Gate Crasher

A flyer in the Science Center announced an upcoming "Celebration of Women at Harvard College", to take place on Saturday, October 4, 1997. It looked like a typical Harvard event that is free and open to the public, and it said you could register online.

The "Celebration" was to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Harvard allowing female students to live in the freshman dorms in Harvard Yard.

I found the phrase "Women at Harvard College" odd. Harvard College did not admit women back in 1972. My Class of 1979 still had separate admissions offices for Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. While we received degrees from Harvard, primitive computer printouts of class rolls listed all the female students as "Radcliffe", while the men were "Harvard".

My freshman dorm didn't house women until my class entered in 1975, and we were only in the I, J, and K staircases of Wigglesworth Hall. Those entryways were right across from the Harvard Police Station, which at that time was in the basement of Grays Hall. (Wigglesworth was viewed as less safe than other dorms in Harvard Yard since it was on Mass Ave near Harvard Square, a busy place with sketchy people.)

Tickets for the discussion panels that would follow the October 4 ceremony needed to be ordered at least a week in advance. I requested a ticket online for the Science discussion. A reply email, from womenreq@fas.harvard.edu and signed by "The Committee for the Celebration of Women at Harvard College", told me I must pick up my ticket at University Hall by October 2.

I was spending the year at Harvard as a Science Scholar at the Bunting Institute (which was part of Radcliffe College, which was part of Harvard University), but the math department had kindly given me a desk in an office in the Science Center.

I wrote back and asked them to send my ticket via University mail to my math department address. The reply from "The Celebration Committee" said that they would set aside two tickets for me and reiterated that I needed to pick them up at University Hall by October 2.

As I told a friend at the time, "This seems to me to be part of a pattern I've seen where everything `for women' has lots of barriers in the way, while analogous things for men don't. It's as if they don't want people to show up. As a Harvard woman alum, and a Bunting Fellow, I think they should make it easier for me to go to this event".

Ever curious, I wrote back:

Dear The Celebration Committee,

Thank you for your message. Could you please explain why one

needs tickets for this event, why they cannot be sent to me,

and why I have to pick them up in advance of the date? I

do not have time to run down there to pick them up, and

would prefer that they be sent to me or that I pick them

up at the door. Thank you.

Prof. Silverberg

[followed by my Harvard centrex phone number and @math.harvard.edu email address]

I got a very nice reply, this time actually signed with a human's name (with the titles Administrative Assistant to the Dean, and Manager of the Office of the Dean of Harvard College), explaining that students need to pick up their tickets, they replied before they noticed that I'm a faculty member, and he had already instructed one of the assistants to send me my ticket. Tickets were needed because Sever Hall has limited space and they "anticipate that this will be a popular event; tickets would therefore provide means with which to minimize disappointment."

I found it hard to believe that the Science panel would really be such a popular event.

At the "Celebration", the registration people were prepared with pre-made name tags for everyone except me. They were very confused about how I could have a ticket but not a name tag. I learned that they only expected invited people to be there, and while they were OK with students registering online, it never occurred to them that anyone but a student would [be so gauche as to try to] attend without being invited.

I felt as if I were crashing the party.

The band played in the rain, and dignitaries who were kept dry under a tent gave speeches to a small wet audience, just outside the wrought iron fence that surrounds Harvard Yard. They talked about how now Harvard --- students, faculty, etc. --- is fully co-educational.

Radcliffe President Linda Wilson was put in the second row of dignitaries, and wasn't given a speaking role. The word "marginalized" came to mind.

The event included the dedication of a "small gate" with "no official name" that had been erected two years earlier. The dignitaries told us that this gate symbolized that women were at last being let in.

That gate is currently known as the Bradstreet Gate, after Anne Bradstreet, a 17th century poet who migrated to Massachusetts. Later Harvard publications tried to rewrite history to give the impression that the gate was officially named after Bradstreet at the October 1997 celebration.

The gate isn't on a main path, and every time I've gone out of my way to try to go through it, it's been locked.

Almost no one went to the Science panel in Sever Hall. I found it rather sad. Nevertheless, they didn't let anyone in who didn't have a ticket. The audience was mostly retired male (presumably invited) Harvard professors. A tenure-track panelist's viewpoint was that Harvard is wonderful and never discriminates, and she finds it hard to believe people older than her when they tell her the history of women at Harvard.

