25 Facts About Radcliffe College

Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College.

In 1977 Radcliffe College signed a formal "non-merger merger" agreement with Harvard and completed full integration with Harvard in 1999.

Radcliffe College approached Harvard President Charles William Eliot with the idea, and Eliot approved.

Radcliffe College threatened to scuttle the relationship between the two institutions.

Radcliffe College was forced to agree to a limitation on the size of its student body, with 750 spaces for undergraduates and 250 for graduate students.

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Radcliffe College's was a key figure in the college's early 20th-century development.

Between 1890 and 1963, Radcliffe College awarded more than 750 PhDs and more than 3000 masters degrees to women.

Radcliffe College constructed Hilles Library in 1966 and the Radcliffe College Quadrangle Athletic Center in 1982.

Radcliffe College Institute was an institution premised on the needs of a female life trajectory, providing opportunities that might otherwise have been truncated by women's decisions during early adulthood to leave academia to raise children.

Radcliffe College staff were invested in assisting women graduates with career planning and placement, as well as providing a number of different programs to provide post-graduate study for women.

The Radcliffe College Publishing Course offered students experience in editing and other skills needed to enter the field of publishing.

The Radcliffe College Seminars Program in Landscape Design gave students a chance to study landscape design before it was a course of study at the Harvard Design School, and in a less formal environment.

Beyond the life of the mind, another appeal of Radcliffe was the comparative freedom that its undergraduates enjoyed compared to students at other women's colleges.

Radcliffe College Choral Society was a popular and influential student group.

Radcliffe College Crew is the oldest women's rowing program in the Ivy League.

In 1989, Radcliffe College was undefeated with a Sprints championship and Ivy title.

Harvard students lived closer to the Harvard Yard, while Radcliffe College students had a longer walk to Yard-based classes from the Radcliffe College Quadrangle.

The Radcliffe College Quadrangle was quiet and peaceful, life in the dormitories was friendly and gracious.

The women who had chosen to come to Radcliffe College all were intelligent, quite independent, and concerned with the world around them.

However, some people within the Radcliffe College community were less sanguine about the differences between the two schools, seeing the relationship with Harvard as an institutionalized separate but unequal experience for women.

That same year, several Harvard and Radcliffe dormitories began swapping students through an experimental program, and in 1972 full co-residence between the two colleges was instituted.

In practice most of the energies of Radcliffe College were then devoted to the institution's research initiatives and fellowships, rather than to female undergraduates.

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, now a division of Harvard University, carries on many of the research and professional development programs that Radcliffe College pioneered and has introduced other programs to the worldwide community of scholars.

The Annex gained some vindication against Presidents Eliot, Lowell, and Summers when Drew Gilpin Faust, Dean of the Radcliffe College Institute, replaced Summers and became Harvard's first female president.

Radcliffe College alumnae continue to press Harvard on the question of the university's commitment to women, and increasing the number of female faculty members at Harvard is a particular alumnae interest.

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