SPRING 2016
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SETTING THE STANDARD A New Chapter for Barnard
HOW DO YOU THINK BARNARD HAS CHANGED YOU? Cinneah: Barnard has opened the doors to fields of inquiry I never would have imagined I would study in college. The woman I am today is largely influenced by the individuals and experiences I’ve had since my first year at Barnard. Lizzie: Barnard has made me a fiercely passionate learner. The classes I’ve taken and the professors I’ve worked with have inspired me to push myself harder than I thought I could. WHY DID YOU MAKE A GIFT TO THE COLLEGE? Cinneah: My support of the College is my way of ensuring women, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, have the same opportunities I did to thrive at this wonderful place. Lizzie: I gave a gift to the college because the college gave me infinite gifts that I will continue to cherish for my whole life.
Meet Our Newest Alumnae CINNEAH EL-AMIN ‘16, AFRICANA STUDIES, BALTIMORE, MD ELIZABETH RODGERS ‘16, HISTORY, BELMONT, MA
The accomplishments of our students and the paths they choose as graduates affirm the value of a Barnard education. It is all made possible by annual gifts from alumnae, parents, and friends. Help sustain the College’s work. GIVE NOW TO BARNARD’S ANNUAL FUND: 212.870.2520 or barnard.edu/gift.
FEATURES
DEPARTMENTS
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A Harlem Collaboration by Eveline Chao The classroom takes root in Harlem for an innovative new program
Letters
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Global Reach by Annette Kahn ’67 Students mentor high schoolers and professors make academic connections at the Global Symposium in Paris COVER STORY
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Building Barnard’s Future by Jennifer Altmann and Abigail Beshkin Scholarship and academic opportunity thrive at Barnard, which is launching its most ambitious fundraising endeavor 34
Literary Life by Abigail Deutsch Anne Bernays ’52 reflects on books, Barnard, and truth-telling
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President’s Page 4
Inside 5
Through the Gates PANEL Inside the Reality of TV SCHOLAR Passages to India SCHOLAR Gender Difference INTERNSHIPS And Justice For All EVENT A Salute to Pioneers 12
Syllabus Say What? 14
The Salon DANCER Jamie Scott ’05 POET Alice Notley ’67 MUSICIAN Sadie Dupuis ’11 38
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Alumnae Association
Love Is On the Air by Benjamin Reeves Three alumnae help create a podcast for The New York Times’ “Modern Love” column
PRESIDENT’S LETTER NEWS & NOTES
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Class Notes ALUMNAE PROFILES Herminia Palacio ’83, Jane Slusser ’04, Lara Avsar ’11 IN MEMORIAM
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STORIES OF EMPOWERMENT Three Barnard graduates of different backgrounds, generations, and ethnicities explore how feminism shaped their lives. barnard.edu/news/ stories-empowerment Watch the video online.
Sources Sister Act by Elicia Brown 75
Last Image by Leticia Wouk Almino ’08 76
Last Word by Chaya Deitsch ’86
ON THE COVER Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 1
LETTERS
WINTER 2016
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THE PACESETTERS Who They Are,Why They Give
Reconciling with Barnard’s Past On the President’s Page (Winter 2016), Debora Spar states that Barnard College is “named after a man who owned slaves.” President Spar also states, “For years we had both explicit and implicit quotas on ... students, including both African Americans and Jews.” It was more than student quotas: Barnard Hall was built in 1916 with money from financier Jacob Schiff. Schiff died in 1920, but that building, known as Students’ Hall, was renamed Barnard Hall in 1926—a redundancy, since the College already bore that name. The Schiff family protested with charges of anti-Semitism, but with no result. In those years, antiSemitism was rife at universities (see Andrew S. Dolkart’s Morningside Heights: A History of its Architecture and Development). All that remains to acknowledge Jacob Schiff’s contribution to Barnard is a plaque on the floor of Barnard Hall and the name “Jake” for the entry hall (or so it was in my student days at Barnard). If President Spar is doing a mea culpa for Barnard’s less illustrious history, she forgot about Barnard Hall and its naming for a slaveholder instead of its Jewish benefactor. Perhaps historical justice is now due. —Vivian R. Gruder ’57
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President Spar’s letter regarding a new presidential task force to explore divestment from fossil fuels is a welcome development. As a nonprofit institution chartered to act in the public interest, Barnard should closely examine whether its investments foster a better future for its students. As an educational institution that places high value on independent thought and sound research, we should not outsource important decisions regarding the ethical implications of our investments to outside money managers, but rather conduct a rigorous discussion within the Barnard community about how to best ensure that our investments reflect our values. Investing in fossil fuels has become an increasingly risky economic proposition, as evidenced by the fact that even major lending institutions are transitioning away from funding fossil fuel activities. As a result, it would be imprudent for us not to analyze whether these investments will produce profitable returns. —Gretchen Collazo Garnecho ’02 Former Chair & Alumna Representative on the Barnard Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing A French Connection The French critics loved Mistress America, the 2015 comedy co-written by and starring Greta Gerwig ’06, but asserted that the main character was a student at “l’université de New York.” I successfully convinced the movie critic at the weekly Pariscope to change the definite article to an indefinite one since Tracy, the film’s protagonist, attends Barnard and not New York University. The correction was made in the next issue. —Bettina Lande Tergeist ’76
