The council tackled a number of safety issues this fall, subsidizing the Rape Aggression Defense program (RAD), "Model Mugging" and helping to form HASTE, the Harvard Alliance for Safety Training and Education.

Those measures were achieved by the work of many PUCC members, according to Franke-Ruta.

PUCC's role in the formation of HASTE was particularly remarkable, she says.

"I don't know when the last time the U.C. spawned a new organization was," she says.

Franke-Ruta says the relevance of these safety resolutions to students was demonstrated by the alleged attempted rape of a student on Tuesday night.

"It shows the necessity for the University and for students to pay more attention to safety issues," she says.

Several legislative measures on gender-neutrality have also gone through the council recently.

At the second session of this semester, amendments implementing gender-neutral language in the council's constitution and in official council documents were passed.

And last week, the council passed a resolution calling on the University to change "freshman" to "first-year" in official University use.

But Rawlins, the PUCC member who sponsored all the resolutions, says the council still has a long way to go before women are treated as equal partners.

She condemns the "general ugliness" she says characterized the debate on gender neutrality, an issue she views as a "seemingly simple tool" to make women more comfortable on the council.

And some sources close to PUCC admit that the coalition does not itself reflect the equality it strives to attain for the council.

"I don't feel that most of the men on PUCC are as concerned about equality as they say," says Suk, a PUCC founder who ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the council.

She says that most of PUCC's founders were men, and that these men tended to dominate the organization.

"At the time, I sent out e-mail to everyone trying to get more women involved," Suk says. "How could we say we were going to reform the council, if we were that way ourselves?"