When Ada L. Comstock drafted her diary entry on June 19, 1931, the 56-year-old Radcliffe College president was on edge. That day, Comstock, who rarely strayed from the faithful recording of her meals, her weight and the weather, penned four words that bear evidence to months of anguish in the making: "Fear trouble for Radcliffe."

Her worries stemmed from a battle waged by then-Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, who in 1930 asked the Corporation to relieve him from signing Radcliffe diplomas, a duty required of the University president since the Board of Overseers approved the Radcliffe charter in 1893.

By June of 1931, Lowell had suggested that Radcliffe courses would need to be reevaluated for quality control annually in order to get Harvard's nod.

The diploma incident was eventually resolved, but Comstock's diary helps reveal the dual nature of women's lives at Harvard--as well as the degree to which the tables have turned in a half-century.

In its early years, Radcliffe--through Comstock's tenure--was subject to Harvard's whim, each year having to commission professors to re-teach their courses to the ladies across the Common.

But in recent years, Harvard has been the one courting its neighbor, increasingly willing to adopt Radcliffe students as its own. Meanwhile, Radcliffe has shied away, intent on maintaining its independent status and tradition.

This flip has reached equilibrium only this year, resulting in a merger that dissolves Radcliffe College and creates a new Institute for Advanced Study.

It took just over 100 years to find a happy medium between a role for women at Harvard and institutional independence.

A COLLEGE OF THEIR OWN

In 1893, 14 years after the creation of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (familiarly known as the Annex), with Radcliffe becoming an awkward adolescent, a Crimson editorial reported that the Annex wanted to be more integrated into Harvard.

"It is the hope of the Annex authorities that the two lines of work now running almost parallel may soon merge into one," the editorial read.

According to Radcliffe College Archivist Jane Knowles, some Annex alumnae indeed wanted a closer institutional relationship with Harvard. After all, the point was to get Harvard degrees.

Harvard, however, was proving resistant to Radcliffe's clamors for equal footing.

While the University paid little mind to its down-the-road affiliate during the first half of the century, Lowell's instigation of the diploma dispute is emblematic of the Harvard-Radcliffe tug of war that characterized college life in Cambridge before the start of the Second World War.

RADCLIFFE THE RIVETER