Coed Living: Some Success, No Freshmen

For many if not most students here, coed living and the impending merger between Harvard and Radcliffe have been the only campus issues of any lasting impact. While pamphleteers in the Square denounce capitalism and hawk revolution, the once-venerated lifestyle of "separate but equal" between the sexes at Harvard is in the process of imminent collapse.

But if you're having any thoughts about doing coed living this year, you may as well forget them. The incoming freshman class has already been written out of this year's coed switch. No girls will be living in Harvard Yard, and male freshmen will not be moving to the Cliffe. Some incoming women will live in Radcliffe dorms into which Harvard upperclassmen have also moved, but for freshmen, that's about as far as it goes.

Merger

Students on House committees have been planning a coed switch in earnest since last Fall, when President Pusey softened his stand on coed living and implied that an exchange would be possible even before the complete institutional merging of Harvard and Radcliffe. In February, 159 men from three Harvard Houses switched rooms with an equal number of Cliffies, and undergraduate Harvard first began going coed.

Then at the end of last year, after a long series of Faculty resolutions, committee findings, numerous polltakings, and assorted student raffles, five Houses-Adams. Dunster, Lowell, Quincy, and Winthrop-opened their doors to some 335 Cliffies for this Fall. The same number of men from those Houses willmove to the Radcliffe Qead and, if last term's switch is any indication, the whole thing will go off pretty well.

Unexpectedly, however, the ultimate fate of this year's exchange is still in limbo because the overriding issue-merger-is presently bogged down in a severe morass.

As of this year, Radcliffe women attend lectures in Harvard classrooms, study in Harvard libraries, eat in Harvard dining halls and reside in Harvard dormitories, share Harvard's under-graduate facilities and get Harvard degrees, but Radcliffe and Harvard are still institutionally distinct.

When the Radcliffe College Council first proposed marriage to the Harvard Corporation a year and a half ago, it was thought that the only real obstacles to their union-Radcliffe's unsteady financial status and the reluctance of her alumnae and staff to become submerged in Harvard's multiversity structure-could be overcome in the course of merger talks.

A Problem

Since that time, however, a thorny problem has made itself increasingly evident: the present four-to-one ratio of men to women among undergraduates, is extremely ill-suited to coed living if the exchange is to be carried out on equal terms.

This means that two changes will have to occur before the merger is complete: an increase in the number of women which Radcliffe now admits, coupled with a cutback in male enrollment to level off the uneven ratio.

But these measures, even in their most modest forms, now seem nearly inconceivable. Pusey and other administrators have repeatedly opposed decreased admission of men, stating that Harvard has "an obligation to the nation" to train men for leadership roles.

On the other hand, if the number of men in the College were to remain the same, total enrollment would have to increase by 60 per cent in order to get the number of women needed to balance the figures. Such an increase, of course, would strain the College's resources and its teaching facilities beyond any workable state.

Another Problem

Underlying this dilemma is another problem that threatens the future of coed living. Physical conditions in the Houses are far more attractive than they are in the Radcliffe Quad, and that, perhaps even more than the uneven ratio, has led many male undergraduates to oppose an extensive or long-term coed plan. The coed switch that will begin this Fall had to be curtailed by almost a third because of large-scale unwillingness to move to the Cliffe.

Any merger agreement would have to address all these inequalities, and administrators who acknowledge the difficulties claim that a solution is nevertheless within their grasp. At this time however, it seems clear that merger talks, once scheduled to end by September 1970, are destined to drag on for months to come.