Togetherness in Cambridge

In a Boston hotel lobby not long ago, a Harvard professor stopped to chat with two impressively good-looking girls. As he walked on, a friend asked who they were. "Why, young ladies from Radcliffe," said the prof. With a look of astonishment, the man replied: "My God, how things have changed since I got my wife there!"

The professor's friend might have been even more surprised at some other changes in recent years in prestigious Radcliffe College (1,773 girls), the women's adjunct down the street from Harvard. Starting in World War II, when " 'Cliffies" first began invading Harvard lecture rooms, togetherness has been creeping ahead until today the two schools are more coeducational than not. The girls take their exams with Harvard students, and some share the same tutorial sessions. Radcliffe's president is invited to Harvard's monthly meeting of deans, and for the first time Harvard is represented on Radcliffe's board of trustees.

Two for One. This year three Radcliffe girls were accepted by Harvard business school. The daily Crimson still retains its Harvard identity, but a Radcliffe girl is one of its top officers. Despite the fabled incompatibility of 'Cliffies and Harvardmen, Radcliffe's class of '49 reports that 42% of its husbands are Harvardmen. Sighed a recent Harvard Alumni Bulletin: "One can only hope that when the millennium comes and the two noble institutions become one, they will let us call it Harvard, rather than Radcliffe, University."

As its next step toward the millennium, Radcliffe last week formally inaugurated a lady president (Radcliffe's third), to take over from Wilbur K. Jordan, who returns to teaching history at Harvard after ten years. She is Vassar-educated Mary Ingraham Bunting, 48, a microbiologist and mother of four teenagers, who describes herself as "a geneticist with nest-building experience." The widow of Yale Pathologist Henry Bunting, she had a distinguished teaching career at Bennington, Goucher, Wellesley and Yale. In 1955 she became dean of Rutgers University's Douglass College for women, carried on radiation research for the Atomic Energy Commission. Her specialty: a bright red bacterium called serratia marcescens ("I'm quite sure the Miracle of the Bleeding Host, which took place in medieval churches, was serratia"). She plans to set up her own lab at Radcliffe, teach a freshman seminar.

Technologically Unemployed. President Bunting says she would like to see more women train for careers, at least for a few years after college, thinks that "the nation's biggest waste of talent is women." Something else that alarms Bunting is the growing number of girls who get married in their teens and drop out of college. She warns such girls that they will be "technologically unemployed" by 31. In fact, she believes, a modern woman "cannot be a good mother" without a sideline career to help stimulate her children. President Bunting's advice: "Don't learn the how-to-do things. Learn the principles of how to find things out in a fast-changing world."

To combat early marriage, President Bunting recently suggested: "Girls go steady at 14. Why shouldn't they go to college at 14?" To keep married women in college, she hopes to inaugurate a program of part-time studies at Radcliffe. Mary Bunting tried the part-time-study idea before at Rutgers, and reports that it was a great success: not only did married women get the education they needed, but their presence made other students take their own studies more seriously.

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