EDITORIAL STAFF Jennifer Altmann EDITORIAL MANAGER Abigail Beshkin ART DIRECTOR & DESIGNER Anna Nozaki RESEARCH EDITOR Rebecca Geiger EDITOR
ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION OF BARNARD COLLEGE Terry Newman ’79
PRESIDENT & ALUMNAE TRUSTEE
ALUMNAE RELATIONS Caitlin D. Tramel
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
COMMUNICATIONS Joanne Kwong ASSISTANT VICE PRESIDENT Patricia Keim CREATIVE DIRECTOR David Hopson VICE PRESIDENT
DEVELOPMENT VICE PRESIDENT FOR DEVELOPMENT
Bret Silver
Spring 2016, Vol. CV, No. 2 Barnard Magazine (USPS 875-280, ISSN 1071-6513) is published quarterly by the Alumnae Association of Barnard College. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send change of address form to: Alumnae Records, Barnard College, Box AS, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598
EDITORIAL OFFICE Vagelos Alumnae Center, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598 Phone: 212.854.0085 E-mail: magazine@barnard.edu Opinions expressed are those of contributors or the editor and do not represent official positions of Barnard College or the Alumnae Association of Barnard College. Letters to the editor (150 words maximum), submissions for Last Word (600 words maximum), and unsolicited articles and/or photographs will be published at the discretion of the editor and will be edited for length and clarity. The contact information listed in Class Notes is for the exclusive purpose of providing information for the magazine and may not be used for any other purpose. For alumnae related inquiries, call Alumnae Relations at 212.854.2005 or e-mail alumnaerelations@barnard.edu. To change your address, write to Alumnae Records, Barnard College, Box AS, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598 Phone: 646.745.8344 E-mail: alumrecords@barnard.edu
PRESIDENT’S PAGE
Photograph by Steve DeCanio
DEBORA SPAR
Barnard Bold • I’ll confess. When my colleagues first brought me the concept for The Bold Standard— Barnard’s ambitious capital campaign that you will read about later in this issue—I responded like the economist I once used to be. For years, I had taught a class on Great Britain and the gold standard, highlighting the debate between Churchill and Keynes over how best to regain their nation’s preeminence in a post-war world. It didn’t go well (the return to gold, that is, not the class). And so I worried about the association. Wouldn’t the Bold Standard remind everyone of the gold standard? It is a tribute to my colleagues that they patiently listened to my turn-of-the-century woes before gently reminding me that I was probably the only person in the Barnard community for whom this particular association held, the only one who would even hesitate at the broader, more commanding message in this statement. That we are Barnard, and we are bold. It is a powerful word. And a wholly accurate one. Barnard women are many things, most of which defy easy descriptions or generalizations. We are smart. We are savvy. We are researchers and builders, corporate leaders and community activists. We create art and cause trouble. What ties these disparate qualities and behaviors together, though, and connects generations of Barnard students and alumnae, is a certain audacity of spirit. A willingness to speak up and find a different voice. A propensity to engage—in activism and adventure and whatever ails the world around them. A penchant for majoring in unafraid. This is the college, after all, that was launched as little more than a distant dream by a small group of smart, struggling women in 1889. It is the college that saw the death of parietal rules and the birth of feminism. The college that refused in 1982 to be absorbed by its big brother, and one that has joyously and resolutely carved its own path ever since. We are the college that educated Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead; that hosted Malcolm X and Gloria Steinem and Barack Obama. We are, and have always been, bold. With this campaign, though, we are taking audacity to new and different heights. Because if there’s one thing we haven’t been bold about, it’s money. On the contrary, we have traditionally been timid about money, pinching our pennies and priding ourselves on a hard-won resourcefulness. Which was fine, perhaps, for a while. But the time has come to be bold about our finances as well. Here is the case, in the bluntest of terms. As of this writing, our endowment sits at $276 million. That is up 30 percent since the start of my presidency in 2008, but still pales by comparison to any of our peers: Wellesley at $1.85 billion, Wesleyan at $810 million, Vassar at $983 million. We are more selective than any of these schools, and have a higher yield as well. Like them, we are need-blind in our admissions policy and provide even our neediest students with full financial aid. We have similarly stellar faculties— urged even higher, in our case, by our faculty members’ appointments at Columbia. Yet we are trying to do this—and thus far succeeding in doing this—with only a fraction of our peers’ wealth. This situation is simply not sustainable. If Barnard is to prosper in the future as it has in the past—if, to be justifiably audacious, we aim to get stronger and stronger over time—we need to build an appropriate financial foundation. This is by no means outlandish or unrealistic. It’s just bold. We need to raise several hundred million dollars over the course of this campaign, using these funds to endow professorships and
