Four years ago Radcliffe was a lonely college. After a hectic week of orientation, the wide-eyed young freshman found herself left in peace, and usually in isolation, to make what she would of her college experience. If she was neither a psychotic nor a genius, the chances were that her adviser would turn out to be a kindly rubber-stamp device with virtually no interest in whether she majored in English or physics. Nor did anyone seem to care care whether she rounded off her four years by marrying an eligible Ivy Leaguer or by scuttling off to graduate school in quest of a Ph.D. No one, except her roommate writing a gen ed paper or her parents paying tuition, ever asked her to define her concept of women's education or describe her vision of woman's role in the world. In the fall of 1958, no one had yet suggested that Radcliffe's boundaries might extend beyond the residential Quadrangle on the North and the Harvard Houses on the South, or that the time had come for 80-year-old Radcliffe to break away from Mother Harvard and fashion its own, quasi-independent, future.

Then, suddenly, the idyll collapsed. The tower walls turned out to be not ivory but papier-maché, and in the winds of controversy they all came tumbling down. By spring, 1962, the Radcliffe girl found herself exposed to public view on a not-entirely-comfortable plateau. The slick-paper magazines had discovered in her a whole new target for cliches. "Beauties with brains!" bellowed Time in surprise (or was it indignation?), but ran a group of pictures which seemed to disprove the contention. Writing in Holiday, a former 'Cliffie reminisced lyrically and tastelessly over the pleasures of the past, from sex to soc sci. The launching of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, designed for women with a Ph.D. or its equivalent in achievement, rocketed the College onto the front pages of newspapers across the country. In the suburbs and the cities, from Connecticut to California, nearly everyone seemed to be speculating on woman's role in society. And, more often than not, Radcliffe was the pivot and symbol of the ensuing argument.

Privacy was gone, but so was stagnation. Radcliffe, which had spent the last ten years settling smugly into a niche of excellence as a sacred barnacle on the good ship Harvard, experienced an unexpected jolt. Now, people were questioning all the privileges and restrictions the Radcliffe community had taken for granted. What was the point of a Harvard education for a girl? Should it prepare her for motherhood, graduate school or a career? How closely should Radcliffe follow the Harvard model? In what ways might the College exploit its unique situation? And, ultimately, what could and should a woman do with a liberal arts education?

THEY weren't new questions. But they were being asked insistently and energetically by someone who indicated that she might even know the answers. Applying the shock treatment with all the skill and persistence of a dedicated scientist was Radcliffe's fifth President, Mary I. Bunting.

One can only guess as to whether or not the trustees knew what they were getting into three years ago when they approved the appointment of Mrs. Bunting. Described by one disillusioned Harvard undergraduate as "the most dynamic college president in Cambridge," Mrs. Bunting has spent the two and a half years of her tenure proving that a president who doesn't have to worry about pleasing a faculty or raising funds can shape the destiny of a college very much as she chooses. Her influence has permeated the undergraduate College and her ideas won national acclaim. Radcliffe in 1962 has become Mrs. Bunting's college.

Among the many voices praising this development, the cry of the few dissenters goes almost unheard. But, setting aside the reactionaries to whom change is anathema, the skeptics have something significant to say. For Radcliffe the lonely college possessed some attributes that Radcliffe the community of educational suffragettes may prove to lack. Perhaps the negative aspects of the many wise and already fruitful experiments that Mrs. Bunting has initiated are only the inevitable concomitants of progress toward a broader and deeper concept of women's education. And yet, one wonders.

President Bunting's first full year at the College was one of inauguration. The Institute for Independent Study and the much-touted House system were planned and announced. This year the projects got under way.

For the most part, they appear to be a huge success. Under the direction of Constance E. Smith, the Institute's pilot group of 22 scholars, their specialties ranging from international law to creative writing, spent what most of them apparently feel was a happy and profitable year at the College. Fifteen will return next year, along with 17 newcomers. The Institute, one of the first organizations in the country to offer support for part-time scholarship, has received glowing notices in the press and attracted a bunch of talented, interesting, and highly articulate women to Radcliffe. President Bunting will have a right to be proud when and if other educational institutions follow her lead.

Yet the Institute has not fulfilled all of its proponents' expectations. It has opened up new opportunities for the individual scholars, succeeded in soliciting funds for a variety of research projects assessing women's education, and even set up a program to advise local women on the best way to use their training. But it has not impinged to any appreciable extent on the life of the undergraduates.

Some of the scholars offered non-credit seminars for Radcliffe students; others occasionally dropped into the dormitories for meals. In the first case, contact was limited, in the second, superficial. The great majority of the undergraduates never met any of the Institute members and never evinced any interest in doing so. If, as Mrs. Bunting hopes, the scholars are to inspire the students by their example, they will have to be linked more closely to the College. Perhaps as the House system takes shape a few will be able to move into Radcliffe residences with their families, but this is only a partial solution. It seems likely that the Institute will continue to be only a peripheral part of the College.

CERTAINLY the boldest and, from the undergraduate's point of view, the most far-reaching of Mrs. Bunting's experiments is the new House system. Under her aegis the dormitories grouped into three House centers this year and, tentatively and sometimes reluctantly, began to sponsor a variety of social and intellectual projects. South House, composed of Barnard, Bertram, and Briggs Halls, held an art show; North House (Comstock, Holmes, and Moors) invited Norman Thomas to speak; East House (Cabot, Eliot, Whitman, and the Jordan co-operatives) put on a production of George Bernard Show's Heart-break House.

