Radcliffe's work with RUS has been directed atbringing the student group under the first of whatVice President for College Relations Robin Jacobycalls its "three umbrellas": education, researchand public policy.

In each of these three areas, Jacoby and hercolleagues say they hope to help move women'sissues into the mainstream. "This is not anadversarial approach," Wilson says. "This is arecognition that society will benefit from aneffective partnership between men and womenfocused on important issues."

Wilson says she is particularly excited aboutthe addition of a public policy component--throughfellowships, colloquia, and research--toRadcliffe's work.

Wilson comments that young women must confrontsocietal pressures when making decision about howto balance career and family, pressures which mendo not face to a comparable degree.

"As women move against that, some mayover-correct, and that may make it hard for menwho are trying to figure this out," Wilson says."Ground is shifting. It's not shifting veryrapidly, but it's still disconcerting."

Wilson says Radcliffe's aim is "to transformsociety so that society will value women andaccommodate them."

But for now, it seems that Radcliffe is the onedoing most of the accommodating. The college'sofficials are notoriously hard to pin down oncontroversial campus issues, a fact that has leftmany a female student activist dissatisfied.

Take final clubs, for instance. In 1985,Harvard officially dissociated itself from theCollege's nine all-male clubs. In 1987, Lisa J.Schkolnick '88 filed a discrimination complaintagainst one of them with the state ofMassachusetts. Over the years, anti-final clubagitation--most recently, by RUS--has waxed andwaned.

But Radcliffe has never taken any strongposition or official action on the final clubsissue. Even today, two of the college's top threeofficials say they are unsure about the clubs.

While Bovet says she has "a hard timeunderstanding the value of exclusivity," and that"it's [the clubs'] loss," Jacoby says, "My senseis that it would be better if clubs were open toothers, but I don't really know."

Wilson responds even more adamantly, saying,"There's not any need for Radcliffe to have aposition on things which aren't ourresponsibility. We don't issue positions onthings. We are an educational institution."

Radcliffe in fact disapproved of the work RUSdid last year against the clubs, Jarvenpaa says.Jarvenpaa says that this opposition was based onthe notion that RUS could not be representative ofall women when taking a position on issue that iscontroversial within the student body.

"It was difficult for us to claim that we wererepresentative of all the women on campus,"Jarvenpaa says. "That made RUS more political in alot of ways and not necessarily representative inthe way that we are now."

But Jarvenpaa says RUS has since changed itsapproach because it considered the battle futile."We just felt that we were expending a lot ofenergy on something that wasn't going very far orthat didn't have concrete results."

Mutual Misperceptions