Radcliffe's Revolution

Radcliffe is rapidly becoming the most interesting women's college around. For the first time since the founding of Sarah Lawrence, an institution of higher education for girls is being run with not only an articulated sense of dissatisfaction, but also a radical and immediate program for rebuilding its educational structure.

President Bunting is presently consolidating her forces--and doing so rather dramatically: she has sold Longfellow and other buildings on the Appian Way, and will soon transfer the Radcliffe Ph.D. program to Harvard. Byerly will almost certainly be disposed of in the immediate future, and presumably the construction of the Radcliffe study center, will be the signal for sale of the Radcliffe library.

Radcliffe no longer has any use for its classroom buildings--it already rents them to Harvard, and this fall could not even recover a room for the use of its its own new Institute. Indeed, Radcliffe is about ready to drop its simulation of a University and concentrate entirely on creating a tightly knit College which will have enough individuality to offer a distinctive education in a Harvard whose growing intensity threatened to swamp the 'Cliffe only a few years ago.

Further up Garden Street, the serious enterprise is beginning. In five years, perhaps four, Bunting hopes to have completed both a new House, on the corner of Linnaean and Garden, and the study center. Plans for both are quite tentative, but the search for an architect is now in progress, and construction will not wait upon the raising of funds.

The study center is necessary for Bunting's vision of a new Radcliffe. It will include a library, designed, like Lamont, for study rather than book storage. But it will also have office spaces for the Faculty she hopes to attract to the new House system, rooms for group study and seminars, and a forum room. The Institute for Independent Study will be placed in this building, where, hopefully, it will be available to spark the intellectual life of the new House system.

The House system, despite all the accompanying noise and shouting, is really the heart of matters. The study center should help to make the residential quad a reasonably self-contained unit, but the Houses will (or will not) give it an intellectual tone. Bunting is presently looking for Faculty members to serve as non-resident Masters for the three existing House groupings. These Masters will, with whatever assistance undergraduates can offer, construct something resembling senior common rooms.

One thing these moves indicate is how much Radcliffe's action is circumscribed by Harvard's presence. Because the Harvard Faculty meets students in the Houses, Radcliffe must offer something similar to create Faculty-student relations. It cannot hope to venture into extensive programs of individually directed study as Sarah Lawrence did; it cannot adopt a highly student-centered curriculum; it can only cut Harvard's cloth to its own pattern.

Radcliffe Competes With Harvard

In essence, Radcliffe is competing with Harvard--a word which President Bunting avoids for very good reasons. It must win from Harvard the attention of the Faculty and even the interest of its own students if it wants to succeed in creating an independent and self-sustained system of residential education.

Radcliffe maintains a freedom that Harvard has lost, just as women's education has generally been freer to experiment than has men's. With an enormous Faculty as a basic resource, and the Harvard curriculum as a drawing card, Radcliffe has an almost unparalleled opportunity to work with residence, dining, and social patterns to extend the effectiveness of the Harvard model.

Conscious of how little is known about these patterns, particularly in women's colleges, Bunting is determined to extend freedom to experiment to its very limits. She sees no reason why Radcliffe should follow Harvard's policy of making Houses as similar as possible; she is avoiding central direction in the creation of the Houses, not so much, one suspects, because she fears an error of judgment as because she has a geneticist's respect for separate units evolving separately.

The competition with Harvard is directed more at maintaining freedom than at doing exactly what Harvard does just a little better. The famous four to one ratio combines with the natural patterns of relations between the sexes to submerge Radcliffe's individuality; a separate program must have considerable vitality if it is to survive at all.

The banner lettered "BLEAK HOUSE" that flapped across Moors Hall last week, like the "HOWARD JOHNSON'S" that adorned Barnard, proclaimed a real discontent. The anguished cry, "But we just want to be left alone," which greeted evening programs in some halls last spring, has now risen against the Houses. Even granting that the painting of doors and cupolas was not a master stroke of artistic taste, there are more fundamental reasons for the tide of opposition.

Some 'Cliffies Oppose Houses

Perhaps 'Cliffies, who seem to work harder than Harvard men, are not anxious to have introduced into the dorms an extensive intellectual life conducted over coffee and seminars. Many who see the dorms as a place to relax do not regard as even remotely relaxing the atmosphere the Houses promise to generate. In contrast to the continually intellectual atmosphere of the Harvard Houses, Radcliffe offers an extreme alternation of work and leisure possibly reflecting a generally higher academic motivation.

In addition, Bunting's decision to let the Houses evolve separately with the advice and consent of the Hall Presidents has introduced a coercion of the disaffected by the energetic. It is harder for girls to ignore activities arranged or promoted by their confederates in the relatively close confines of the Halls than for Harvard students to remain inactive in the anonymity of the Houses. This will be less serious, of course, when activity centers in the larger House units instead of the relatively small dorms.

Finally, there are a great many girls living in the quadrangle on Garden Street who came to Radcliffe in order to attend Harvard. They want a place to sleep, and contemporaries to whom they can talk, but for all the complaints about the trek to the Yard, they want to and intend to focus their lives on Harvard. For this group, Bunting's plans are annoying in almost direct proportion to effectiveness.

But all this opposition is passive. The dissidents would like less crowding, but nothing else, and there are no vociferous minorities proposing positive alternatives to Bunting's proposals. Things are happening on Garden Street. And they're going to keep on happening.