Word: ratio
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...there is any villain in all this, it is probably the ratio. And the ratio has become a hot topic of late. Last spring, a committee chaired by Karl Strauch, professor of Physics, issued a much-ballyhooed list of recommendations about the Harvard-Radcliffe relationship, the most important of which was that the ratio be dropped in favor of an admissions policy of "equal access." Equal access sounds great on paper: every applicant will be judged solely on the basis of his or her qualifications, without regard to sex. No longer will there be any of those artificial quotas...
...have in dealing with each other here are common to many college campuses, and are largely attributable to the fact that this is 1975 and the people here are between 18 and 22 years old. But just about all of these problems are exaggerated by the fact that the ratio of men to women at Harvard is approximately 2.5 to 1. If you are living at Radcliffe, where the ratio is maintained at 1 to 1, you probably won't feel the impact of this all-important imbalance in your House, but it will be hard to avoid...
...hard to estimate the actual meaning of the 2.5 to 1 ratio, simply because it's impossible to tell what things would be like if the ratio were equal. But it's a safe bet to attribute the dismal history of women's organizations at Harvard in large part to the fact that women have felt too isolated and scattered to develop much of a sense of solidarity. Women in the Yard and the River Houses have complained that it's hard for them to simply meet other women and make friends, and women's groups in the Houses have...
...ratio also seems to have reverberations that affect the quality of male-female relationships. From what I know about other colleges, most Harvard men are unusually reluctant to involve themselves in anything more than platonic relationships--with Radcliffe women, that is. It's hard to pin down the reasons for this, and of course they vary from case to case. One big factor is probably the fear that if you start something with a woman in your House, as opposed to a woman at Wellesley or Pine Manor, it will inevitably become something "intense." But another big factor is probably...
...world Harvard plans to increase the number of women and maintain the same number of men without making the total number of students any larger. And one crucial point is that no one has ever predicted that equal access will lead to a 1 to 1 ratio in the forseeable future. The best that can be hoped for, apparently, is a 60-40 split of men to women over the next 5 years...