I was surprised by some panelists' statements that their departments are wonderful, women are full members, and everything is completely coeducational. So when they asked for questions and no one else raised their hand, I asked how many tenured women there were in those departments. No one but me seemed to notice the disconnect between their answers and what they had said earlier. I asked some follow-up questions to try to get the panelists to address the connection between the low numbers of women in their fields and the long history of discrimination, but they kept talking about women not wanting to go into science.

According to the printed program, after the panels was the reception. I walked over with someone from the Science panel audience. She had helped design the gate, and was annoyed that the people who designed the gate were never thanked.

I was stopped at the door and asked for a ticket. I asked if it was invitation-only, and they said yes.

Nowhere had anything said that any of this was invitation-only. It had all been well-advertised (the PR was good). The program did not say the reception was private, and I felt humiliated to be turned away at the door. (A Harvard Crimson article published two days later states that "The event participants were then invited to a reception in Robinson Hall".)

I resorted to groveling --- I pointed out that I was in the first group of women to live in Wigglesworth Hall, and if they were celebrating 25 years of coresidential living in

Harvard Yard (which they were), then I was one of the pioneers they were honoring. My new friend who walked over with me helped me talk my way in. Again, I felt like a gate crasher.

A young Harvard math professor had arrived at the reception before me and was already eating --- he told me he had walked in a side door, without a ticket.

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy Knowles gave a short speech that I liked, except for when he

talked about Harvard being completely coed, including the faculty. At first I didn't understand why no one at that speech or the gate dedication speeches protested. Then I realized it was because the whole event was a carefully orchestrated invitation-only PR stunt. They presumably didn't invite anyone who might cause trouble (such as the alumnae-initiated Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard).

I decided that, as long as I'm a gate crasher, I might as well play the role to the fullest. Unfortunately, I realized my duty too late. I expected Harvard President Neil Rudenstine to give the next speech, which I thought would be the most appropriate time to shout "more women on the faculty!", but there were no more speeches.

I overheard Paul Martin (Dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences) telling someone "but Harvard has as endowment of $12 billion dollars; what else are they going to do with it except throw a party?" as he pointed to all the expensive food and wine. I recognized Martin's name as the person whom I had been told was responsible for a new FAS (Faculty of Arts and Sciences) policy restricting who can access the FAS computer system.

I cut in and said that they could use the money to allow visitors at the Bunting Institute to access the campus computer network. I told him that at Bunting we were assured we were full members of the Harvard community, and so far the only point at which I found that to be false was for Internet access.

While I could hook up my laptop to the Internet via an Ethernet cable if I were in my Bunting office, I coudn't connect to the Internet in the (formerly Radcliffe, at-that-time Harvard) dorm room where I was living or in the Science Center, since I had only a Radcliffe appointment, not an FAS one.

I pointed out that the last time that I was an unpaid visitor to the Harvard math department, it would have counted as an FAS appointment, and I would have had these privileges. Now I'm an even higher class of visitor, but I can't easily use the Internet. I added snarkily that female mathematicians had to go to Bunting to be at Harvard, since the Harvard math department didn't have a good record of having women.

He jumped on that and said it was totally false --- the math department has lots of women and I don't know what I'm talking about.

I laughed and asked him about that. He said he knew the names of lots of women. I asked him for some of them. It turned out he was bluffing --- he said he couldn't remember any names and would have to look them up --- he has a list of who has had computer accounts through the Harvard math department, and remembered that women were on it.

He said that the Nieman Fellows are in the same position as Bunting Fellows. Luckily I knew enough to call his bluff, and pointed out that Nieman Fellows did get access.

It was a conversation between two New Yorkers. It started out contentiously but ended amicably. I think he warmed up to me after it became clear that we had many friends in common, and I wasn't just some outsider (or party crasher). Both of us loved Harvard and cared about it. In the end he told me whom in the math department I should tell to sign the form to give me access.

A strange slick brochure was put out for the occasion. Its first page talks about "women students and faculty [having] become full participants in every aspect of the life of the College." Curiously, Harvard didn't officially claim to go coed until two years later, in 1999, when Harvard finally killed off Radcliffe College.

A couple of days later, Harvard Yard was plastered with flyers pointing out problems with the status of women at Harvard (scarcity of women on the faculty, only one tenured African-American woman, etc.), and saying that the Celebration of Women was just a ploy to bring in money. I was glad that I wasn't the only one to notice.