When Mary Ingraham Bunting-Smith became president of Radcliffe College in 1960, she sought to combat what she called “a national climate of unexpectation” surrounding women’s education. As part of that mission, she created the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, which provided stipends and access to University resources for women returning to careers interrupted by family obligations. The Bunting Institute, as it later became known, was “a laboratory of sorts,” Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin said. “The goal was twofold: to encourage and to catalyze women’s scholarly and creative work, and to discover the conditions that best supported women’s endeavors in the face of persistent societal barriers.”
In 1999, when Radcliffe College merged with Harvard University, the Bunting Institute became today’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: a center dedicated to advanced interdisciplinary scholarship and public engagement. The Radcliffe Institute supports the work of 50 fellows each year, from across academic and artistic disciplines, with a continuing commitment to the study of women and gender. The institute also hosts public events and houses the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. On Thursday, at the Knafel Center in Radcliffe Yard, dozens of Radcliffe-affiliated scholars, artists, and administrators gathered to reflect on the Institute’s first 25 years—and those to come. “Here, the ethos of Bunting’s messy experiment has lived on,” Brown-Nagin said, “as we continually reimagine what an institute for advanced study can be.”
Radcliffe fellowships today are today highly selective and sought-after. But it wasn’t always that way, recalled president emerita Drew Gilpin Faust, who served as Radcliffe’s first permanent dean: “When I arrived, many people regarded the Institute with skepticism,” she said. Since then, Radcliffe’s fellowship program has facilitated discoveries from how sperm whales communicate to the “Radcliffe wave”—a 9,000-light-year-long ribbon of matter that reshaped how researchers understand the structure of the Milky Way. Its fellows have gone on to become Nobel laureates and win Pulitzer Prizes. “No one doubts Radcliffe now,” Faust continued.
She credited part of the Institute’s success to the early support and vision of president emeritus Neil L. Rudenstine, who oversaw the Harvard-Radcliffe merger and the creation of the Radcliffe Institute. “Neil’s vision for Radcliffe reflected an approach to universities and to leadership that characterized his career well before the Harvard-Radcliffe merger,” Faust said. Rudenstine believed the University’s job was “point our thoughts upward, to enable us to pursue the biggest imaginable questions in our teaching and research…making intellectual connections that others may not see or care about.” Radcliffe, she continued, made such work possible.
Rudenstine received a Special Radcliffe Medal at Thursday’s event in recognition of his role in the Institute’s founding and early years. Accepting the medal, he recalled conversations about what the Institute might look like. “When we were trying, many years ago now, to create something that would be worthy of Radcliffe and its history,” he said, “it was far from obvious what could be done. Then someone said—and I really can’t remember who—‘Institute for Advanced Study,’” and the path became clear. Today, he continued, as he reads news stories about public figures questioning the importance of higher education, “I feel that if they could only come and spend an afternoon at the Institute, they would be startled into total inability to say such things.”
Looking toward the future, Brown-Nagin announced two new Radcliffe initiatives. Starting next year, a dedicated archival team will reprocess materials in the Schlesinger Library related to the history of Radcliffe College, which were processed before the development of modern archival methods and are therefore difficult to navigate. She also announced an initiative on academic freedom that will explore political polarization, state regulation, and other policy issues related to higher education. Brown-Nagin (who co-chairs the University’s Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, chartered last April) said the latter initiative fits into Radcliffe’s larger commitment to research “that examines Harvard’s progress toward upholding its ideals”—work that also included, she said, the faculty committee she chaired that created the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report. Later, President Alan Garber acknowledged that the initiative—which has suffered from high turnover and staff disagreement, according to reporting by The Crimson—was “not a cake walk,” and thanked Brown-Nagin for her work.
The September 26 celebration also included a panel with two former Radcliffe fellows and Nobel laureates, Lee professor of economics Claudia Goldin and Gesyer University Professor Oliver Hart. Garber, himself an economist and physician, moderated as they discussed their careers in economics. Both said that interdisciplinary research and collaboration—including at the Institute—have enabled them to pursue questions beyond the scope of economics.
Goldin said history has added an important perspective to her current project, “Why Women Won,” which she recently resumed after it was interrupted October 9, when “I received a call at 4:30 in the morning—and I won’t go through what that call was.” When she gives lectures about the project, “there’s always a group of people, somewhat younger, who look at me and say—we did?” In response, she lists the realities that women faced until various points in the last century: being legally fired for marrying or having children, being denied mortgages, having to use their husbands’ names on credit cards, facing inequitable treatment from the IRS, Social Security, and federal retirement rules.
“Most economists, and most people, are stuck in the present,” she said. “What I learned from historians—what I do as a historian—is I point to the fact that it’s only because we’re stuck in the present that we don’t understand that there has been enormous progress—in fact, one of the most important civil changes in the labor force ever.” On Thursday, as speakers reflected on the Bunting Institute’s transformation, the progress was not hard to see.
