'Cliffies Second-Class

IN reviewing some of the events of particular interest to women which occurred during the last semester, I have come to the conclusion that the true significance of these events has been overlooked by the University community. Rather than a series of unrelated events, they represent a disturbing trend of a de jure relegation of women to less than full members in the Harvard community.

To some members of the community, particularly women, this may not come as such a stunning revelation; to others, too caught up in the whirlwind of their lives to look closely at what is going on around them, such a statement requires significant substantiation.

Most alarming is the fact that a rape occurred in a Harvard academic facility. The true significance of the December 7 Science Center rape is that it has reflected the fact that women are being restricted from going to certain places, University academic and residential facilities no less, at certain times on account of their sex. That no regulation to that effect has been enacted is of no significance; the threat of incurring rape is a more effective deterrent than any Administrative Board decree.

A Harvard police officer, speaking after the rape, admitted that there is no way that his department could guarantee that the police could prevent a similar occurence in the future. Such arguments of feasibility, coupled with the fact that women are under similar restrictions in general society, are no excuse for Harvard's failure to ensure equal freedom for all of its members.

Women agreeing to enroll or take up employment here clearly expect that the right to freedom of movement will be guaranteed. It would be absurd to suggest that Harvard's committment to equal treatment for both sexes somehow doesn't include this basic right.

FINAL clubs have been a perenial source of controversy, reeling under a barrage of attacks ranging from racism and elitism to sexism. While all of these charges bear some force, the arguments supporting such accusations have become so varied and muddled that their viability seems destined always to be in question. Such arguments seem incapable of building a true consensus of opposition.

However, there is no getting around the obvious fact that women are being denied a resource simply on the basis of their sex. Not a resource beyond the scope of the University community's influence, but rather a resource open exclusively to students at Harvard. This resource provides its members with amenities as mundane as free beer to those as lucrative as business contacts.

Harvard's administration washed its hands of the issue, a la Pilate, when it cut "all official ties" with the final clubs in 1984. Such "harsh" measures included cutting off the clubs' Centrex and heating services. Yet their can be no doubt that the University has not exhausted its options as it has claimed. It does nothing to deter professors from dining there and, worst of all, says nothing about students' conspicuous membership in a discriminating institution.

But the University does not see fit to classify an organization that arbitrarily excludes women as being sufficiently discriminatory; it is blatantly hypocritical for the administration to trumpet claims of equal treatment for both sexes while failing to combat obvious violations of such to the greatest extent of its abilities.

SUCH an argument easily extends to the dearth of women on the faculty of the University. Harvard ranks dead last in the Ivy League in terms of tenured women, since women make up only 5 percent of the faculty University-wide. When such prestigious institutions as Columbia, Pennsylvannia, Berkeley, Dartmouth, and Cornell have percentages twice as high as Harvard's, it leads one to the conclusion that the problem is inherent in the institution and not in the pool.

If it were granted as fact (which it most certainly is not) that the size of the pool of professors was a problem in the case of minorities, who represent only a small percentage of even the general population, such an argument cannot be extended to that of women. Women represent, in fact, a majority of the population. In addition, women, as a percentage of their gender in the general population, enter higher education at a much higher rate than do minorities.

The University maintains that it is taking steps to rectify the situation. Yet, when one looks at figures representing the percentage of women on the junior faculty on tenure track University-wide, Harvard again wallows at the bottom of the Ivy League at 15.1 percent.

It would seem that Harvard is responsible for the lack of effort that has resulted in the attitude campus-wide that women are not being actively sought to fill positions of responsibility in the University. Again we find an an example of what appears to be a restriction of women's equal right to opportunity in the University community.

Harvard, then, does not appear to be fulfilling the terms of its 1977 agreement with Radcliffe College, described in the Handbook for Students as "to insure that women undergraduates enjoy the same opportunities here as men." Women have indeed been regulated to the status of second-class citizens.

To its credit, Harvard has elected a woman to its previously all-male Corporation, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has formed a special committee to review faculty hiring practices and the College did provide $500 this week for Safestreets, a night escort system. But this slight bit of progress came only after the vehement agitation on the part of students--from the bottom up, if you will.

As Law School Professor Derrick R. Bell noted at a rally held two weeks ago, it is not the responsibility of students to motivate such change. Leadership, inherent in the meaning of the word, should come from the top. The Harvard administration needs to make a more concerted effort to rectify this intolerable situation.