Strauch Brings In Few Surprises

The Strauch Committee's recommendations last week that equal access admissions through a unified undergraduate admissions office should be instituted in time for the selection of the Class of 1980 came as no great suprise to most members of the Harvard-Radcliffe community.

Any alumnus who has heard Karl Strauch, professor of Physics and committee chairman, give his standard "the-time-has-come-for-gradual-change" spiel; any faculty member or administrator with an ear to the ground; or any student who reads. The Crimson was prepared long ago for the committee recommendations.

That fact, those who are supposed to know say, is the advantage of the University's student-faculty-alumnus-administrator committee style of evaluating its practices: everyone has time to anticipate and get used to the future before it arrives.

The pragmatic change in the attitudes of all constituencies that has come about during the year-long deliberations of the Strauch Committee has surely buoyed the hopes of administrators wondering about the upcoming review of undergraduate education by a similar committee.

But for those who expect that the recommendations of the Strauch Committee may be rubber-stamped through the Faculty and the Governing Boards of Harvard and Radcliffe because they have long been expected, one hard reality remains: If the admissions offices are merged, Radcliffe College and its Trustees will be giving up the last claim they have to women undergraduates in the University.

The function of Radcliffe, as far as women undergraduates are concerned, will be reduced to providing the advisory services of the Office of Women's Education.

The question this spring may just become whether the Trustees (and the Radcliffe administration) are willing to sacrifice this at a time when they need every bargaining position they can get in the merger talks.