College To End Gender-Specific Student Prizes

All Harvard College prizes and fellowships will be available to men and women next year without gender restriction, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 said Monday.

The announcement comes after a legal review of all the College's gender-restricted prizes to determine whether they could be made available to both genders without violating the donor's original intent.

The lifting of the gender restriction affects the Paul Revere Frothingham Prize, an award that is being given this year with "manliness" intact as one of its criteria.

In the future, "we will simply be inviting the Houses to nominate women" in addition to men, Lewis writes in an e-mail message, and "manliness" will be interpreted as "character."

Lewis said that in recent years the committee awarding the Frothingham has considered "manliness" to mean "character."

However, the Fellowship Office at the Office of Career Services--where the Frothingham nominations are collected--said earlier this spring that the Frothingham has only been awarded to men in recent years.

The legal review's findings allow for certain athletic prizes to remain gender-restricted.

"The situation of the athletic prizes is different, since the men's and women's prizes are awarded for different activities, in which men and women do not compete against each other," Lewis wrote in an e-mail message.

Lewis also said the Shaw Travelling Fellowships--previously for men only--will be made available to women next year.

A short article about the Frothingham and its "manliness" criterion appeared in most recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Though the Frothingham was awarded this year, the Captain Jonathan Fay Prize--traditionally Radcliffe's highest honor for a graduating woman--was not awarded, for fear of violating Harvard's non-discrimination policy.

Mary Maples Dunn, acting dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Jeremy R. Knowles, dean of the Faculty, also declined to award the Fay this year so that criteria in keeping with the Institute's missions could be established.

Though Lewis wrote on Monday that the Fay and Frothingham were not comparable prizes, Paul A. Bohlmann, director of fellowships at OCS, said earlier this spring that the only prize similar to the Frothingham was the Fay.

And almost comically, the second sentence in President Neil L. Rudenstine's baccalaureate address yesterday referred to members of this year's class winning both awards.

"You...have already won...the Captain John Fay and Paul Revere Frothingham Prizes," he said.

The line was a faux pas of sorts, but was also significant for making a direct connection between the two prizes.

Also on Monday, Assistant Dean of the College Karen E. Avery '87 announced that Lewis's office will launch a mentoring program for women in science next year.

The program will be organized through academic departments, with participants "discussing with various people the idea of a program to support

networking, mentoring, and support of undergraduate women in sciences."

Avery said the "Science Mentors Program" will be aimed at strengthening the advising women receive in science departments.

"It is hoped that ultimately there will be an even greater increase in the number of women science concentrators at Harvard College," Avery wrote in an e-mail message.

Karen Gordon Mills '75 has donated the funds for the fledging program, and Avery said all of the science-based academic departments will take part in the program.

The mentorship program may fill a gap left by the Science Alliance, a program formerly sponsored by Radcliffe College. The Science Alliance brought first-year women to campus a week early for intensive seminars about the sciences at Harvard.

When Radcliffe College merged with Harvard last October to become the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Science Alliance was discontinued.

Elizabeth D. Chao '01, president of Women in Science at Harvard and Radcliffe (WISHR), said earlier this month that she would like her group to take over where the Science Alliance left off, but that WISHR lacked the full-time staff needed to run such a program.

The Mentors Program was discussed informally earlier this spring at a student-Faculty meeting of the Ann Radcliffe Trust--a grant-awarding body supervised by Lewis and Avery, whose purpose is to fund student groups with an interest in women's issues.

Those present at the Trust meeting placed an emphasis on coordinating the program through the science departments.

"These mentors could serve as a link to the academic departments and enable women in science to feel like more integral members of the academic department," Avery writes. "We have heard from many students that this currently is not their experience."