Continued on Page 74 BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 3
INSIDE
Photograph by Frank Wojciechowski
EDITOR’S LETTER
New Beginnings • Four times a year, Barnard Magazine lands in your mailbox, offering a window into what’s happening on campus, what fellow alumnae are up to, and what members of your class are reporting in Class Notes. We also know—thanks to your letters and requests—that you’d like to learn even more about activities on campus and watch videos, listen to audio interviews, and share stories from the magazine on social media. This spring, we’ve redesigned the magazine’s website to enhance those offerings. Of special interest is the wealth of videos we have featuring alumnae, faculty, and students. Recent videos have captured the magic of the Global Symposium in Paris (see page 28) and the reminiscences of noted playwright and poet Ntozake Shange ’70 on the occasion of her archives coming to Barnard (see page 25). We hope you will visit barnard.edu/magazine to see these videos and many other offerings. There are some other new beginnings here. After many years of editing the magazine, Annette Kahn ’67 retired in February, and I am honored to take the helm. I arrived in March from Princeton, where I worked for 15 years, most recently as an associate editor at the University’s alumni magazine. A graduate of Vassar College and Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, I am no stranger to Barnard, having written frequently for Barnard Magazine over the last decade, including profiles of literary agent Molly Friedrich ’74, TV producer and writer Veena Sud ’89, actress Ariane Rinehart ’15, and many others. I relish the opportunity to get to know many more of Barnard’s alumnae, faculty, students, and staff. Barnard is a unique place where women’s education is paramount and women leaders abound, nestled in the city where I grew up. I look forward to meeting many of you at reunion, commencement, and around campus. If you spot me getting a latte at Liz’s Place—or you’d like to drop by my office on the second floor of the Vagelos Center— please do say hello! —Jennifer Altmann
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THROUGH THE GATES
by Lois Elfman ’80
Illustration by Melinda Beck
During season two of the show, Boylan and four other transgender women accompanied Jenner on a cross-country bus trip. At times, producers asked Boylan to steer the participants into meaningful conversations, she recounts. Jenner, a conservative, butted heads with the other women over political issues. “The most radical show on television has a Tea Party Republican as its star,” Boylan says. “The show is about a question the country is now trying to wrestle with—how do we talk to each other when we hate each other? What this group of women had to learn was how to have a conversation about the most important issues. In fact, we did it. I hope it will serve as a model of how the rest of us can treat each other.” Model Kelly Killoren Bensimon, GS ’98, a former cast member on The Real
Housewives of New York City, says reality TV shows produce “genuine, organic feelings and emotions” among the participants off-camera, but often force situations on-camera for dramatic effect. Also on the panel were Ronak Kordestani ’96, head of development at Trium Entertainment, and psychologist Jacqueline Schatz ’90, who advises producers on Newlyweds: The First Year about interpersonal dynamics. Most of us think about the “fantasy of how an interaction could have gone,” says Schatz; reality TV can manipulate situations to achieve that emotional impact. What we see, Kordestani says, is “heightened reality, elevated from the norm.” The bottom line, says Pozner, is, “I’m not going to tell you not to watch reality TV. Enjoy, but just do so with your critical filters turned on.”
PANEL
Inside the Reality of TV • Shows open important discussions but generate dangerous stereotypes
• It was an animated evening of
conversation as Barnard students, faculty, and alumnae discussed the perils and benefits of reality TV—and admitted they enjoyed shows such as The Bachelor and America’s Next Top Model—at a panel discussion during the spring semester on “Not-So-Guilty Pleasure TV: The Highs & Lows of Reality Television.” Jennifer Pozner, the executive director of Women in Media & News and the author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, says reality TV devalues women and often exploits them for entertainment. “Girls who watch reality TV are significantly more likely than girls who don’t watch to think they’ll be judged or valued primarily on their looks. They are more likely than other girls to think that is normal,” Pozner says. “My concern is what millions of people see every week and how that impacts their ideas.” Barnard Professor of English and Anna Quindlen Writer-in-Residence Jennifer Finney Boylan, who is a consultant and cast member on the show I Am Cait, sees benefits in the juxtaposition of views presented on the program, which chronicles the transition of Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce Jenner. “I think I Am Cait is the most subversive, progressive show on television right now,” says Boylan, who moderated the event, which was produced by the alumnae group Barnard Women in Entertainment and the office of Alumnae Relations.
