Paget added such arguments to her own bid for a larger Radcliffe-oriented athletics staff. But Watson, in an interview, dismissed Paget's call for more women's administrators as a last-ditch effort "to protect her students and the programs she founded. It's very hard for poor Miss Paget," Watson said. "Suddenly she's told that the program she nursed for so many years is about to be swallowed up."

Watson's casual substitution of the words "swallowed up" for the term "merged" was not a coincidence. In the same interview, Watson said the non-retained status of women's athletics meant "Radcliffe didn't want anything to do with it."

"They can't have it both ways," Watson said in reference to Paget's request for her own assistant. "There are tradeoffs. There's no such thing as a Radcliffe Department of Athletics. This is Harvard."

But if Watson thought Radcliffe wanted nothing to do with athletics, Paget was not the only active dissenter. In early December, three Radcliffe athletes wrote a letter to Horner on behalf of all women athletes, charging that "the Harvard Athletics Department has interpreted the merger directive with a discriminatory attitude."

"A uniform application of policy is not the solution for the women's development," the letter continued. It also called for "a director of athletics fully aware of the women's collegiate athletic scene and not a director foreign to women's athletics and alienated by its growth."

"Merger implies there's something valuable on both sides," Cervilla says. "But in athletics, Harvard decided that its system was the best and plugged Radcliffe into it."

Cervilla's assessment comes close to a comment that Baaron B. Pittenger, Watson's right-hand man, uses to sum up the merger: "It's like having a family full of boys, and suddenly you have a daughter." Or Watson's way of saying "we gave them" facilities, time or resources, when "we" means Harvard men and "them" means Radcliffe women. In last year's cases of the Radcliffe swim, basketball and squash teams, the women obtained only those practice times that the men's teams did not use. Put simply, Radcliffe and Harvard students were not "undergraduates" in a merged athletics program; they were men and women in a men's athletics program, or (in Pittenger's words) in a family of boys.

Backstage, a personal feud between Paget and Watson fed the fires of an already overheated controversy.

Watson sees the movement of women into many Harvard programs as a threat to men's athletics. If Paget is protective to a fault in his eyes, the reverse is no less true. Watson tells a story about an Ivy League college, which he won't name, whose men's athletics program crumbled when women's teams began to share its facilities.

Watson often treated men and women as adversaries. He told the football team, when it took buses to the Penn game last fall instead of an airplane, that the women's teams had used money he would have budgeted for them, one team manager said. He also said that if Radcliffe swimmers had priority over the IAB pool from 4:30 p.m. until 6 p.m. (the Harvard team currently uses the pool from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m., the prime time hours), "they would wreck the men's program."

When Paget requested those practice hours for the women (other times conflicted with the swimmers' classes), she says, Watson called her "disloyal to Harvard" and charged her with attempting "to destroy the men's swimming team."

He also called the women athletes "dabblers," rather than committed sportswomen, Paget says. Three other Radcliffe athletes say Watson also called them "dabblers" when they requested longer or prime time hours. Asked in an interview whether he had so branded women athletes, Watson did not deny the charge and repeated that most women's programs "are not as intense as the men's."

Watson and Paget reached a standoff in late spring and Paget refused to talk to him for almost a month, dodging his phone calls and visits to her office. "We think we've been treated like pariahs," Paget said.

As the season drew to a close, Watson hit on a solution for dividing up limited indoor facilities among men's and women's teams. In swimming, perhaps the most difficult sport to accommodate during the last year, he invited the two teams' captains into his office to work out a sharing system. They succeeded. The Harvard swimmers were willing to set aside enough lanes so that the women could practice at least one hour daily in the IAB pool.

As for now, the merger is scheduled to roll on in its current direction. "If Bob Watson wants to do something," Kaufmann says, "the dean would say 'he's the director of Athletics and he should be able to decide.'"