This year, the Harvard and Radcliffe admissions offices will share quarters in Radcliffe's Byerly Hall. Arthurs predicted that cooperation between the two offices will be quite substantive. "The staffs will be traveling and probably interviewing for each other," she said. "I think that working more closely together will be to the advantage of both--for Harvard because it needs women and for Radcliffe because it can profit from the expertise and links to the University's intellectual community which Harvard's admissions officers have enjoyed for a long time."

Also for the first time this year Radcliffe admissions officers will have House affiliations and will act as freshman advisors, a step Arthurs described as "not at all difficult to effect." In fact, Arthurs said that so far she has found Harvard "eager to be pressured" into treating female students on a par with male undergraduates.

ARTHURS SEEMS less convinced than Horner that women have special needs that must be met in special ways. Even though she will be over-seeing studies on how current ratios affect women, she said that some of her liaison efforts with the Houses and with Harvard agencies may be informal since she is not sure how necessary they will be.

"Most of the evidence shows that a coeducational population is the healthiest and happiest, and that the students themselves like it best that way," she said. Arthurs said she views her role as insuring that women are included in ongoing Harvard studies of undergraduates, and that they can be candidates for any new fellowships that are made available to men.

Arthurs said that through OWE-initiated projects and through studying Radcliffe's archives, the colleges administrators will study the experience of Radcliffe students and their career patterns after college. However, these studies may only serve to satisfy their curiosity, she said. "I expect the really concrete things will come out of Harvard's Office of Instructional Research since it now collects the same information on women as on men," she explained. "We have stopped asking questions just about Radcliffe students: it doesn't help us to know how many women graduated magna or summa unless we know how many men did the same."

"I would call it a policy of cooperation with caution," she said. "Not to cooperate is not to have much to offer, and I think Radcliffe has a great deal to offer. I think it is alive and well and extremely important to the life of the University. It is a locus, Radcliffe's operation, including joint fund raising;

that the Radcliffe Houses become part of a unified House system under the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and

that Radcliffe retain control of the Schlesinger Library, the Radcliffe Institute, the Alumnae Office, and its admissions and financial aid office.

The non-merger merger was financially attractive to Radcliffe: Harvard absorbed all of its debts. But for Harvard's sake, the compromise side-stepped the key issue--the total absorption of Radcliffe women into the Harvard mainstream, a situation that many observers felt could only be brought about by the admission of equal numbers of both sexes.

And, in fact, male faculty and administrators had feared a legal merger would eventually require a one-to-one male-to-female ratio.

Committee members who drew up the non-merger recommendation admitted freely that their proposal intentionally avoided the ratio issue--which was not in keeping with their report's repeated emphasis on "full and equal participation of Radcliffe students in the intellectual and social life of the University."

In the last couple of years, Pembroke and Jackson women have officially become Brown and Tufts women, respectively. The mergers at those institutions paved the way toward equal admissions.

But in 1972 the most President Bok would do was to offer a plan for a 2.5-to-1 ratio of men to women, and this only by expanding the colleges.

The non-merger merger that went into effect in June 1971 is renewable after four years. In June 1975 Radcliffe can recover its holdings, a move that will be virtually impossible since the school would have to reabsorb its debts and face a University for which coeducation has become a way of life.

Therefore, when the issue of Radcliffe's status arises again in a little less than two years, the two alternatives will be renewal of the non-merger merger accord or adoption of a total agreement.

Many Radcliffe (Harvard?) women sense a schizophrenia that follows from our experiences with the non-merger. Technically we were all admitted to Radcliffe: we filed our applications with the Radcliffe admissions office, and our letters of acceptance bore the Radcliffe crest and the signature of a Radcliffe dean.

But as it worked out, we came to Harvard. At Harvard we carry on the pursuits that make us students: we registered with Harvard men to take Harvard courses, we live in Harvard Houses, we pay our bills to Harvard, and we receive our walking papers from Harvard.

So, where the Radcliffe experience ends and the Harvard experience begins remains unclear. Apparently our affiliation with Radcliffe ends with the letter of admission we received when we were still in high school. And if the dividing line between our associations with the two schools was back in high school, maybe the issue of merger isn't an issue at all