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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 5
THROUGH THE GATES SCHOLAR
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by Robert Ast
Photograph by Phoebe Jones ’18
Passages to India • A scholar creates a definitive guide to the work of a legendary Indian poet
• Jack Hawley has spent his career
immersed in the religions and literature of northern India. His fascination with the topic was sparked by a course on world religions he took in the 1970s as a graduate student at Harvard. He decided, he says, to delve into “something that would be big enough that I knew I couldn’t possibly understand even some tiny segment of it. All these years have passed, and it’s still just as big as it ever was.” For more than three decades, Hawley, a professor of religion, has studied the work of one of the most prominent literary figures in his field: Surdas, the 16th-century Hindi poet. In 2015, Harvard University Press published Sur’s Ocean, which he worked on with Kenneth E. Bryant of the University of British Columbia, as one of the inaugural books in the Murty Classical Library of India. The series offers accessible English translations of the most important texts in Indian literature, many of which have not been available in English before. Sur’s Ocean, for which Hawley provided the translations, is a 1,000-page collection of poems attributed to Surdas, who was already legendary in his lifetime. “What poet, hearing the poems Sur has made, will not nod his head in pleasure?” wrote one near-contemporary observer. The poems of Surdas were almost always sung, not just read or recited, and the poet himself must have been a singer, says Hawley. He and Bryant reconstruct a version of Sur’s Ocean
that is closer to what Surdas originally sang than other editions, which have failed to distinguish between the many “Surdases” who later composed in his name and the early poems that can more reliably be associated with the man himself. “It was a huge task—collecting manuscripts, digitizing manuscripts long before anybody digitized anything,” notes Hawley, who is celebrating his 30th anniversary at the College this year and won a Barnard Teaching Excellence Award in 2013. “It provided us with the opportunity to uncover the earliest manuscripts and stick with those. No one had really done that before.” At the end of this year, the Harvard Oriental Series will publish the last big piece in Hawley’s Surdas puzzle: Into Sur’s Ocean. “Every poem has an essay that goes with it,” he says. Last year also saw the publication of A Storm of Songs, a book that scrutinizes commonly held convictions about how the bhakti religion—the religion of shared singing, heartfelt personal devotion, and sometimes social protest—marched through India’s history for a thousand years, beginning in about 600 C.E. Received wisdom says that this bhakti movement, something broader than Hinduism yet also indelibly a part of it, is what supplied the core of India’s national identity long before the nation itself came into being. It tied Surdas to hundreds of other poet-saints. Hawley challenges this view of history, and shows that the idea of something like a bhakti movement didn’t begin to take shape until the 16th century and came into clear focus only in the 20th. Hawley will spend the 2016-17 academic year in India, where he will study Brindavan, a sacred Hindu site and the location of his early research into practices associated with the worship of Krishna. Once a pastoral wilderness that is featured in tales of Krishna’s boyhood, Brindavan today bears the marks of globalization and is in danger of being choked by the sprawl of nearby Delhi. The intersection of religion and
urban centers is the subject of several of Hawley’s courses. He has frequently offered one on “Hinduism Here”—in New York—and is co-teaching another ethnographic seminar on New York religion as a whole with Courtney Bender, chair of Columbia’s Religion Department. The sabbatical year will also allow Hawley to pursue a recent discovery— an immense trove of illuminated manuscripts from western Rajasthan that depict scenes from Surdas’ poems, as well as Surdas himself, through a rich interplay between imagery and text. Says Hawley, “There are always surprises, which is the great thing about scholarship.”
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HAWLEY WILL SPEND THE 2016-17 ACADEMIC YEAR IN INDIA STUDYING BRINDAVAN, A SACRED HINDU SITE. ONCE A PASTORAL WILDERNESS THAT IS FEATURED IN TALES OF KRISHNA’S BOYHOOD, BRINDAVAN TODAY BEARS THE MARKS OF GLOBALIZATION AND IS IN DANGER OF BEING CHOKED BY THE SPRAWL OF NEARBY DELHI.
BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 7
THROUGH THE GATES
by R.A. Monroe
Photograph by Phoebe Jones ’18
of how hormones work and their impact on sex difference. Jordan-Young and her colleagues viewed what was happening to Chand as the latest attempt by sports officials to define and police gender. “We saw this as an opportunity to shine light on laws and policies that are not only unethical, they’re scientifically wrong,” she says. Jordan-Young, who is the chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, has been a pioneer in research on the intersection of
science and social differences, especially concerning gender. A specialist in study design and measurement, she has delved into controversial debates about whether our brains are wired to be masculine or feminine, the importance of gender in the practice of medicine, and the significance of hormones such as testosterone. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College, Jordan-Young earned a PhD from Columbia in sociomedical sciences, an interdisciplinary field that combines the technical aspects of public health
SCHOLAR
Gender Difference • Rebecca Jordan-Young dislodges cultural myths at the intersection of gender and science
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In 2014, the governing body for international track and field competitions banned Indian sprinter Dutee Chand from women’s races, claiming that the naturally high levels of testosterone in her body gave her an unfair competitive advantage. The case, which ignited an international controversy, raised questions that professor Rebecca (Beck) JordanYoung has been addressing for years. She has spent her career studying issues of sex, gender, and sexuality, and much of her work has combated misunderstandings 8
research—such as epidemiology, biostatistics, measurement theory, and research design—with social science approaches to health and medicine. Through close collaboration with other scientists over the past 20 years, she has gained additional research skills in neuroscience and endocrinology, as well as cultural anthropology and history. She spent the early part of her career researching HIV/AIDS and urban health while running a street-outreach program to prevent HIV among drug users and sex workers. As she looked at behavioral research on sexuality, such as studies that claimed to find biological differences between heterosexual and homosexual men, she was amazed by how much of what she read was deeply flawed. “I began to think about all the ways the studies were biased— through their recruiting methods, their measures, through analytical strategies that were subtly slanted toward finding differences,” she recalls. Her research also led her to be critical of some practitioners of gender-specific medicine, which promotes the idea that treatments should be tailored by gender. While she acknowledges that the women’s health movement offered an important critique of how medicine considers the male body to be the default “norm” when conducting studies, she has concerns about how gender-specific medicine functions in practice. “A lot of claims that go under the banner of gender-specific medicine are more ideological than based in nuanced, detailed science,” JordanYoung says. Her interest in gender issues—and her expertise in analyzing studies and statistics—led her to devote 13 years to dissecting the scientific literature on whether hormones make our brains wired to be masculine or feminine in some consistent, demonstrable way. The result was the 2010 book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, which analyzed virtually all published research that supports the claims that sex differences are hardwired.
