Keep the Girls in Lamont

They've been letting Cliffies into Lamont for close to two weeks now and lo! the hallowed walls have not fallen. In fact, the short tenure of emergency coeducation in Lamont has accomplished what years of verbiage could not -- proven, once and for all, that people can study for Harvard degrees in a heterosexual library.

There now seems to be no reason for the library administrators to fulfill their promise and end the arrangement on Sunday. In fact, there is more reason than ever to allow Cliffies to use Lamont.

The new Hilles Library in the Radcliffe Quad is attractive, comfortable, and convenient for Cliffies to use for taking out reserve books at night. But during the day, when the girls are in the Square and might like to spend a spare hour between classes looking at a reserve book, there is no place for them to go. While Radcliffe once housed its books midway between the Quad and the Square (and conveniently across the street from the Graduate Center where many Cliffies eat lunch), now there is nothing but an intellectual wasteland stretching the long mile up Garden Street.

Furthermore, Hilles's location should relieve Harvard men of what seems to have been their chief grounds for barring Cliffies: the fear that the girls, like locusts, will descend at 9 p.m. to pick reserve book shelves clean. It would be a rare Cliffies who would choose to trudge to Lamont just to get a book when a much more attractive building sat just a few steps outside her door. Nor would Cliffies be likely to brave the snows of January reading period to crowd the boys out of their accustomed carrels.

Letting girls stay in Lamont would work no hardship on the boys (who are, after all, free to use Hilles if they should be passing by), and would be one less inconvenience for Cliffies. The administrators merely have to view what was an emergency measure as an experiment--one that has succeeded.