RUS Amends Bylaws to Allow Male Voters

Almost as an afterthought, the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) voted unanimously last night to amend its constitution to admit men as full members.

"It's not that big a deal to RUS, but apparently it is to Harvard," said Co-President Kathryn B. Clancy '01just before the members voted 5-0 in favor of the change.

After they attend two meetings, male undergraduates will be able to vote.

The vote came at RUS' first meeting of the year, sandwiched in the middle of a free-ranging discussion of the group's future in the post-Radcliffe College era.

Harvard College requires officially recognized student groups to admit all students regardless of sex.

During most of the meeting RUS grappled with the host of questions it faces in the wake of the merger. Some women said they still felt left in the dark about the status of women's programs at Harvard.

"I'm just totally bewildered," said Gloria A. Bruce '00. "[Administrators] haven't been making any effort to come to undergraduates and tell them what's going on."

Students cited the now-missing RUS Web site. It vanished last week when Radcliffe revamped its main site, but group members were not informed about the change beforehand.

"Our Web page is not there any more, and no one told us it was [not] going to be," said Carletta P. Bruno '01, RUS's publicity chair.

Others were startled to notice the change to the Lyman Common Room, whose walls used to be covered with colorful displays by student groups and information women needed.

But the walls were stripped bare over the summer and now the room feels like any other. Clancy said that undergraduate use of the common room has been restricted so that the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study can use it as a conference room.

The most pressing issue was what to do with a $34,000 "nest egg" of unused money that came from the term bill fees formerly charged to female undergraduates. RUS was only notified this summer that the fund existed, Clancy said.

One student proposed a campus-wide event to raise awareness of women's groups and issues on campus, similar to last spring's Rally for Justice.

Another proposal involved reserving the money to fund groups that might be denied grants by the new Ann Radcliffe Trust, a foundation that will pay for gender-related events at the College.

"It's going to be a lot more difficult for action-based groups to get money from administrators," Clancy said.

The group made no definite plans for the money. But Clancy vowed that RUS would fight any attempts by administrators to regulate the use of the fund.

"This money is ours," she said. "They can't just take it."

The prevailing mood at the meeting was one of discontent. Students said they feared that popular Radcliffe programs would disappear and that undergraduates would have little say in the distribution of the Radcliffe Trust's grant money.

One student even lamented that most all-female undergraduate groups could no longer exist.

Wendy A. Seider '00 said RUS should push for exemptions to the College's no-single-sex rule, even though the group voted to follow the policy itself.

"It wouldn't be unreasonable for us to say, 'Now that Radcliffe is changing, everything's changing,'" she said.