“The history of the so-called sex hormones is a really fantastic example of how it’s been hard to absorb evidence that contradicted expectations that people had for these ‘essences of masculinity and femininity’—and how we have repeatedly forgotten the more complicated story about how testosterone actually functions,” Jordan-Young says. Her study found methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions in years’ worth of studies. She argues that far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated study of gender differences is necessary. Jordan-Young’s expertise in neuroscience came in handy in her analysis. “Neuroscience is currently a crucial arena for public discourse on sex/ gender, and it’s not easy to break with the mainstream, which is mostly very committed to a conventional view of sex/ gender differences, and often quite blind to methodological errors and biases in research,” she says. Jordan-Young’s current research— for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in April—focuses on exploring disagreements among scientists in different disciplines about how testosterone functions in the body. “Testosterone has taken on a life of its own in the culture,” she said. “When people say things like, ‘There’s too much testosterone in the room,’ they’re using the term as a shorthand for all sorts of things that are wrapped up with maleness: masculinity, aggression, male privilege, libido.” This cultural baggage has a tendency to impede our understanding of the science—something that Jordan-Young believes is in play in the Chand case. While testosterone is a potent biological substance, multiple studies have shown that it doesn’t equal maleness—or athletic prowess—in any sort of simple or obvious way. In the Chand case, Jordan-Young argued in articles for The New York Times, Science, and other publications that elite athletes have many physical
characteristics that distinguish them from the mainstream, but none of those other natural variations were being singled out. For example, women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, whose bodies are unable to process testosterone, often are taller than average and are overrepresented among elite athletes. “Fairness means a level playing field, not level athletes,” she says. Chand has a condition called hyperandrogenism, which results in her body producing levels of testosterone that situate her in the male range in the view of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). Using testosterone levels to determine who is allowed to compete is illogical, Jordan-Young argues, because there is no clear evidence showing that successful athletes have higher testosterone levels than less successful ones. “There is very little consensus among sport scientists about precisely what testosterone does, how important it is, and under which circumstances it’s important,” she says. Jordan-Young and her colleagues’ work arguing for a more nuanced, complex understanding of hormones seems to be paying off: Last summer, the IAAF suspended its hormone testing rules for two years, allowing Chand to compete. But even if hormone testing is no longer permitted, cultural anxiety about gender persists. Sports is where much of that anxiety gets played out— despite the scientific consensus that sex is not one single thing in the body, and that there aren’t any bright lines that divide all males from all females. “The ideal solution to worries about masculine women in sports would be for the sports organizations to actually take a positive step toward educating athletes and the general public about the range of natural variations among athletes,” Jordan-Young says. The biggest obstacle, however, may remain our cultural myths: “The folklore about testosterone doesn’t seem to get dislodged, even in the face of contrary evidence.”
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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 9
THROUGH THE GATES
by Merri Rosenberg ’78
Illustration by Thereza Rowe
summer, she will return to the Southern Center for Human Rights as a Liman Fellow, one of 11 Barnard students who have prestigious summer fellowships in criminal justice and public interest law. Three students have been selected for the Judith Kaye-Arthur Liman Public Interest Yale Law School Summer Fellowship, which comes with a $4,000 stipend. Kaye ’58 was the first woman to serve as chief judge of the State of New York. Eight students received the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation Oscar S. Straus II Fellowship in Criminal Justice, with funding of up to $4,500 through Princeton University. “There’s so little money for students to do public interest,” says Abigail Lewis, associate dean for pre-professional advising, which makes these fellowships especially critical. Barnard’s Liman Fellows have worked at the Legal Aid Society and Harlem Legal Services. Guggenheim Fellows have worked at Bronx Defender Services and the Correctional Association of New York. They also participate in a biweekly seminar on the Barnard campus. Evan Zavidow ’17 has been a
Guggenheim Fellow and is a Liman Fellow this summer. She is interested in prison reform, particularly the intersection of incarceration and sexual politics. She worked at the Vera Institute of Justice last summer on a project that helps provide access to higher education for those who are incarcerated or were formerly incarcerated. Liman Fellow Marielle Greenblatt ’17 hopes to work on issues that affect Latino communities: “I want to engage with those who are negatively impacted by their interactions with the justice system.” Many alumnae who serve as fellows pursue criminal justice and public interest law after they graduate from Barnard. Gabrielle Fromer ’14, currently in her second year at Georgetown University Law Center, is spending the summer at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. As a Liman Fellow, she worked at the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan, helping locate and interview witnesses and attending family court. Liman Fellows also participate in a spring colloquium at Yale Law School, at which, says Fromer, “I met students who were passionate about justice. It was an inspiring place to be.”
