Karl Strauch professor of Physics turned over the final report of the Committee to Study Aspects of the Harvard-Radcliffe Relationship to Presidents Bok and Horner on Thursday. Most of the text of 60-page report appears on the following three pages. Space limitations have prohibited the inclusion of the background material and statistical studies contained in the appendices of the report.

Issues and Recommendations:

As long as Harvard and Radcliffe were physically separate institutions, it probably seemed natural to decide the number of Harvard and Radcliffe students separately. This rationale has disappeared with the advent of coeducational living and the resulting unification of previously separate House systems by the 1971 agreement. The undergraduate of today still enters Harvard or Radcliffe, but thereafter he or she attends the same University, participates in the same programs, uses the same facilities and shares the same experiences. Of course some of these activities are still labeled Harvard or Radcliffe, or are not yet optimally designed for both sexes, but the vast majority are available to men and women on an equal and shared basis.

Under these conditions the separate admissions offices appear anachronistic to the undergraduate of today and the traditional system of having separate admissions targets for Harvard and Radcliffe constitutes a quota system for determining the men to women ratio of the undergraduate student body.

The obvious advantage of the quota system is that it provides the most direct method of achieving certain objectives. For instance, given the present applicant pool and general admission goals, only the quota system could immediately achieve a 1:1 ratio. Alternately, given a hoped-for larger pool of qualified women applicants, only the quota system could maintain the present 2.5:1 ratio for long.

On the other hand, any kind of quota, and in particular quotas based on race, religion or sex, are inconsistent with the role of an institution serving the public in a free society. Once it has accepted the task of educating both men and women, a university, dedicated as it is to intellectual freedom and dispassionate analysis, must provide equality of opportunity in admissions and intellectual development for both sexes. If a sex quota is acceptable, why are not other quotas all right? Now that Harvard has accepted, why are not other quotas all right? Now that Harvard has accepted full responsibility for education and housing of both men and women undergraduates, adoption of equal access admission is natural and compelling.

Thus the Committee recommends that an admission policy of equal access be instituted as soon as practical, that is for the admission of the class of 1980. We expect other admission policies to change little as the result of this recommendation. But we urge additional efforts to recruit a larger number of qualified women candidates as discussed in the next sections.

Implementation of this recommendation will make clear to all that the University is committed to enrolling and educating outstanding students irrespective of their sex. We expect that it will also encourage greater numbers of qualified women to apply than have in the past. This enlarged pool of women applicants will, in turn, help bring about an increase in the number of women students, which the Committee believes to be desirable.

It should also be noted that both state and national legislative trends are in the direction of forbidding discrimination on the basis of sex; the present quota system may well become illegal in the future.

Equal access to financial support is an integral part of a policy of equal access admission. We strongly endorse the present policy of admission without consideration of ability to pay, and the offer of sufficient financial aid to all who may need it.

Diversity of the student body is one of the great strengths of the University of today, and no factor contributes more to social and economic diversity than the policy of admission independent of ability to pay and the offer of sufficient financial aid to all who may need it. We are under no illusion concerning the fact that even with the financial aid that is made available, attendance at Harvard or other private institutions requires greater financial sacrifices from families than does enrollment in most public institutions and that this is reflected in the applicant pools. This situation only reinforces the importance of maintaining the present policy of admission without consideration of ability to pay, and of offering sufficient financial aid to all that may need it. Preservation of this policy in the future should be a matter of highest priority.

Effects of Equal Access

We believe that the arguments for a policy of equal access are sufficiently compelling so that early implementation should be postponed only if it were to seriously compromise the programs and character of the University. In fact we expect problems that may arise to be quite manageable and see no reason for postponement. Most of these problems and possible solutions are closely related to the questions of a larger number of women students and of the size of the college. The following are of particular concern to the implementation of the equal access policy.

(1) In our view, an equal access policy requires administration by a single admission committee and staff. As has been discussed, the policies and organization of the Harvard and Radcliffe admission committees and staffs are now very similar; the two groups are learning to work together. Thus, at this time, unification should be possible with a minimum of perturbation of the admission process.

(2) Had the Class of 1978 been admitted by a unified committee under the policy of equal access, the Class would not have been significantly different from the one that came to Cambridge in the fall of 1974. This is primarily due to the similarity between the men and women applicant pools, and the fact that at present their relative sizes match the 2.5:1 quota. While we expect the women applicant pool to increase relative to the men applicant pool as a result of equal access and of other factors, this growth ought to be at a pace such that the University should be able to adjust.