Some friends were discussing Radcliffe College the other day. When Harvard College, its sibling institution within Harvard University, decided to accept female students, the school was left with a huge endowment and no students. The bureaucrats running Radcliffe responded by running a fellowship program for female scholars, nearly all of whom were older than college age and working on obscure academic subjects. Radcliffe faded into oblivion and eventually most of their endowment was stolen by the larger university.
Could they have done something different with their hundreds of millions of dollars?
My idea was that they should have aggressively shucked off their reputation as a snobby northeastern school for rich girls, but kept their mission of educating women aged 18-22. The growth in U.S. population is happening mostly in the Southwest so the new Radcliffe would be there, perhaps in Phoenix, Santa Fe, or Los Angeles. To ensure that the graduates took up powerful places in society, the school would have only three majors: Pre-Med, Pre-Law, 5-year MBA. To make sure that the press and the public would recognize the new demographic, the school would accept only “women of color”. No white or Asian-American students would be permitted to apply.
The new school would have been called “Radcliffe Southwestern Pre-Professional College for Women of Color”. Compare to what they are actually doing these days: http://www.radcliffe.edu/ .
Would improverished Laotians, Cambodians and nearly-black Pacific-Rim Asians be allowed?
Surely Asian-American women are “women of color”.
Steve, you’re absolutely right. Good catch.
Make it the (-clears throat-) “Radcliffe Southwestern Pre-Professional College for Underrepresented Women of Color.”
Of course I predict if this plan were put in place the students would “rise up” within approx. two academic quarters, take over the administration building and begin a hunger strike demanding ethnic studies departments, women’s studies, “peace and conflict studies,” etc. At least then the name could be shortened to “Radcliffe Center for Justice.”
PS the “of color” thing really gets under my skin, no pun intended. Like white people have no color, their skin is totally devoid of pigment, never reddens, nevermind their eyes or hair. If people mean “non-white people” they should have the balls to fraggin’ say so.
A great idea. They could even claim highly successful placements in medical/law schools, as all grads would have the advantage of being “URM”‘s
How about “Radcliffe Southwestern Pre-Professional College for Underrepresented Women of Color and Daughters of Poor White Trash”
Hey, My kids need an education too!
I had one of those really great conversations with my 20 year old daughter this weekend about her direction in life, educational opportunities, etc… We ended up under a banner advertising “$50,000 for college, Join the Navy”.
It may have put enough terror in her heart to pass a few classes this semester 🙂
But really, a nicely endowed college in Phoenix with a mission to advance the, um, under-represented… SWEET!
There are a number of factual inaccuracies in your post:
1) The so-called “non-merger-merger” happened in 1977 (and informally earlier in the 1960s and 1970s), but Radcliffe did not become an institute for advanced study until 1999.
2) The Radcliffe fellows are not just female scholars — there are male fellows as well.
3) I would hardly call the topics that current fellows are researching “obscure” — research topics span the gauntlet from art history to physics and mathematics. Computer science, incidentally, has often been a major focus.
4) Radcliffe’s endowment is still very much Radcliffe’s, and has not been absorbed (or “stolen”!) by the larger university.
5) In addition to providing a opportunity for senior scholars, both from Harvard as well as from elsewhere all around the world, to come together and be provided with time and resources to work on independent projects, the Radcliffe fellows benefit the greater Harvard community by giving talks, organizing conferences, and otherwise participating in campus intellectual life.
6) It seems that Harvard has been doing a fine job of producing graduates who take up powerful places in society by explicitly not providing majors in pre-med, pre-law, or business.
Sam: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/04.22/rad.final.html talks about the endowment situation. It looks as though Radcliffe had $200 million in 1999 when they started that institute. The folks at http://www.olin.edu started with only a bit more and they (1) don’t charge tuition, and (2) operate in the high-cost Boston area. So Radcliffe clearly had the resources to start an interesting new undergrad college. If computer science has been a major focus for Radcliffe, that really underscores the irrelevance of what they are doing. Given the research budgets of ARPA, NSF, Google, Microsoft, and IBM, why is Radcliffe funding CS research? To your point 6, about Harvard grads taking up powerful places in society… economists who studied students who were accepted at Harvard but decided to go to cheaper less-selective schools found that these folks ahd the same lifetime income as Harvard grads. If your parents are wealthy and powerful, you’re very likely going to be wealthy and powerful regardless of where you go and how hard you work in school (check the biographies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump). It doesn’t make sense for a typical Harvard undergrad to major in pre-med because very likely her parents already own a chain of for-profit hospitals (for example, I told a Harvard junior that I was taking flying lessons and she cheerily responded with tales of flying her family’s little airplane… a Pilatus PC-12 ($3.4 million turboprop)).
What are “pre-med” and “pre-law”? Can you name any universities that have such majors? Can you name any medical schools that accept students who have majored in “pre-med”? Likewise for law schools and “pre-law”?
Echo Matthew’s comment — there is no such thing as a pre-med or pre-law major. And if Radcliffe of the West really existed, wouldn’t it make more sense to make it an engineering/tech/science school geared towards women, since President Summers seems to think that they fall behind? If I ever have a daughter, I know that I am selecting her grade/high school based on strength of the science curriculum that they offer her.
Also, I don’t think that women need any additional help getting into law or medical school. Starting in 2001, women became the majority of enrolled law school students. And in 2003-2004, they made up 49.7% of enrolled medical school students. I think the current Radcliffe money is well-spent encouraging “Women in Astronomy” (one of the links on the page you linked to), rather than pushing them towards professional schools.
I don’t know if this is true, but my understanding was that it’s really black MEN who are way-under-represented, not black women. Blacks generally are underrepresented, but black men are more under-represented than black women. Maybe there really should be more programs for black men.
Michael: The goal was to figure out something that would be true to Radcliffe’s roots of educating women 18-22 years old, while still being relevant to society’s needs. Black men may need help, but they aren’t women aged 18-22.
Folks who doubt that there is a pre-med major: It might be worth investing in a Google search before asserting that “pre-med” does not exist anywhere or that students who got so radical with their major would never be admitted. http://www.barry.edu/preMed/About/Default.asp (first result back from Google) shows a university that does have such a major and claims that 90 percent of their graduates get into med school on their first try (not a very different percentage from MIT grads, though the tuition is much lower and the weather is much nicer during the academic year).