CAN THE average freshman Cliffie find her way, unaided and unsacred, to sophomore year?

At Radcliffe, some administrators say that Harvard is much too complicated a place for freshmen to cope with alone. Others claim that it is an illusion to believe that anyone can provide adequate help.

It was in the early 1960's, when Mary I. Bunting was new as president of Radcliffe, that the current freshman advisor program was begun. Radcliffe Iuned teaching fellows up Garden Street with corporation appointments, offices of their own, free meals at Radcliffe, and pay equal to the pay they would have earned with one-fifth teaching time.

The goal of the program was to provide academic advising to freshman Cliffies, while also exposing them to Faculty types," as one dean calls them. The idea was partly to make Radcliffe more like Harvard, with its advisors, proctors, and resident tutors.

There can be no doubt that the program was an improvement over the old advising system, in which two undergraduate deans" handled two classes apiece, and grad students were paid to assist at study-card time.

But the issue now is not whether the program has succeeded on its own original terms, but whether those terms are still appropriate for Cliffies at Harvard ten years later.

THE ADVISORY system has not changed radically from its original organization in 1962. South and East House each have two advisors; North House, the largest house with the most freshmen, has three. Each advisor has thirty to forty-five advisees, and the three house deans advise all students cligible for advanced standing. Advisors are interested grad students with teaching experience or with current teaching fellowships, and most were at Harvard or Radcliffe as undergraduates. They are trained for their advising jobs and briefed during the year by the associate dean of the College.

But "Radcliffe was a simpler place then," according to Catherine D. Williston, associate dean and dean of North House (now on leave). "Students had fewer options, and advising was easier." Since the early sixties, Harvard has expanded freshman seminars, independent study, and general education, multiplying the choices of a freshman has and the decisions she must make.

The College is more complex, and so is the world. "These are anguished times." David K. Smith '58, Radcliffe dean of admissions, said. "Every girl wants adult advice whether or not she admits it to herself."

Smith has five advisees, each of whom comes to talk with him every week, not just about academic matters, but personal things as well. During the time between Fall registration and the study card deadline, he spent three hours a week with each of them. He knows them well, and says that it is only that context that enables him to give them advice. He views ten advisees per advisor as a maximum: "Any move in that direction would be an improvement," he says, "More than that is hard to control."

Someone who approaches advising with Smith's personal intensity sees forty-five advisees per advisor as a clear violation of the principles of adequate guidance.

Some others, administrators and students alike, perceive the problem in the current system differently. For them, the question of numbers is not the crucial issue.

Kathleen O. Elliott, dean of Radcliffe and dean of South House, spends hundreds of hours a year talking to students, and speaks about advising with great sensitivity. "The relationship between advisor and student is not a function of numbers," she says, "It is a function of both persons' temperament, locale and availability."

Even with forty students each, advisors are not over-worked talking to students. Freshmen. in most cases, simply do not come to their advisors any more than they have to, which is four times a year.

Dorothy Zinberg is acting dean of North House and was a freshman advisor for four years while working for her doctorate in psychology.