My undergraduate college, which is 1800 women, has a rigorously Kosher/Halal kitchen in one dormitory and works hard to accommodatoe vegetarians and vegans.

My graduate university, which is the subject of the current controversy -- well, it used to be that the entire place was "men's space." The Adams House pool (defunct now, I think) was nude, single-sex swimming, and I believe Lamont Library was males-only until the early 1970s.

The wise-guy comment about a Shari'a compliant gym: Hillel has its own facility, not a gym, but a building. I don't see why Muslims shouldn't have theirs, and I hope they're working on raising funds for the same.

A space for women only to exercise would benefit not just Muslim women, but Orthodox Jewish women and probably some of the more modest of the Christian denominations, who -can- adapt, but might prefer not to.

I personally see this as a luxury that Harvard, with its $34 billion endowment and multiplicity of gym facilities, can easily provide. It's not as if the university is closing down the Indoor Athletic Building (rudely called the IUD, when I was there). And there remain, as far as I know, a few male, single-sex bastions.

Should Harvard close this gym? I don't know. Like LeCastor, I'm on the fence. There will always be ambitious prelaws and other types -- the whole place is verbal to madness -- who'll argue for the sheer joy of it. I think I've argued myself to a point where I want to see how this works itself out.

By the way, the Kosher/Halal kitchen has worked out well at Mount Holyoke. The establishment in the chapel of times where each faith can have its own sacred space has produced some outrage in the Quarterly from an alumna or so -- and arguments against them, too. Meanwhile, if Orthodox and Muslim students are eating together, I count it a plus. No one is excluded: just don't bring your BLT or cheeseburger or pocketflask.

I've been reading Dowd on the campaign, and I have to say, her tone strikes me as that blend of arch and nasty that used to be called "poison nice." I don't like that tone being used on anyone: it reeks of Heathers and high school girls' cliques back in the 1950s and 1960s.

As a strong Second Wave feminist who voted for Hillary, I wanted to thank the person who spoke out for that generation of us who earned graduate degrees and professional positions back in the day. Personally, I think we have a lot more to contribute, including the fact of the impact that this experience still has.

I see that Obama supporters have targeted this board and are earnestly pleading their cause. As someone who's been called shrill and strident back in the day and whose clothes have been examined in even more detail than her ideas, I have to tell you that the lines some of you are taking (LittleLordBaltimore being an ADMIRABLE exception) are not going to win any converts. Name-calling rarely does; reiteration and mobbing only get people's backs up.

Except that it comes from a different place and isn't psychotic with fear and hatred, it's a lot like the MRA spam we've been seeing around here. Should your candidate win and you take that to the whole country, you're likely to hit them the way the late 1960s hit the Silent Majority, as it was called. We're all still paying for that, and payback's a bitch.

Then I take it that you would say "shame on Harvard" for the mere existence of its Divinity School as well? If so, you've gone in one breathtakingly intolerant step from interfering with student life to tampering with the university's curriculum.

Harvard can hardly teach unless it respects its students and their core values. It can hardly regard tolerance and ecumenism as core values unless it practices what it preaches.

It's done at least an adequate job over the past few centuries, stirred up its share (and more) of firefights, and -- to my way of thinking -- is true to its mission as a liberal arts university because theology was (again, if I remember correctly) part of the medieval trivium and quadrivium that comprised the liberal arts.

I can infer that you consider your own superstition (militant atheism) more important than about a thousand years of tradition of university life and can only suggest that you take your own advice and -shed- it before shaming anyone else.