In a ceremony that included Harvard officials and Renee Landers '74, then president of the Harvard Board of Overseers, the gate closest to Canaday Hall was dedicated to the history of coeducation.
Yet no acknowledgement was made in the ceremony of the institution that had made coeducation possible. Wilson, the president of Radcliffe, sat on the stage. But she had no speaking part in the ceremony.
"It was mind-boggling," an alumna says.
Avery says that Radcliffe felt "slighted."
With the ceremony months in the planning, and a formal event at that, Radcliffe officials concluded that they'd been intentionally--and publicly--slighted by Harvard College.
What Is To Come
"In one sense I admire Harvard for not encouraging division, but in another sense I see the cost," says Drew Gilpin Faust, the incoming dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, when asked about her thoughts on Harvard having a women's center.
But if Harvard and Lewis thought that along with the merger agreement, the Radcliffe irritant had at last faded away, Faust seems to have something different in mind.
The dean of the Institute will serve on the board that supervises the Trust's funds.
And Faust says that after attending this year's Gender at the Gates Conference, she is convinced she and the Institute have to speak out for women at Harvard.
Lewis said he found it "odd" that Wilson had a place with he and President Neil L. Rudenstine at the round table at Faculty meetings.
Yet Faust sees her place on the Dean's Council--also at Rudenstine's side--as her biggest opportunity for advocacy.
"Quite simply, we are going to become a voice for women at Harvard," Faust says. "I'm going to be the only female at the deans' roundtable and there is a motive to be an agitator...I'm not so sure that's the mission those people who hired me wanted me to have...but it needs to be done."