Early American suffragists would probably be amused that Harvard is likely to have a referendum in which only women can vote. The question is whether women undergraduates want to keep the five dollar charge on their term bill that currently funds the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS).

Administrators say the idea of a referendum has been around for years, and that particularly now that the new Undergraduate Council is taking form, it would be useful to see if women undergraduates still want to support the group.

RUS leaders maintain that their group has long done the kind of work on issues like sexual harassment, rape security, and women's studies that regular student governments have never addressed.

For now, they say their job is simply one of salesmanship. "We are going to do the same things we've always done." RUS president Sharon J. Orr '83 says, "but now we are going to make sure people know that we are doing them."

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During her first five years at Harvard. Lee Perry '64 was known only to the handful of students familiar with her psychology courses at the Graduate School of Education. But the assistant professor's anonymity was shattered recently when the national press learned of a sensational lawsuit she had filed against a leading California educator.

Perry, 38, charges that Richard C. Atkinson, chancellor of the University of California at San Diego, impregnated her in 1977 during a protracted affair talked her into having an abortion and then reneged on his promise to impregnate her again. Atkinson denies the charges, but Perry seems serious until she changed her mind last week, she had been willing to drop her suit in return for being impregnated again by Atkinson.

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The Sociology Department's embattled effort to build up its faculty was dealt a blow last week when a University of Chicago scholar announced that he plans to turn down Harvard's tenure offer.

Edward L. Laumann, the chairman of Chicago's sociology department, attributed his decision primarily to the fact that Chicago's department is considerably larger than Harvard's and stronger in his specialty of data analysis.

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People don't usually care about course enrollment levels, unless they have been sent packing from a class like Stephen J. Gould's Science B-16. But many people at the Law School were eager to find out that about 60 students had signed up for a course in civil rights law.

The course--being taught by Civil rights lawyers Julius Levonne Chambers and Jack Greenberg--has been the subject of an active boycott by the Black Law Students Association (BLSA), which had called on the Law School to bring in a tenure track minority professor to teach the course.

Professor Derek Bell, who taught the course before he left the Law School, said last week that his course usually attracted about 40 to 90 people, and that boycott or no boycott, the 59 people that enrolled in this year's course "is definitely in the ballpark."

But BLSA executive committee member Donald Christopher Tyler said last week that his group would not judge the success of its boycott strictly by numbers. "I do feel the boycott will emphasize to the Law School the need for more minorities and women professors."