Right for the Wrong Reasons

. The problem is not gender-specific programs, but pretending that Radcliffe is a real college.

Since the first instance of debate on the topic of Radcliffe's future, I've found myself keeping odd company. It began the night of December 6, at the ARCO forum panel discussion "What is Radcliffe's Relation to Harvard?", when the former editors of Perspective, Harvard Radcliffe's Liberal Monthly and The Salient(Harvard's Almost Liberal Almost Biweekly) decided to break ideological stride with the co-president of the Radcliffe Union of Students (Radcliffe's Liberal Always). The continued existence of Radcliffe, they argued, is patronizing to women, similar to the sexism exhibited by the final clubs, and so long as it exists, Harvard can shirk on its responsibility to its female student body.

Soon after this dramatic exhibition of seeming omnipartisanship, an opinion piece appeared on these pages, written by a first year computer to The Harvard Crimson. In it, he told of the travails of this publication's gender-neutral mission, which on the occasion of his first news story left his prose awkward and "corrupted" the story's original meaning. Interestingly, he finished his observations on gender neutrality by considering how the above panelists' anti-Radcliffe conclusions could be read as a "support for a more androgynous environment" here at Harvard.

Then came a letter to The Crimson, issued by the director of the Civil Liberties Union at Harvard, Reading almost like an apology, the letter suggests that the officers of CLUH had fallen asleep at the helm of all that's leftist and good and were suddenly awakened in mid-January with the epiphany the Radcliffe's systematic discrimination against men.

As even a newcomer to campus politics can figure out, the ideologies of these groups don't normally mesh. And neither do they here.

Mixing its ideologies and metaphors, the anti-Radcliffe as the final club men can't join, shouting "hey hey ho ho / Radcliffe has got to go," and then points to the statement of a Peninsula editor, describing Radcliffe as the road block to women's full membership at Harvard, in support of its bipartisan appeal.

As you can imagine, as that Peninsula editor and panelist at the ARCO forum, I find myself in a curious position. It's not every day, you know, that I find myself or mine seconded by the members of The Salient, Perspective, or CLUH--at least, not when their purpose isn't to demonstrate how deeply offended, how outraged, how whatever they are.

But as much as I'd like to finish my remaining inches pondering the possibilities of a Peninsula-CLUH-Perspective trilateral conspiracy or even picking on Radcliffe exclusively, the anti-Radcliffe camp needs to be further divided, sectioned according to a political spectrum that hasn't lost all its integrity.

Sure, I could be content to think that for once the campus Left is on the Right side of the fence and that it doesn't matter that its reasons for being there aren't quite right; that maybe I shouldn't get overparticular and ruin the only moment's alliance this campus has seen since Peninsula wasn't. But you know what Edmund Burke would have to say about that.

The problem with Radcliffe, as I see it and others do not, is not that Radcliffe "Systematically" denies men access to financial opportunities and extracurricular programs that are currently reserved for women. In the conservative conception of things, the biological differences between the sexes highlight even deeper differences (emotional, psychological, etc.) that cannot be brushed over or wished away. Accordingly, separate programs work with these differences, instead of against them in an "androgynous environment," and thus enable the sexes to develop to their fullest capacity in accordance with their different needs and desires.

We use this reasoning with athletics, so why not with other things? It women tend to do better in language oriented subjects and worse in the sciences, why not have a program devoted to Women in Science, as Radcliffe indeed does? Furthermore, like the final clubs and the alumni who donate money to them, female students and Radcliffe alumnae should be able to restrict their program to whomever they wish.

However, lest you think that in the Harvardian spirit of moral relativism and sisterly love, I've changed my position, you're wrong.

Harvard went co-educational in 1977 and although the proximity, resources and caliber of Radcliffe enabled women to attend Harvard sooner than if there had been no nearby women's college, there is no doubt which college had more to gain when the two colleges "merged."

While the proponents of Radcliffe (as a college) maintain that its elimination would represent a direct slight to "our own history as a women's college," its elimination would actually only bring these proponents up to date with reality. All the programs and research projects in the world won't make Radcliffe a college, especially after the 1977 Agreement, when it turned over all responsibility "for the instruction and for the day-to-day management of undergraduate affairs" to Harvard.

In this way, Radcliffe is being maintained as a college in much the same way the affirmative action exists in order to right past wrongs for present-day Black. And just as affirmative action in patronizing to Blacks and forever casts doubt on their qualifications to be here, so, too, does the artificial maintenance of Radcliffe, which quite significantly is maintained only for female students. Men, as we all know, only go the Harvard.

Sure, let's be thankful that Radcliffe existed--and let's allow men and women to enjoy the benefits of sexspecific activities. But let's leave the past behind and let men and women get on with the business of being a community.

Kelly A. M. Bowdren '95 is a council member of Peninsula.