INTERNSHIPS
And Justice For All • Fellowships provide hands-on experience in the public interest field
• When Isadora Ruyter-Harcourt ’16 was
growing up in Mongomery, Ala., and later Chicago, her father would come home from his job as a defense lawyer and discuss the clients he represented, some of them inmates on death row. RuyterHarcourt even attended court sessions to watch her father’s oral arguments. “I was blessed to have grown up aware of these issues,” says Ruyter-Harcourt, who developed a passion for public interest law. She has served as an intern for the Bronx Defenders, which provides legal services to the poor, and at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. This 10
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THROUGH THE GATES
by Alia Persico-Shammas ’16
Photographs by Samuel Stuart and Getty Images
EVENT
A Salute to Pioneers
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• The Athena Film Festival recognizes women leaders
• The Athena Film Festival celebrated women and their leadership with an engaging weekend of films, discussions, and a record-breaking 5,000 attendees. From the feature film Suffragette to the documentaries He Named Me Malala and Code Girls, this year’s films and honorees highlighted women who are pioneers. Director and producer Mira Nair accepted the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award at the sold-out Awards Gala. Athena Award winners included director Karyn Kusama, producer Geralyn Dreyfous, and composer Jeanine Tesori ’83—winner of a Tony Award for Fun Home—who gave a heartfelt tribute to women who inspired her. Director Paul Feig was presented with the inaugural Leading Man Award by Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon. Barnard president Debora Spar presented the Ensemble Award to the cast and crew of Suffragette, about the lives of the British women who pioneered the suffrage movement in the early 20th century. In the photos: 1 Barnard staff and friends get the word out on social media. 2 Athena Film Festival cofounder Melissa Silverstein, Athena Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori ’83, President Debora Spar, and Athena Center Director Kathryn Kolbert 3 Director Mira Nair, who won the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement award, celebrates with Sheila Nevins ’60, president of HBO Documentary Films. 4 Athena Film Festival co-chair Susan Fales-Hill and Orange is the New Black actress Alysia Reiner 5 Sarah Gavron is the director of Suffragette, which won the inaugural Athena Ensemble Award. 6 Producer and Athena Film Festival co-chair Dan Cogan 7 Tesori held a master class on musical composition. 8 Actress Kate McKinnon presented director Paul Feig with the inaugural Athena Leading Man Award. 9 A lively audience participated in question-and-answer sessions.
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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 11
SYLLABUS
by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
Illustration by Eric Petersen
speech. These findings can be applied in a wide range of fields, from voicerecognition technology to the creation of assistive devices for use in impaired hearing. The work of the lab is primarily supported by a grant from the National Institute on Deafness, part of the National Institutes of Health, which Remez was first awarded 30 years ago. Some of Remez’s discoveries about the way we perceive speech can seem counterintuitive. Instead of listening for sounds, we are actually listening for modes of variation. It’s not unlike in music, where a melody comprises a series of intervals, rather than a specific set of notes. “That’s why we’re able to understand each other over the telephone,” he says. “If it were all about the sound, the corruptions and distortions imposed by the telephone connection would make it impossible to recognize the linguistic message. What we’re listening for are the relationships in an evolving pattern of change.” Remez talks about his research almost poetically, as a quest for knowledge rather than a solution to a specific problem. He is a musician—before he went to graduate school to study speech, he played the bass fiddle in a band—and sees a natural bridge in his work between the humanities and sciences. Because of his appreciation for the arts, he helps students who want to continue their study of graphic arts, theatre, dance, and music by integrating those interests into their research projects. And to encourage his students to venture into the city, he organizes several yearly field trips to restaurants in different parts of Manhattan. His collaborative approach draws students with backgrounds in many disciplines. Jessica Nowinski ’92 was planning to major in theatre when she began working with Remez as a first-year. By the time she was a senior, she had switched to psychology. Remez helped her design a senior thesis that incorporated her love of theatre—she examined whether speech performed by actors is perceived differently than spontaneous speech. Working in Remez’s laboratory gave
her the confidence to consider a career in science, says Nowinski, who is now a research psychologist at NASA: “Before I worked in Robert’s lab, I never thought of myself as a scientist. But Robert also never treated me as only a student in his lab—he wanted me to grow as a whole person. It was important for him that we continued to appreciate the things we loved outside the world of science.” Jennifer Fellowes ’93, who worked on her senior thesis with Remez, says the professor sets the bar high from the first day. “The expectation is that everyone should be able to research and conduct an experiment that can be published in a well-regarded, peer-reviewed journal,” says Fellowes, who is now a psychiatrist in New York City. “But there’s no fear that you won’t measure up. The sense is that we’re all doing high-quality research together, and we’re having fun.” Many of the students who work in his lab begin by meeting Remez in the classroom. He offers a lecture class each fall that introduces students to the ways we perceive the world through the five senses, as well as through our sense of balance. His course “Perception and Language” is a scientific survey of language from the listener’s perspective, everything from the physical acoustics of speech to the way we process metaphors. To conclude the class, he gives students a challenge. “It’s fun to finish out the semester with a bit of Celtic transcendentalism,” he says. “I take a passage from a poem by Yeats, and I ask them, how would you understand someone who came up to you in a bus shelter and said, ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer’?” The point, he explains, is that poetry is a tricky kind of speech that isn’t exactly directed to the listener, so we listen differently. He creates these unusual exercises to allow the students to grapple with scholarly questions and to feel that they can make their own contributions to the scientific conversation. To hone their professional abilities, Remez encourages his students to present