Following the Harvard model, President Bunting appointed a Master for each of the Houses in January. During the spring the Masters in their turn selected eight or ten Faculty Associates to aid them in stimulating the students' intellects, popularly supposed to lie dormant from the moment the 'Cliffie left the Harvard Yard after classes till that when she returned next morning.

For all these changes Mrs. Bunting had the sanction of a large majority of the students, eager to cement with the Faculty members all too frequently exhibited their existence only as a voice from the of Lowell Lecture Hall or a grade on a bluebook. Many 'Cliffies were anxious to learn for themselves whether or not Harvard's famed ner-table education" was really the myth their cynical friends from the Common claimed. Most of them found that it was, but also discovered that their favorite professor, from his den in the Widener might prove entertaining if not Undeniably, Mrs. Bunting's system added the spice of wit, of scholarship, to Radcliffe's otherwise drab meals.

So far, so fine. But Mrs. Bunting had even more ambitious plans in mind. To replace the off-campus houses, which have been a drain on the College's financial resources for years, she proposed to build a House and solicited students' on how to construct it. The response came from campus dwellers who clung to the shaky frame houses and nothing could be better. Convinced at last that their day was over, them sadly joined in plans for on Garden St. to house 275 undergraduates and 25 faculty members. Somehow the builders will try to incorporate all the advantages of the campus house except the one that has endeared it to the residents: its isolation from the rest of the college.

If the demise of the off-campus house is really a financial and Mrs. Bunting insists it is, fourth House is perhaps the best and probably the only solution to the problem of Radcliffe But the library-study-tutorial the Quadrangle, another of Mrs. Bunting's projects for the future, other questions. No one who has attempted to cram herself into the Radcliffe library during reading would argue that the College does need more space for both books and students. Yet, despite the obvious advantages of putting books in to living quarters, there are drawbacks to the suggested Radcliffe's greatest natural and will remain Harvard, and Harvard is a mile down from the Quad. For the 'Cliffie, the ideal study center a co-educational meeting place the Widener reading room. Only the most ardent feminists really want an answer to Lamont, and only the most unrealistic co-educationists believe that a resplendent new building Quad will prove as or more than one located a little nearer to the Square.

This is essentially a frivolous quibble, and yet it suggests the reasons why a few students remain obstinately about the House system and that is currently accompanying its birth. Founded to provide a Harvard education for women, Radcliffe has always had a somewhat relationship to Harvard. In the 1962 Yearbook, President Bunting remarks that in 1943, when classes and educational policy were finally co-, "Radcliffe became a college Harvard University. . . . The had become an organ." But, although "Cliffies will receive Harvard diplomas next year, this is not the same as being a part of Harvard College. According to Mrs. Bunting, the Radcliffe identity provides the incentives as well as the responsibility for full consideration to the special of women students."

And so she disposes of the problem. Mrs. Bunting, naturally enough, sees Radcliffe through the eyes of an administrator and finds it an almost ideal testing ground for her theories about women's education. To her, Radcliffe's unique situation means a chance to experiment and to publicize the results.

Clearly, Radcliffe can profit from Mrs. Bunting's imagination and Institute and the House proof enough. But like most with a talent for organization, Radcliffe's president wants to control the programs she initiates. In the years, the undergraduate has more and more to feel a the bacteria Mrs. Bunting in her role as a geneticist. she urges students to express their views on everything from meal educational policy, Mrs. Bunting unwilling to acknowledge any of "the special needs of the students" that differs radically from her own. She wants the undergraduates to become self-conscious, to and re-shape their education, and insists on the scientist's of laying down the guidelines.

RADCLIFFE'S president may be satisfied with the development of college, but not all of the undergraduates are equally well pleased. For the student must work out her own concept of Radcliffe's identity in a situation far different from that of a college administrator. She grows weary of being singled out from her Harvard classmates as a special case for observation and study and may rebel against the insistence that she immerse herself in the problems of women's role in society. Not every girl is passionately interested in women's education per se; some of the most intelligent would rather spend their time just being a chemist, or a teacher, or an artist. Or a housewife.

At times President Bunting's solution to the opposing claims of career and marriage may seem vastly oversimplified. To the student who wants to raise a family and pursue a career now, the suggestion that she marries today and study ten years later seems a little short of perfection. The part time opportunities offered at the Institute to the outstanding few cannot solve the dilemma of the girl who fears she must choose immediately between career and family.

And for the girl who welcomed Radcliffe as a chance to escape from the problem for four years while exploring her own capacities, Mrs. Bunting's college can only be a disappointment. At Radcliffe today, no one is supposed to maintain a position of detachment. Increasingly there is no place for intelligent apathy, the standard defense of the undergraduate trying to discover for herself what really matters to her, as a student and as an individual. Whether she wills it or not, she has become part of a pattern she did not choose, the subject in an experiment she may not wholly approve.

Radcliffe is no longer a lonely college. A battery of advisers have suddenly appeared to channel the student's college experience. Before she was free to do what she wished with her education; now she is being pushed to use it in some way that will provide tangible results according to a scale of achievement she may find alien and insufficient. Not that Mrs. Bunting wants it this way: she would be the first to speak out in favor of flexibility and broad standards of judgment. But for the moment she is offering her students little choice; those who do not care to define women's education in her terms have no real chance to suggest alternative solutions.