Just four days after Harvard and Radcliffe announced the two schools' intent to merge, hundreds of eager prospective students and their parents crammed into a cavernous Science Center lecture hall. The high school seniors gathered to hear the presidents of the two schools speak, a highlight of pre-frosh weekend.

In her remarks, Radcliffe President Linda S. Wilson assured the crowd that the traditionally male-dominated Harvard has changed.

"Now there really is opportunity on every side for everyone," Wilson said. "Everyone is welcome here."

But Wilson hasn't always thought so.

For years, Wilson and other Radcliffe officials have quietly insisted--and its alumnae and supporters have all but shouted--that women are not, in fact, entirely welcome at Harvard. They said women still faced subtle forms of discrimination at Harvard and needed Radcliffe as an advocate and a supportive space.

In a speech in 1991, not long after she assumed the presidency, Wilson insisted women couldn't rely solely on Harvard.

"Full access for women students to a Harvard education goes well beyond just opening the doors to classrooms, labs and libraries," Wilson said then, countering outgoing Harvard President Derek C. Bok's assertion that Radcliffe's role as an undergraduate institution should end.

"It is much more complicated to move on to those much more subtle ways in which women students have not yet been allowed fully to flourish," Wilson said. "We are unwilling to let go of our connection with...our students."

Eight years later, however, Radcliffe is doing just that.

And while Radcliffe has been moving toward a transferal of its undergraduate responsibilities to Harvard for years, some undergraduates now say they don't understand why Radcliffe thinks its job is suddenly over.

Mission Accomplished?

During Wilson's tenure, Radcliffe has strengthened its research arms--the Murray Research Center, the Schlesinger Library, the Bunting Institute and the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute (RPPI).

Collaboration between the sexes has been a watchword during the past few years of Wilson's tenure, while she has downplayed the role of Radcliffe as an exclusively female space.

In 1993, Wilson worked to found RPPI. Two years later, the Board of Trustees reorganized the college into two wings: educational programs and the Radcliffe Institutes for Advanced Studies.

In these intervening years, Wilson's rhetoric about the place of students at Radcliffe has been conveniently bendable.