May Conducts Open Hearing On Coed Life

"The fact is that some of the people in the Harvard Houses are going to be disappointed," Dean May said yesterday in his opening remarks at an open hearing, held before a three-member committee, to discuss which Houses should go coed.

Dean May is chairman of the committee, which will decide by next Thursday or Friday which Houses will be coed next year. The committee's two other members are Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of Government and Social Relations, and Genevieve Austin, Radcliffe dean of residence.

Varying Tone

The hearing, which drew almost 100 people at one point to the Winthrop JCR, lasted nearly three hours, and was spirited, dramatic, and at times bitter in tone.

May explained that if all the Houses went coed, there would be a 7-1 ratio, with 45 to 65 girls per House. The situation, he said last week, would be unacceptable.

In the most dramatic presentation of the afternoon, six members of Winthrop House- three men and three women- urged the committee to consider the emotions of the 300 men and women involved in the current coed exchange by not shuttling them any further for the sake of ratios.

"In the past few weeks, we've begun to feel very much at home here, which is something we've never felt before," one Winthrop coed said. "Right now we feel very threatened."

John D. Hanify'71, one of the six from Winthrop. charged that the Kagan Committee on Co-residential Living, which has now dissolved itself, had an unstated, informal understanding that Adams, Lowell and Winthrop would be coed on a permanent basis. "It would be unacceptable at this point to ask the girls now at Harvard to move back," Hanify said.

Bruce Chalmers, Master of Winthrop House and a member of the Kagan Committee, replied that "the Committee did not regard this as a long term plan. "He hastened to add." "I unreservedly support the six Winthrop representatives [in that] continuity should be regarded as particularly valuable."

Militant Stand

The most militant stand was taken by members of Dunster House. Robert A. Ferguson'64. Allston Burr Senior Tutor of Dunster House, claimed that the Dunster proposal was widely misunderstood.

"It doesn't insist on a pervasive 4-1 ratio. There should be a great deal of experimentation- a variety of ratios, with a minimum of five Houses coed," he said.

Ferguson said that a 2-1 ratio would limit the exchange to three Houses and force "the maximum amount of disruption in these Houses" with five-ninths of the selected Houses having new members.