“The writers misunderstand the terms of the Radcliffe-Harvard merger and the identity of the new Radcliffe Institute,” she wrote. “Radcliffe is not a women’s public policy institute.”

While a “substantial portion” of academic activity goes to gender studies, she added that, through the fellowship program, the Institute supports a broad range of fields, “from poetry to sculpture to history to string physics.”

According to Judith Vichniac, who heads the fellowship program, 13 of this year’s 51 fellows include gender in their projects. She says gender studies remain a “major intellectual concern” when Radcliffe picks its fellows.

The letter-writers cast doubt on Radcliffe’s commitment to this part of its mission, specifically questioning the way the Institute recruited a group of astrophysicists—male and female—for this year’s class of fellows.

Radcliffe Dean of Science Barbara J. Grosz, who worked to assemble the group, echoes Faust’s defense of including science among the Institute’s priorities. She also says inviting male astrophysicists is crucial to the program’s success.

“My goal is to the get the world’s best scientists here. We would not have a first-rate science program if we didn’t have men,” she says. “And we would not have the best women here because the best women want to be around the best scientists.”

But the letter’s authors say they are skeptical of this claim and hope other alumnae will join in their objections.

“Rather than serving the heritage of Radcliffe, it’s becoming just a generalized intellectual institute,” Greenspun says. “If there are a lot of women watching and paying a little more attention, maybe we’ll get a better or more representative group next year.”

This letter marks the second time in as many years that the fellowship program has come under fire in the Radcliffe Quarterly for its changing focus.

In fall 2001, more than half of the 2000-01 class of fellows, along with one of the program’s former directors, suggested that Radcliffe may be neglecting its commitment to gender issues.

At the time, former fellow Kathleen M. Sands, who helped write the letter, expressed concern that women and gender do not play a “clearly central role” in the fellowship program’s latest incarnation.

“So far as we can see, there are no specific procedures in place to actually make that happen,” said Sands, an associate professor of religious studies at UMass Boston. “We wonder therefore how deep the commitment of the new Radcliffe Institute is to structuring that.”

When she defended the program, Faust said that year’s class of fellows was “heavily focused on gender issues” and she pointed to the recent appointment of four prominent women scholars as Radcliffe faculty as reflections of a “strong Institute interest in gender studies.”

'ONE REGRET'

Though many of the fellows who wrote the 2001 letter were drawing on just their one-year experience at Radcliffe, scholars who have participated in the program more than once raise similar questions.