Six Sisters?

If Radcliffe's transformation hasn't quite followed the Pembroke path, neither has it gone the route of its Seven Sister schools.

The Group--which traditionally included Radcliffe, Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Vassar College, and Wellesley College--has steadfastly maintained its identity as a collection of independent liberal arts colleges.

With the exception of Vassar, they had all remained single-sex as well.

In 1967, Vassar's Board of Trustees rejected an offer by Yale University to move the school from Poughkeepsie, N.Y. and merge with the New Haven institution.

Instead, the school went fully coeducational in 1969, forcing the collection of schools to begin referring to itself more accurately as the "seven siblings."

Representatives of the seven said yesterday that they are not sure if Radcliffe's merger with Harvard means a new name change is in order--to the six siblings.

The group has continued to meet once a year, each sending its president and other top administrators to one member's campus in order to discuss issues considered pertinent to one member's campus in order to discuss issues considered pertinent to all. Last year, the group gathered at Bryn Mawr.

"[The member schools] still consider themselves to have things in common that allow them to have common interest," said Ann E. Shanahan, director of administration and special events in the office of college relations at Smith.

Representatives of the seven said that they're not yet sure if the new Radcliffe Institute will send representatives to this year's meeting in November.

Shanahan said her school would be happy to welcome interim Dean of Radcliffe Mary Maples Dunn as Radcliffe's representative to the president's gathering. Dunn, who takes office July 1, is the former president of Smith College.

And Bryn Mawr officials said even if Raddcliffe chooses not to attend, a new sister won't be asked to fill her seat.

"If some other college bopped up and said 'can we come?' we probably would say no,"' said Dean of the Undergraduate College at Bryn Mawr Karen M. Tidmarsh.

"It's such a historically formed group, that even if someone peeled off, I don't think anyone else would think it would be appropriate to join," she added.

Most of the seven siblings said they had seen Radcliffe's transformation coming for years, and, as a result, the move won't much affect the mostly informal ties they maintain.

"Radcliffe has not seemed to us a women's college in the most ordinary sense for quite a while," Tidmarsh said.

Yet the decision by one its members formally drop its college' title has "brought into focus," in the words of one member, the future of single-sex education in America.

The Barnard College Office for Public Affairs, for instance, has been flooded with calls since last week's merger announcement. Barnard, an independent women's college, is affiliated with Columbia University. Women attending Barnard can take class and participate in extra-curricular activities at either school.

So many news organization wanted comment about Radcliffe from Barnard President Judith R. Shapiro that she issued a press release stressing the historical differences between the two schools.

"There has been a bit of puzzlement that people are somehow reading this as the death knell of women's education, when in fact there's been an extraordinary increase in the health of women's college," said Barnard Director of Public Affairs Lucas Held.

According to Held, the number of applications to the nation's 78 all-women's undergraduate institutions has drastically risen in the 90s.

"[The merger] doesn't shake us in our boots," Shanahan said. "We're confident and comfortable in the idea that Smith and a number of other women's college are an important part of the educational landscape and will not just disappear into the night."