HOUSE COMMITTEE AND THE BASTION

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I would just like to clear up several ambiguous points which occurred in your March 5th article on the Leverett House Committee Elections. As you know, the House Committee's Counstitution explicitly limits membership to males. Your article, however, quoted me as determined to deny Miss Kleinberg an opportunity for candidacy even if the Constitution had not been explicit on this point. The quote is ambiguous, for I would not have denied Miss Kleinberg her "Constitutional" right. I would have, however, verbally discouraged her candidacy because Miss Kleinberg has no official or permanent attachment to Leverett House and would not have had to live within a community which, as a "House Commitee members, she would be representing.

This, indeed, is the issue. As long as Harvard and Radcliffe students have separate residences, male-female House Committees with remain infeasible, not because women are inferior but because they have no stake in the Harvard House system. The way to "put some life into co-education" is not to install women on committees where under the present system they have no justified place, but to work to change through study and planning an unnatural system.

Secondly, the "bastion of maleness" quotes attributed to me were out of context and incomplete. I used these terms to describe the House Committee under the present male community system which I have begun to question deeply. Jeffrey Donner '70   Chairman   Leverett House Committee