"There wasn't much goodwill on either side," one official says.

Enter Sheerr. Even as an undergraduate she was devoted to the Radcliffe cause--as president of the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS), she advised an alumnae committee examining a proposed revision of the Harvard and Radcliffe's relationship in 1970. She began serving on Radcliffe's Board of Trustees in 1985 and was elected its chairman in 1990.

Sheerr is deliberate and unswerving--according to Rudenstine, "rock-like"--once her mind is made up. With an office in Fay House and no other job to distract her from her volunteer position, she has an unusual level of oversight into the day-to-day operations of Radcliffe.

As Radcliffe began a process of long-term planning, Rudenstine and Sheerr were joined by Wilson for a friendly chat in the summer of 1997. In the Morning Room of ivy-covered Loeb House, the home of the Harvard Corporation, the three spoke in the most general sense about the intertwined past of the two schools and their potential for joining. Even then they laid out the idea of a Radcliffe Institute as their ultimate vision for the future.

"The response was immediate," Sheerr says. "The overall conception of vision was a meeting of the minds."

It was the first of a number of informal conversations between Rudenstine and Sheerr that took place that summer.

Rudenstine is known among administrators as a quiet consensus-builder, the kind of man people just trust. The two quickly established a bond.

"They really hit it off," says one source. "They're both straight-shooters."

But while Sheerr and Rudenstine were talking big picture, Sheerr already had her Board of Trustees looking at specifics. "There wasn't any attempt to soft-pedal the discussion," says then-Board member Stanley Miller '52.

Miller says the board was acutely aware that Radcliffe was facing a financial crunch. Despite a fundraising campaign that was chugging into its seventh year, Radcliffe was burning money on unusually high administrative costs. From the beginning, the board realized it might have to sever official ties with undergraduates. Only then could it sell Radcliffe's buildings and land to Harvard--worth a considerable sum in the overheated Cambridge market.

"If you could work out a deal with Harvard, you could turn things around," Miller says.

The Women At the Top

While the process began with a conversation between Sheerr, Wilson and Rudenstine, the talking group was soon pared to two.

"It began small, Rudenstine says. "At each step of the way, as we became sure that this was the way we wanted to go, more people became involved."

But after the first Loeb House meeting, Wilson largely dropped out of the negotiations. While sources say she communicated frequently with the trustees, Wilson's contact with Harvard was virtually non-existent.