Word: rus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WORD FROM University Hall and Radcliffe these days indicates the University may soon be holding a referendum on whether to continue funding the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS). Leaders of RUS have charged that University Hall is pushing for the referendum simply because RUS bothers them, because it raises issues the College doesn't want to deal with. The charge seems valid...
...year history, RUS has had a rather impressive record of lobbying the College for action on issues like rape security, tenuring women, and sexual harassment. On those issues, its voice has often been alone. If RUS at times seems overly vocal, that tactic is only appropriate, since these are the very issues on which the University is most secretive. For example, even when women are upheld in charging professors with-sexual harassment, the College has no official policy of telling the student involved what punitive steps, if any, it has taken. And there are many more rapes on campus than...
Paradoxical? Not really. Harvard's got good reasons to think it can silence bothersome groups like RUS, which has often stood alone in calling attention to sexual harassment and other problems. The University seems to be assuming that, encumbered by size and pacified by past gains, the campus women's movement has lost its militant zeal and become a silent (near)-majority. How else to explain University Hall's headlong rush to execute RUS, a move it wouldn't have dared to take just five years ago? Countless minority groups outside of Harvard have failed to capitalize on early successes...
...Harvard seems to be gambling that the same maxim will hold true again. It hopes the substantial gains women have made on campus will include similar complacency, allowing University Hall to pull out of RUS, the Clearinghouse and perhaps other commitments to women...
...Harvard is forgetting another tested political adage. It's a lot easier politically not to give than to take away. Harvard's spurning of the third world center request wasn't killing a sacred cow so much as refusing to establish a new one. RUS and the Clearinghouse, on the other hand, are traditions, remnants of an activist era still remembered fondly. The University obviously feels anxious to do away with such nettlesome relics. But in picking a fight with Harvard's women, instead of being satisfied with the status quo, it may be getting into its own Vietnam...