Bad News for Women

WOMEN ON THIS CAMPUS have been getting a peculiar lesson in good news and bad news in recent weeks.

The good news is that their steady push for equal representation in the University's student body, faculty and administration is as strong as ever. The class of 1986 boasts a near-record 40 percent female population, and with the arrival of the History and Literature Department's Barbara Lewalski, the Faculty sports an all-time high of 16 tenured women. The installation of the Education School's Patricia A. Graham gives Harvard its first female dean ever.

The bad news is that, in spite of those impressive numerical gains, Harvard is taking its women less seriously than ever. Consider the following events of the past week alone:

First, administrators disclosed they were considering holding a student referendum on whether to choke off the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) by eliminating funds for the vocal women's interest group. Then word got out that Harvard had quietly withdrawn funding for the Women's Clearinghouse, a counseling and referral service for female undergraduates. And meanwhile, amid all the retrenchment, the major women's issue of recent months got no attention whatsoever. University Hall still refuses to say how, if at all, it intends to deal with the Faculty members who reportedly harass dozens of undergraduate women each year.

Paradoxical? Not really. Harvard's got good reasons to think it can silence bothersome groups like RUS, which has often stood alone in calling attention to sexual harassment and other problems. The University seems to be assuming that, encumbered by size and pacified by past gains, the campus women's movement has lost its militant zeal and become a silent (near)-majority. How else to explain University Hall's headlong rush to execute RUS, a move it wouldn't have dared to take just five years ago? Countless minority groups outside of Harvard have failed to capitalize on early successes and were stymied as their solidarity withered away. Black strugglers for equality, anti-war protestors and ardent feminists all had their places in the sun in the early 1960s, mid 1960s, and early 1970s, respectively. Yet to varying degree, each group foundered after its initial breakthrough.

On Harvard's own campus, an example comes to mind. Minority groups were nearly unanimous in calling for a formal third world center two years ago, but when the administration balked, effective opposition never gelled. The groups' militant zeal had dissipated, perhaps because previous gains.

Now Harvard seems to be gambling that the same maxim will hold true again. It hopes the substantial gains women have made on campus will include similar complacency, allowing University Hall to pull out of RUS, the Clearinghouse and perhaps other commitments to women.

But Harvard is forgetting another tested political adage. It's a lot easier politically not to give than to take away. Harvard's spurning of the third world center request wasn't killing a sacred cow so much as refusing to establish a new one. RUS and the Clearinghouse, on the other hand, are traditions, remnants of an activist era still remembered fondly. The University obviously feels anxious to do away with such nettlesome relics. But in picking a fight with Harvard's women, instead of being satisfied with the status quo, it may be getting into its own Vietnam--a needless fight from which it cannot emerge victorious, only tired and tarnished.