CURRICULUM
Say What? • Robert Remez untangles how our brains decipher speech out of the jumble of sounds around us
• For most people, the twin processes
of listening and speaking are so natural that we never pause to think about how they work. But in the moment when a word or phrase hits the ear, the brain springs into action. “How do we know a sound is speech at all?” asks professor of psychology Robert Remez. “You can think about this from the perspective of a baby, lying in the nursery and hearing dogs barking, birds chirping, doorbells buzzing—and sometimes, a voice speaking. Out of that welter of sound, the baby somehow orients toward speech and doesn’t worry about the dogs and the doorbells. But how does the cognitive system recognize that speech is there?” Since 1980, Remez has been conducting experiments on speech perception in his Barnard laboratory with six to eight undergraduates, who are his partners in what he calls “an adventure in the direction of the unknown.” Over the years, he’s relied heavily on his students to shape the course of the research, which focuses primarily on the way we perceive speech and how we follow it in quiet or acoustically busy environments. In the lab, the students work with Remez to build “sine-wave speech,” an artificial form of speech stripped of familiar acoustic markers like tone and timbre. The result is a series of roboticsounding beeps and whistles that convey a linguistic message despite their unnatural quality. By manipulating the samples and playing them for test subjects in experiments, Remez and his students can learn about how we track and identify 12
their research at academic conferences and works with them on skills such as interviewing. “My best teachers taught me how to be taken seriously,” he says. “I want to give the students practice in explaining and arguing and thinking through questions, but also in how to collaborate, how to work generously on a team, when to bear down, when to wear your knowledge lightly.” Many of the women who work in his laboratory stay in touch with each other— and with Remez—for decades. One of Remez’s aims is to create an environment
where mentoring and cooperation are the norm. “My goal is to get the students to see me as a peer, someone they can speak their mind to,” Remez says. “Often they’re right and I’m wrong, but I’m happy to lose those arguments because it means we make progress together.” Every Friday, Remez and the students in the lab gather—over food, of course— to discuss their research projects. For Samantha Caballero ’17, it’s one of the highlights of her week. “At first I thought it would be scary to give my perspective on what we’re doing, but now it’s just a
fun, freewheeling conversation,” she says. “He just really wants to hear what we have to say.” Lauren Beltrone ’17, who works in Remez’s lab, appreciates his welcoming approach: “He wants to capture your imagination and give you something to chew on intellectually. You learn a lot, but you have to work for it.” To listen to examples of sine-wave speech and learn more about Remez’s research, visit columbia.edu/~remez/remez/Talker_ Identification.html.
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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 13
THE SALON
by Abigail Deutsch
Photograph of dancers by Stephanie Berger
On a chilly Friday in mid-March, members
until she arrived on campus. Scott had studied ballet throughout her childhood, but by the time she was applying to college, she had given up on becoming a professional dancer. She conceived of Barnard chiefly as a place to pursue her academic interests, which included East Asian studies. Yet Barnard drew her back to dance, and showed her that academics and the arts can reinforce each other in meaningful ways. In college, Scott took modern dance classes with instructors such as Risa Steinberg, now associate
DANCER
Leaps and Bounds • Jamie Scott ’05, a modern dancer with ‘nuance and ease,’ takes the stage from Paris to Moscow
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of the Trisha Brown Dance Company are rehearsing in a church on Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn. Among the flashing arms and thumping feet, one slim, sandy-haired performer stands out: Jamie Scott ’05, whose Barnard experience has played a crucial role in her dance career—but who landed in the College’s superb dance program, she says, through pure luck. As a high school student, “I had under-researched Barnard,” she admits with a laugh. She didn’t recognize the scope of the College’s dance program
director of the dance division at Juilliard, who “made dance into a thinking action,” she says. “You had to be a thinking body to do it. And that’s why I went to college— because I wanted to be using my brain.” A decisive moment came during Scott’s sophomore year, when the modern choreographer Elisa Monte restaged one of her seminal works, “Pigs and Fishes,” for the Barnard dance department. For the first time, Scott felt connected to a mode of dancing other than ballet. “It opened up a whole new chapter for me,” she says. The experience captured elements of modern dance that continue to thrill Scott. She had long enjoyed the rigor, precision, and scope of movement that ballet demands, and during college, she was surprised to learn that modern dance shares those requirements. She also appreciates modern dance’s emphasis on movement rather than image. “In ballet, there is an ideal standard of what things should look like, and you’re always trying to attain that image—or that was my understanding at the time,” Scott says. Modern dance was not about appearance, but about “how you do the thing, the physical process, rather than the performative result.” During her senior year, Scott finally decided to pursue dance professionally after attending a powerful performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. “I was so moved by seeing each of these dancers attack this beast of a work in their own ways.” Post-graduation, she did the “New York dance thing:” waited tables while taking classes and workshops at Cunningham’s company. She was hired as an understudy in 2007 and as a dancer in 2009. Dancing for Cunningham, one of the major modern choreographers of the last century, presented a wonderful challenge. “It was like a game,” she says. “He would run us into the ground, but in the most joyful way. What was so amazing was to see how every dancer would approach these impossible tasks of movement differently. There was almost more room within his specifications to have an
