Dozens of Harvard women found their way this week to a suburban Holiday Inn where a photographer from Playboy magazine took Polaroid snapshots of them, clothed, and asked them to fill out applications listing their hobbies, academic majors and measurements.

The magazine was recruiting candidates for its ''Women of the Ivy League'' feature, to be published in October. In the process, it kicked off a Ivy League-wide debate on the effects of pornography and on the responsibilities of student newspapers.

The Harvard Crimson refused to print a Playboy advertisement for the recruiting sessions conducted by David Chan, a staff photographer for the magazine. ''The editorial meeting was held a week after we received the ad,'' said Joseph S. Kahn, president of The Crimson. ''After three hours of debate, we decided to reject the ad on the grounds that Playboy and the advertisement degrade women, and we at The Crimson did not want to aid the degradation by printing the ad.''

The Crimson stood alone, however, as the ad ran in The Boston Herald, The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix and in The Harvard Independent, a weekly campus publication. It also ran in papers at all the other Ivy League campuses - althought not without protest - where Playboy interviews have yet to take place. Disappointment at Brown