With a new student group, an aggressive fundraising campaign and a publicity blitz ranging from campus postering to the pages of the Boston Globe, Radcliffe this month launched a new crusade for female faculty hiring at Harvard.

A Radcliffe alumnae Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard, founded last year at the 1953 and 1958 class reunions, released a report earlier this month critical of Harvard's record and announced several new initiatives to improve the situation.

"You have to start somewhere and do something other than encourage and speak toward a goal," says Radcliffe President Linda S. Wilson. "We wanted to do something tangible."

But while professors agree that the University has a problem with hiring female faculty, many say the Radcliffe plans are little more than a symbolic effort.

"They can express and convey information and express their opinions, but that's as far as I'd go," says Thomas N. Bisson, history department chair.

The real hiring problem, some professors say, is in Harvard's com- plex tenure process, which rarely taps junior faculty and tends to favor traditional, well-established candidates.

Despite Radcliffe's much-bally-hooed crusade, only professors in the academic departments, not administrators or alumnae, can really affect tenure decisions.

"We go through an incredibly involved process of who to hire, and committees of interested alumnae aren't really a part of it," says Robert P. Kirshner, chair of the astronomy department.

The Problem

Harvard's percentage of tenured female faculty lags behind those at comparable universities.

Only 8.8 percent of the University's tenured faculty are women, according to the alumnae committee report. That translates 94 women in a pool of 1074 tenured professors.

In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the percentage is 10.8, up from 10.1 percent last year and 9.6 percent the year before, according to the University's 1994 affirmative action plan report.

The Harvard percentages are far below the national average of 22.6 percent tenured women in faculties of arts and sciences, according to data compiled by the Boston Globe.

Every Ivy League faculty of arts and sciences except Yale's can boast a higher percentage than Harvard's, according to the Globe. Dartmouth and Brown lead the league with 25 percent and 19.25 percent respectively.

In the last official University tabulation in 1992, Harvard's overall percentage of tenured women ranked below all other comparable schools in the survey, including the Ivies, Duke and Stanford.

University officials and faculty deplore the low percentages.