A year before I arrived in Cambridge I talked with the Newsweek bureau chief in Atlanta--a warm, good-natured gentleman who couldn't give me a job but who was willing to share some philosophical thoughts about the South that I, a Northerner, was visiting the first time.

As I rose to go, he smilingly shook my hand, wished me well for the year off I would take before entering Radcliffe, then cautioned, "Watch out for the pigeons!"

"The pigeons?" I asked, smiling also because ever since I came across Emily the pigeon in Eloise I could never share other people's distaste for the birds.

"Don't you know," he came back, "that Radcliffe girls are so intense that they never see the pigeons as they're walking along, and always step on them?"

I hadn't known. But during my freshman year, I tried to emulate the archetypal Radcliffe absorption described to me in Atlanta. Failing to leave bruised pigeons in my wake, I learned instead why a Radcliffe woman--a woman at Harvard--might well be preoccupied. In fact, it took me more than just my freshman year to conclude that her legendary powers of intimidation, which the pigeon anecdote illustrated, are more a defensive posture than anything else.

Here are some of the things that may absorb you, soon to become women at Harvard yourselves. It should be added, however, that what follows may not necessarily touch you this year, nor will it necessarily comprise the dominating experiences of your next four years.

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You may, in your quest for a bathroom at Lamont Library, be informed by the young man (your peer) at Desk I that it is on the east side of the fourth floor; and he may add the gratuitous reminder (should you visibly wish that it were closer) that it was not until recently that Lamont had to worry about providing a bathroom for women at all.

You may find yourself engaged in a conversation with a Harvard man who will tell you in all sincerity that the worst thing that ever happened to Eliot House was admitting women--a comment that the same person would not rephrase and foist upon a black man or woman.

You may receive an invitation to join the Hasty Pudding Club, but you should remember that certain bleak financial prospects dictated that concession to liberation. You might also keep in mind that a similar situation prevailed when Harvard chose to teach men and women in the same lecture halls rather than continuing the practice of letting Radcliffe pay a few faculty members to give the same lecture twice--first in the Yard, and then at the "Annex."

Having lived at the Radcliffe Quad, you may be struck by the fact that River House women rarely congregate at the same table in the dining halls unless by prior arrangement Admittedly there are many Radcliffe women who do not mind being outnumbered, who enjoy testing themselves against Harvard's challenges and conflicts and who do not find themselves wanting. Their sense of ease cannot be scorned. But according to a 1971 study of Radcliffe Quad life by University Health Services psychiatrist Elizabeth A. Reid, coeducation increases the likelihood that women will find friends and intellectual companions within their own sex. And the magic number for that formula is one-to-one. No other ratio works.

Having enthusiastically taken advantage of the option of living in the Yard your freshman year in order, perhaps, to secure an edge on the quintessential Harvard, you should be forewarned of the current wisdom, formulated since women began living in the Yard: There are no Harvard women; at best only Harvard girls. The flippancy of the semantics masks a conviction that Harvard deep down does not accept women, and consequently, any woman who accepts Harvard as it now is, is still a girl.

You will find that you cannot, and should not, take comfort in the possibility that because of the unequal male-female ration here, you may in fact be 2.5 times smarter than your Harvard classmate. The people who actually believe things like that are aggravated Harvard undergraduates who will dismiss you as a snotty-Ali McGraw-bitch. Worse, though, are the professors who would never even entertain thoughts about your intelligence. With the same lack of awareness that leads them to believe that Radcliffe students pay a different tuition than Harvard students, they have never fully absorbed the fact that Harvard has been educating men and women in the same classrooms, sections and tutorials since 1943 As Radcliffe President Matina Horner says, Harvard professors don't view Radcliffe women as potential competitors for, and inheritors of, their academic chairs.

You should need no reassurance that you are intelligent, but at Harvard you may find yourself judged in academic matters as a woman and not as a mind. You may be taught by a professor or a tutor who, for any number of reasons, simply doesn't like women and cannot separate an academic relationship from his personal predilections. Conversely, you may find yourself the recipient of an inflated grade and unable to keep from wondering whether something besides your class performance was behind it.

The Harvard Faculty doesn't know about the women it has been educating for the past 31 years, a fact that makes a difference because these women do not partake of Harvard's protective, unchallenged assumption about men--that they are future leaders, worthy of a Renaissance man's education. It has only been within the last two years that Harvard Faculty members here sat on the Radcliffe admissions committee--a small step that has been apparently long on enlightenment.