During pre-frosh weekend, PSLM staged a teach-in in Byerly Hall to the consternation of admissions officers. In May, they brought actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, Class of 1992, to the steps of Littauer to blast Harvard for dawdling on the issue.

Mills' committee and PSLM's activists didn't agree on every point. But their sometimes testy relationship produced real results, and a benefits policy that could improve workers' lives.

Drew Gilpin Faust

The criteria for the first permanent dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study were formidable. President Neil L. Rudenstine was looking for a middle-aged female academic with solid professional credentials, a commitment to gender issues, leadership ability and administrative talent, who was willing to pull up stakes, move to Cambridge and sort through the host of pressing decisions awaiting a new dean.

But nearly everyone at Harvard and Radcliffe agrees that Drew Gilpin Faust will do nicely. After the appointment of Faust, a historian from the University of Pennsylvania, was announced April 2, the praise--and relief--from both quarters was palpable.

"This is the best appointment Harvard's made in years," said Harvard Dean of Freshmen Elizabeth Studley Nathans.

"[She] gives us a focus, an intellectual center. Now there's someone in authority," said Radcliffe Dean for Educational Programs Tamar March.

Faust is a specialist in the Civil War and the author of the well-regarded Mothers of Invention. Currently the director of Penn's women's studies program, she will reassure older alumnae who fear the Institute might shed its historical attention to women.

Before last year's merger, Radcliffe College was accustomed to distant, fractured leadership. Radcliffe's deans hope Faust will bring a firm hand and the intellectual gravitas the Institute will need to establish itself in its first years.

She will control a $350 million endowment and will have authority to decide a range of important questions, from the focus of the Institute's programs to plans for the Agassiz Theatre and Byerly Hall.

The new dean has signaled that she will stand up for her beliefs. The only woman on the Dean's Council, she promises to be an "agitator" for the concerns of women, including female undergraduates.

Shaping the Institute would challenge any woman at the helm in coming years. Harvard and Radcliffe both seem to think Faust is more than suited for the task.