Mary Maples Dunn was almost late.

Hanging up from a conference call, the woman about to be named the Radcliffe Institute's first dean rushed across the lawn from her Schlesinger Library office to Fay House, Radcliffe's porticoed headquarters. She arrived to find the upstairs conference room already full.

They were all there--the men and women who had spent the last two years negotiating the merger between Harvard and Radcliffe, a merger they would announce to the public an hour later.

Neil L. Rudenstine was there. Over the last 24 months the president of Harvard had spent hours talking on the phone and exchanging hand-written notes with Nancy-Beth G. Sheerr '71, chairman of the Radcliffe Board of Trustees. In the end, the deal on the table was theirs.

Provost Harvey V. Fineberg '67, who carried the deal to completion, and Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, who worked with Dunn to iron out one of the deal's most prickly issues, were also there. Stalwart Radcliffe trustee Susan S. Wallach '68 sent her greetings from New York.

Radcliffe President Linda S. Wilson was there too. She was about to announce her own long-awaited resignation as part of a deal brokered almost entirely by Sheerr.

Dunn took her seat, sandwiched between Knowles and Fineberg. At last the murmurs about the "historic moment" and "the beginning of a new era" quieted down. With a stroke of a pen, Sheerr and Rudenstine signed a seven-page statement of intent to merge. And in the burst of applause that followed, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, so long in the making, was born.

That Institute will merge Radcliffe's vaunted research centers with $150 million of Harvard capital. Female undergraduates will belong solely to Harvard College forever.

A merger of Harvard and Radcliffe has been called inevitable almost as long as there has been a Radcliffe. But it didn't have to turn out this way. This harmonious moment on April 20 capped two years of hard work and frustrating wrangling over a deal that several times almost slipped away.

This is a story compiled from the recollections of nine individuals who were involved in the process at various points, some of whom preferred to remain anonymous.

It is the story of the nation's oldest and wealthiest University, the 120-year-old women's college down the street and the deal that brought them together.

In the Beginning

Under Harvard and Radcliffe's last major agreement, unveiled in 1977, Radcliffe remained fiscally and administratively independent from Harvard, even as men and women lived and worked together.

But since that time most female undergraduates had come to see themselves as Harvard women and felt little inclination to attend Radcliffe programs Meanwhile women's issues sometimes fell between the cracks--Harvard assumed Radcliffe would take care of them, but Radcliffe lacked the money or the clout to pursue real change.

But one negotiator says that despite the growing need for a revision of the arrangement, longstanding distrust between the two schools kept them apart. As early as the 1930s, President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, had set out to sever ties between Harvard and Radcliffe. Alumnae learned even then to be suspicious of big bad Harvard.