Advertisement

College To End Gender-Specific Student Prizes

Dean Lewis announces new science initiative

All Harvard College prizes and fellowships will be available to men and women next year without gender restriction, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 said Monday.

The announcement comes after a legal review of all the College's gender-restricted prizes to determine whether they could be made available to both genders without violating the donor's original intent.

The lifting of the gender restriction affects the Paul Revere Frothingham Prize, an award that is being given this year with "manliness" intact as one of its criteria.

Advertisement

In the future, "we will simply be inviting the Houses to nominate women" in addition to men, Lewis writes in an e-mail message, and "manliness" will be interpreted as "character."

Lewis said that in recent years the committee awarding the Frothingham has considered "manliness" to mean "character."

However, the Fellowship Office at the Office of Career Services--where the Frothingham nominations are collected--said earlier this spring that the Frothingham has only been awarded to men in recent years.

The legal review's findings allow for certain athletic prizes to remain gender-restricted.

"The situation of the athletic prizes is different, since the men's and women's prizes are awarded for different activities, in which men and women do not compete against each other," Lewis wrote in an e-mail message.

Recommended Articles

Advertisement