McCall's Magazine plans to hit newstands and grocery stores with Jean Mayer's article on women's liberation later this winter. It is ammunition for Radcliffe graduates enraged at being forced to secretarial schools. Mayer points out that women make up half the doctor talent pool in this country but only 7 per cent of our doctors are women. "Medical school admissions boards refuse to consider women because they believe that women will inevitably marry and become housewives when in fact all our data shows that they don't. Yet at Harvard Med many of the male students never practice medicine but take administrative posts or do research-jobs they didn't need M. D. s for."

"Because of career limitations that have always been forced upon women in the past, Mayer believes that there are certain spheres in which women could not only work on an equal basis with men, but where they begin with clear-cut advantages. "If women planned public housing projects, we would never build another development with no laundries, no food stores, and no playing areas for the children. Women would make better mayors.

"Men are so conditioned by team sports that they look at every job as a competition with an opponent to vanquish. They take over City Hall with no experience in keeping tabs on daily operations which require continuity and it becomes for them a series of political encounters. The job of mayors is essentially a scaling-up of the running of a household. Women understand better how to get from day to day while men come to the job having no experience in supervising even a small-scale operation and suddenly they expect to manage an enormous one."

MAYER, who as a child read Plato in the original and is glad that he did, defends the ideal of liberal arts colleges. In a recent article for The Harvard Bulletin (November 16, 1970) Dr. Mayer called for courses which will provide law for the layman and medicine for the curious. He believes that too much is yielded to the specialists. "After all," he writes, "everybody will have to deal with problems which have legal implications, choose doctors and decide to consult them, choose schools for his or her children, buy houses or stocks, and vote for representatives who oversee the spending of billions of defense dollars."

"There's a great chasm," he says, "between budget-making and educational philosophy at Harvard. Students, professors, and alumni should be told how the University's budget is made. I wouldn't want to say that anyone at Harvard actively conceals administrative decisions but there is obviously a lack of active explanation of these decisions to the university community. Some people seem to have the idea that their jobs are easier when they do not have to discuss them publicly." He adds, though, that good PR men won't solve everything.

"We need more financial support from the government, but with no strings. At the School of Public Health every man below the rank of full professor supports himself and his staff on research grants. If we expect men to teach, then we must pay these men at least in part to teach." Mayer suggests that the government give a large portion of its research money to students as scholarships. Students would then use this money to pay universities offering good teaching. Universities would be forced to provide better teaching, and students would have some choice about the kind of school they want. Dr. Mayer says, "Now all the money goes to research and good teaching goes un-rewarded. If it sounds like I'm proposing that universities and professors set themselves up in business, I am not. I am suggesting that we need to restore some balance to the university. I doubt," he said laughing, "that any professor will suddenly make a million dollars."

Although Jean Mayer might have filled the big brick house behind Emerson Hall, his obituary isn't going to suffer if he has to stay on Beacon Hill. As we were looking at his father's portrait and the French sabers opposite it on the wall, Dr. Mayer said to me, "A man has to know where he comes from in order to know where he wants to go. Otherwise he will live from moment to moment, and instead of being a statesman he will be a politician, instead of a scientist, a technician." I was sure that Jean Mayer knew where he stood. He said, "It is an accident, but you'll notice how my life is curiously like my father's." It was no accident, I thought, that Mayer was the first to notice the parallel, but I had to agree with him about it.

(The author is a junior living in Adams House.)