in," she says. "I had a profound curiousity and at the same time a toleration for the ambiguities and a sense of humor and patience," she says.

The truth is that the 1971 arrangement has caused Horner much more trouble in her dealings with both the Faculty and the University than she had expected. And she frequently has had to draw on both her patience and sense of humor to cope with it. It's taken four years of haggling about the language and terms of the non-merger merger agreement--until last spring--before Harvard and Radcliffe could start negotiating the shape of Radcliffe's future. Unlike many people on the Radcliffe side of the negotiations, Horner does not attribute the four-year delay to any maliciousness on Harvard's part.

"Radcliffe trustees could not develop a sense of trust that the Faculty would care for women undergraduates" because of the disagreements over the '71 arrangement. Horner says. But she believes the distance between the positions of Harvard and Radcliffe had "grown out of a terrific misunderstandings rather than malice."

All the haggling has left Radcliffe in a state of flux for the past five years--an uninspiring track record for any president.

Although fault for the four years of dickering and Radcliffe's identity crisis cannot be directly attributed to Horner's leadership, her role as prime spokesman for the trustees and the institution reflects badly on her administration in the eyes of the Harvard community.

It's not unsurprising that Horner's behind-the-scenes negotiating technique has left many Harvard observers whispering that Radcliffe has nothing to do. This belief has some logic since Horner, albeit well known on the national scene, is rarely heard from in her own backyard. As one long-time Harvard observer put it, "Most people on this side of the Common have no reason to know the president of Radcliffe...From what anyone can gather, Radcliffe has spent the last four years deciding whether freshmen should live in the Quad and that's a pretty petty issue."

More than a few people in University Hall, the Faculty's nerve center, confess to being baffled by the vagueness of Horner's job. They know she has an office on the first floor of University Hall but they're not sure what she does there or what she wants. And since Horner symbolizes Radcliffe, that institution appears equally vague.

Edward T. Wilcox, a member of a committee Horner chairs and a resident of UHall, says about Horner: "It's hard to define her, hard for her to emerge or for anyone to react to her individually because of the unique complexity of the role she holds. The real profile is of the president non-president, dean non-dean."

On the concrete level, Horner spends her time as president of Radcliffe making appointments, giving speeches, smoothing out the non-merger merger agreement, sitting on University and national committees, visiting alumnae groups, raising funds for the College and traveling extensively.

Her calendar became so clogged early in her tenure as president that Horner found it necessary to set up bi-weekly office hours so that she'd have time for undergraduates. The problem of time has become acute over the past four years--Horner has had on occasion to leave one meeting, hold a conference in a taxi about the affairs of another board while on route to a third reception.

As president of Radcliffe she acts within her ceremonial role in the same manner as does President Bok. But the function the Radcliffe president considers most important is what she terms "the subtle issues in the process of becoming a coeducational institution." Out of the realm of philosophy, that role has entailed overseeing the passage of equal-access admissions, merged athletic facilities, the establishment of the freshman CORE groups and the Office of Women's Education, and the expansion of the programs at the Radcliffe Institute and the Schlesinger Library.

What Horner does as dean of Radcliffe is a more difficult question to answer, with less concrete accomplishments at which to point. She agrees that that particular function is a vague one.

"The role of Radcliffe in all areas except undergraduates is much easier to articulate since 1971. What is confusing is the dean of Radcliffe, its undergraduate role. The 1971 arrangement has made that confusing," Horner says.

She does not see the deanship as a position that involves her in the day-to-day management of undergraduate life. Rather, her concern in that capacity is with institutional issues like housing and admissions, and in commissioning research which will help to deal with these issues.

Both Horner and the trustees are aware of the amorphousness of Radcliffe's connection to undergraduates in the wake of non-merger merger. Over the past two years a panel of the trustees--the Futures Committee--has been grappling with just this problem. According to Susan Lyman '49, chairman of the trustees, a report of that committee is expected to be released sometime this fall with suggestions an approach that fits well with the peace-general direction of Radcliffe's future.