One of Bunting-Smith's fighting points duringher tenure concerned study space for students atRadcliffe. In 1966, Hilles Library opened in theQuad as a replacement for the smaller library forstudents located in Radcliffe Yard.
"She really wanted it to be a multi-purposebuilding," says Suzanne G. Kemple, associatelibrarian of Hilles Library. "Hilles has a cinema,an art gallery space, classrooms, rooms that canused for group study and the Morse music library."
Bunting-Smith's vision of a building that wouldbring students and Faculty together to promotelearning and exchange ideas was realized with theconstruction of the unique building design ofarchitect Max Abramowitz. His alcove arrangement,according to Kemple, was meant to bring studentscloser together with the books of the library.
Today, the old Radcliffe Library in RadcliffeYard houses the Schlesinger Library on the Historyof Women in America. Hilles itself changed when,in 1971, management of the library was transferredto Harvard.
Kemple, however, does not feel thatBunting-Smith saw the library as any sort ofduplicate or equivalent to Lamont Library inHarvard Yard, noting that "Radcliffe Library wasoriginally a research library."
Bumps in the Road
At the end of her presidency, Bunting-Smith wasoccasionally the victim of the unrest andrebellion that characterized the Harvard andRadcliffe student bodies in the late 1960s.
In May 1967, a handful of students participatedin a five-day hunger strike in protest ofBunting-Smith's refusal to allow an unlimitednumber of seniors to live off-campus. The crisiswas rooted in student disagreement with thePresident's steadfast conception of the RadcliffeHouse system.
In December 1968, Bunting-Smith was forced tofly back from a conference in North Carolina tomeet with black student protesters who weredemanding minimum quotas for the admission ofblack students into future Radcliffe classes. By1969, chaos reigned at Harvard and an abbreviatedsit-in took place in the Radcliffe president'soffice.