Though I will soon be forgotten, I used to have a hand in running a college newspaper editorial page. Tough, thankless job that it is, I am delighted to announce that it has at least prepared me well for the life that line ahead.

Because running a college newspaper editorial page, in addition to making you the darling of compulsive letter writers everywhere and rendering you a bleary-eyed vet of intraextracurricular-activity politics, gives you sharpened vision and brilliant insight. Not to toot my own horn, but I now have what it takes to solve the great problems of our time.

So my gift to Harvard College on this, my final day as a non-alum, is a solution to the two biggest problems at Harvard this year. For throughout the final quarter of my college career, two issues have dominated editorial columns across campus. First, Should Radcliffe Exist? And second, though certainly no less important, Aren't Conservative Students Oppressed?

For most of the past three years, Radcliffe has been a mystery institution that periodically issued a report on its own status, a cryptic "R" in the abbreviated name of some student group. Suddenly this year, students woke from their blissful ignorance and entered a debate over whether this nonentity should continue to non-exist. Earnest pieces on Radcliffe began to clutter the 10,000 magazines of Harvard. The Radcliffe fracas even won the ultimate mark of legitimacy, an Istitute of Politics debate in its honor.

Fuel for the flame was the decision by the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) to continue to bar men from voting. Not that men ever cared before. In fact, they tend to shun the mysterious "R" like the plague, with the exception of that guy who attended the Women's Leadership Conference so he would look sensitive for the Rhodes Scholarship committee (it worked). But once they learned that some club somewhere was barring them from entry--that they were being honest-to-god oppressed--a bunch of men suddenly got incredibly indignant.

The battle cry of "we men are oppressed echoes the louder, more vehement shriek of "we conservatives are persecuted at this liberal hell-hole." True, Harvard got a fairly mild dose of the dread Political Correctness; Harvard's administrators are, thankfully, too smart to go around censoring people still, one faction of conservative students managed to paint itself as battered, beaten-down, eternally voiceless. This powerless bunch later went on to found 57 new conservative organizations and take over the Republican Club.

This year's keyboard-wielding Harvard super-conservatives have come up with a number of timeless articles on such topics as "Liberals are idiots," "Boy are liberals idiots," and "Liberals are idiots because the don't have anything to say." In fact, in recent months they've proven it possible to write entire columns about how little liberals have to say--leaving, unfortunately, no room for any ideas of their own.

Ihave a modest proposal that should make everyone happy: Convert Radcliffe College into the Radcliffe Center of the Glorification of Conservatism.

This way, Radcliffe could continue to exist, albeit in altered from. And all those oppressed men (and a few oppressed hyperconservative women) would finally have a central location, a place to gather and discuss oppressed men's issues, a place where, at long last, they felt there belonged.

Instead of razing its buildings in the name of equality, Radcliffe could preserve the resources that are, indeed, used. Some of Schlesinger Library's outstanding collection might, of course, need to be trashed to make room for the complete William F. Buckley papers and all of the those Rush Limbaugh transcripts, but so be it. Conservatives could even wrest the Agassiz. Theatre from the drama club to stage wistful re-enactments of the Nixon years.

In place of the Bunting Institute (who needs graduate fellowships, anyway?) the Radcliffe Center could host a series of workshops to help conservatives deal with the pressures of living amongst all those vicious liberals. Prospective editorialists could cultivate that characteristic snide tone of voice. Brow-beaten moralists could learn to cope in the presence of revision and plurality.

Of course, the Radcliffe Center's resources would only be available for the right kids of conservatives, so to speak. Anyone who didn't subscribe to the tenents of true Harvard conservatism wouldn't get past the guards.

That means you'd have to believe that any socially liberal ideas (feminism, gay rights, abortion rights) zip right down the slippery slope to cultural relativism and the moral decay of Our Great Nation. You'd have to present yourself as a martyr for defending free speech and then use your well-deserved speech to spout only intolerance. You'd have to dismiss moderate conservatives as sissies, or as closet liberals. You'd have to vehemently deny that you were actually on the fringe.

The creation of the Radcliffe Center would allow everyone to ignore the obvious. Radcliffe has a proud and important past--it served as source of education for women when such sources were scarce. But its use as a college is obsolete. Once the powers-that-were decided to make the Harvard experience co-ed, Radcliffe was destined to be little to be little more than a mystery "R".

Recognizing the truth about Radcliffe would mean admitting that Radcliffe 's presence to undergraduates is already largely symbolic-that Radcliffe already serves as shorthand for "female Harvard students." If RUS disappeared, people would quickly from a Women's Students Association of comparable size and constituency. And Harvard students would find a way to take back the night, Radcliffe or no.