering all Radcliffe programs through the new Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; and to keep RUS funding at its current level in the future.

The students' plan would transform RUS into the "Radcliffe Foundation for Women,"--which RUS Co-President Kathryn B. Clancy '01 said would be modeled on the Harvard Foundation for Race and Intercultural Relations.

The group hopes to collect as many as 1,000 signatures in the next week to present to Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 and Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles.

They plan to collect names in dining halls and on a new Web site, accessible through the RUS main site at www.radcliffe.edu/undergrad/rus.

"We can try to play our own form of hardball with them," said Amy L. Beck '00.

Several students objected to a proposed plank calling on Harvard to maintain as single-sex those Radcliffe programs that are currently limited to women.

But meeting organizers insisted that was a critical element of the protest.

"For us, that's so fundamental," Beck said. "That's the reason I got involved."

"The whole point is that it's specific to female experience," Clancy added.

The women also agreed to form the Summer Advisory Committee on the Future of Female Undergraduates at Harvard.

The committee will lobby Knowles and Lewis about their demands while students are away.

"One thing that they are really banking on is that we're all leaving," Beck said.

But the group said they had recognized that affecting the actual legal terms of the merger is unlikely.

"The idea was we could put some of our own ideas into the merger, an idea of which we have been disillusioned," said Emily B. Wong '00.

RUS met with Radcliffe President Linda S. Wilson and Radcliffe Dean of Educational Programs Tamar March two weeks ago. At that meeting, Wilson told the group, "The merger agreement is not yet complete...It's a good time to arrange visits to anyone who will listen."

The group has apparently heeded Wilson's advice--leaders have sat down with March and incoming Acting Dean of Radcliffe Mary Maples Dunn, meetings Wong termed "pretty positive."

Clancy said Dunn convinced the group that temporal issues like those in the petition were inappropriate for the merger document, which will be legally binding for decades to come.

The group plans to hold additional meetings during the coming weeks to present the petitions and elect members of the summer committee.