Traditionally single-sex programs and prizes, like the Radcliffe Traveling Fellowships, have been handed over to Harvard College and opened up to both men and women.

With the last vestiges of undergraduate programming turned over to Harvard, Radcliffe has pointed its eyes inward and streamlined the application process for its own post-graduate fellows.

There is now a common application and single due date for all those looking to be a Radcliffe fellow, and the Institute is hoping to unite the formerly disparate programs of its "jewels," which include the Bunting Institute and the Schlesinger Library.

Fifty-six fellows will arrive at Radcliffe in the fall, the most ever in Radcliffe history, and the Institute is now working to create a central place for all the offices of all its future fellows.

Radcliffe tried to reassert its right to the Cronkhite Graduate Center--a large building that the Institute owns--but was met with a bevy of criticism from graduate students at other Harvard schools who live there now.

The students and Radcliffe administrators faced off in a March meeting at Cronkhite about Radcliffe's plans to turn dorm rooms into office space for its fellows. Radcliffe ultimately capitulated--at least for a year--and put off the renovations, while reserving 10 rooms in Cronkhite to use for office space this coming year if necessary.

Dunn sent a case of champagne to the graduate students' victory celebration.

But Radcliffe still plans to renovate Cronkhite for its own uses.

"I want our fellows to bump into each other. I want to mix up the units as much as possible. I like the plans for Cronkhite that muddle [all of the fellows]," Faust says.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences will have to relocate its admissions office in 2006 when the agreement with Radcliffe to use Byerly Hall runs out.

Radcliffe hasn't decided what it wants to do with Byerly yet, but with an internal space evaluation currently underway, administrators are certain the Institute will need the building.

"The sooner Dean Knowles makes a move, the more I'll like it," Dunn said in March. "He's guaranteed a time in Byerly to help him discover a [different] space."

With the new Radcliffe well on its way, those closest to the merger mingled and munched on hors d'oeuvres in April at the portrait unveiling of the last president of Radcliffe College, Linda S. Wilson.

And only a few weeks later, Radcliffe's near and dear gathered again for the first in an Institute lecture series, featuring a lecture by Dean of Stanford Law School Kathleen Sullivan.

Sullivan compared the precisely worded Harvard and Radcliffe merger agreement--a product of almost two years of nitty-gritty negotiations between the two schools--to the Constitution of the United States.

"I can't think of a better example of a reflective equilibrium," Sullivan said. "I want to express every best wish for a successful future for the Institute."