When Matina S. Horner picked up this year's guide to Harvard and Radcliffe for perspective students a feeling of irritation crept over her. It was page 22 of the booklet that did it: "No longer separate in admissions, dormitories, classrooms, and the granting of diplomas, Radcliffe College is now in many ways more an idea than an institution." The guide is, after all, an official Harvard-Radcliffe publication and Horner had expected it to represent Radcliffe fairly.

Horner marched in to an Admissions Committee meeting that week and explained to them--as she had to literally hundreds of people over the past few years--that Radcliffe is a separate institution that owns $50 million worth of property, governs itself and draws up contracts with Harvard University. And she, Matina Souretis Horner, age 37, is that institution's duly appointed, independent president. Admissions committee members said afterwards that they found the meeting to be most informative.

The incident which occurred this month points to an uncomfortable theme in the Radcliffe administration: as Horner enters her fifth year as president and dean of Radcliffe, no one, not even Radcliffe's governing board, is sure what she is supposed to do and where the institution is supposed to be heading.

When the Radcliffe trustees appointed Horner to the college's presidency she was heralded by the press and national educational and women's organizations. She had written extensively on women in higher education--her fear-of-success hypothesis--which magazines gave wide and favorable coverage to. At 32, Radcliffe's youngest president was described as vivacious, articulate, charming and intellectual; she seemed the perfect figure to lead Radcliffe as it neared the end of its first 100 years.

Horner may not have had all the administrative credentials necessary to run the corporate affairs of Radcliffe--she now admits that "coming from an assistant professorship in Psychology is not the best preparation for leading a corporation"--but it was obvious to all concerned that with a little help she would catch on quickly. Her youth and inexperience only added to the ceremonial excitement.

Horner was to bring in a new era, one that would be carefully conditioned by a 1971 agreement between Harvard and Radcliffe that made undergraduate life entirely coeducational and coresidential but left Radcliffe as an independent entity on the corporate level--the so-called non-merger merger.

Because the agreement appeared to be the major step toward complete merger, many people at Harvard felt Horner was in a position of presiding over a dying empire that no longer had any purpose or direction.

As one Harvard dean recently put it, "Matina has had to spend a great deal of time maintaining the institution. Radcliffe is being swallowed and she's gotten the thankless task of seeing that the cat [Harvard] swallows it slowly, piece by piece."

Horner's position is, in the words of Classics Professor, long-time Lowell House master and recently retired trustee member Zeph Stewart, "the executive officer of an institution that's not yet sure of where it's going or what it should be doing. She came into a job which very well might disappear."

But Horner has a different view. As she sat in her spacious, cleanly decorated office in Fay House, Horner said last week that she accepted the post because it was a challenge. "The thing that attracted me to the job were the questions that affected the Harvard-Radcliffe relationship and a chance to really affect some of the issues, on a national level, that concern women and education in general.

"The challenge made me want to plunge appeal. Brown-Beasley--who holds four graduate degrees including a masters from Harvard in Regional Studies-East Asia--notes that Gibson holds a graduate degree in theology and is listed in the 1975 Harvard Alumni Directory as occupied in the ministry. Indeed, Gibson spent ten years in Harvard's campus ministry before beginning to work in Harvard's Admissions and Financial Aid office in 1966.

According to Champion, Gibson's work in admissions and on student employment and loans were major reasons behind the financial vice president's selection of Gibson to head the Office of Fiscal Services, an offshoot of Champion's 1973 reorganization of services once grouped in the comptroller's office. Gibson was not, Champion adds, a "theoretical systems guy," but he instead had "actually lived in an university environment and understood well" the problem of student financial aid.

Gibson has himself called attention to his interests and qualifications. In the Harvard Class of 1951 25th reunion book, he wrote:

...my greatest concern is still in the area of financial planning so that any qualified applicant can manage to attend Harvard. Just now that requires major attention to both federal and state programs, and Harvard has been a leader in student financial aid planning...Lately I have taken responsibility for various financial services around Harvard, and no one understands how such a thing could have happened. I'm the first to admit that my credentials aren't exactly typical.

In his position as director of the Office of Fiscal Services, Gibson supervises financial transactions within the University such as student loans, term bills and payroll. However, the office's responsibilities extend into other areas that do not clearly follow from its general mandate. These include shaping bursars card policy and managing the miscellaneous accounts receivable.