Last June, Radcliffe President Linda S. Wilson mailed letters to 28,000 of her closest friends.

After two months, only 569 had written back.

Wilson, President of the Radcliffe Alumni Association Joy K. Fallon '78-'82 and Chair of the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard Peggy B. Schmertzler '53 signed the letters.

They appealed to every living graduate of Radcliffe College for support in "increasing the number of tenured women on the faculty."

And even though their response rate was just over two percent, Radcliffe easily made back its $8,120 postage outlay.

Over the summer the 569 graduates donated $48,000 for the establishment of a new fellowship for junior faculty women at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute.

By September the collection had grown to $62,576.

The fellowship will provide female junior faculty with, in Wilson's words, "the precious gift of time and a room of one's own."

She also hopes, along with at least 569 other Radcliffe supporters, that the fellowship will put at least a few female scholars on the path to full Harvard professorships.

"Harvard makes a big deal about having a diverse student body, but more than any other Ivy it doesn't have a diverse faculty," said Sarah M. Rose '96. "What you've got is a student body learning from all white males."

Only 94 of 1074, or 8.8 percent, of Harvard's tenured faculty are women.

With even Princeton and Dartmouth, two schools with similar problems, ahead of Harvard with 12 and 15 percent tenured women

respectively, female professors at Harvard could easily feel lonely.

"Harvard's faculty doesn't reflect the pool of scholars teaching in other universities," said Professor of Sociology Mary C. Waters.

Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith Ryan said, "I can't judge if there's a problem in the pool or a partial blindness to qualifications."

When the Radcliffe classes of 1953 and 1958 returned to Cambridge for reunions in 1988, they found that the makeup of the faculty hadn't changed much.