individual voice.” Scott has performed in major theatres across more than 20 countries, from Paris’ Théâtre de la Ville to Moscow’s Mossovet. She also teaches workshops and master classes. In 2014, she received the Princess Grace Award, which recognizes artists in theatre, dance, and film. Reviewers have praised her “nuance and ease.” The New York Times described a recent performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as “riveting,” and a writer for Dance Enthusiast characterizes her as “incisive, centered, wide-eyed, and wiry.” Cunningham died in 2009, and the company closed at the end of 2011. Two days later, the Trisha Brown Dance Company held auditions. When Scott had tried out for the company before, she considered the work beyond her. “It seemed like a very self-guided journey, and I didn’t feel like I had that in me yet,” she explains. But her work at Cunningham’s company had taught her a
lot about herself as a dancer and a person, and she thought that knowledge might make the difference. She was right: she got in. Scott describes Brown’s work as “internally driven. I have to start from a very quiet, deep internal place and allow it to emanate in a more organic way, sort of like slowly turning up the volume as the body starts to recognize the pattern of movement.” Scott still loves dancing, but she is interested in trying new things, too. She may return to school to study occupational therapy, a career that would let her apply her interest in movement to helping people relearn basic tasks. Brown’s dances involve plenty of gestural motions, she points out, which have helped her realize that “the most simple gesture can be a dance.” To watch a video about Jamie Scott ’05, visit barnard.edu/magazine.
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In the photo: (opposite) Trisha Brown Dance Company’s performance of “Present Tense” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this year, with Jamie Scott in the foreground
BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 15
THE SALON
by Annette Kahn ’67
POET
Well-Versed • Alice Notley ’67 crafts poetry that plays with form and tackles tough subjects
• Poet Alice Notley ’67 believes that to write “vital” poems, one must always be in a state of rebellion or disobedience. Over a 45-year career during which she has published more than 40 books, Notley has mined her experiences to create a poetic world that embraces the quotidian and the nightmarish. Last year, she received the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the largest literary prizes in the Englishspeaking world. Her newest book, Certain Magical Acts, which examines themes such as climate change and economic adversity, was published in June. Her poetry hews to no particular form. She explores word placement, shape, punctuation and illustration. She plays with rhythm and meter, stretching or fracturing them to express an emotion or an elusive moment of awareness. Although associated with the second generation of the New York School poets—her late first husband, Ted Berrigan, was one of its most glittering stars—she refuses to consider herself part of any school. She conducts workshops, but prefers not to teach in a formal classroom setting. “Teaching is a separate talent,” she says. “I didn’t like it very much.” Notley grew up in Needles, Calif., a small desert community where young people who saw a rare rain cloud in the sky would jump in a car and follow it. Barnard was her choice for a radically different experience. After graduation, she attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of two women to be admitted in 1967. She met Berrigan the following year. Notley held a variety 16
of jobs after graduating from Iowa, including serving as a model for sculptor George Segal, whose installation “Alice Listening to Her Poetry and Music” is at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, Germany. In the ’80s, she did office work for poet Allen Ginsberg. Her poetry has explored sexism and motherhood’s effects on creativity, as well as loss and grief. Her recent work examines the world and its difficulties, from the recent economic crisis and climate change to the sorrow of violence and the disappointment of democracy or any other political system. Robert Polito, who is the president of the Poetry Foundation, says, “The range, comprehensiveness, and empathetic imagination of Alice Notley’s poems are among the major astonishments of contemporary poetry. Book by surprising book, she reinvents not only herself as a poet, but also what it means for anyone to write a poem at this volatile moment in our history.” Her 1996 book The Descent of Alette, about urban living and the underground world of lost souls, is her most frequently taught work. Her 2001 book Disobedience won Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize. Notley, who lives in Paris, returns a few times a year to the U.S. to conduct small workshops and give readings, including one given in 2007 under the auspices of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. One reviewer who attended a 2015 reading wrote, “She has such intensity in her words that she brings her poetry to life. Notley sets the mood [and] the intonation with her immense array of diverse poems.” In addition to her poetry, she has written criticism, edited several journals, and created collage art for her own and others’ books. She also generously promotes the work of young writers, but she doesn’t let any of these pursuits draw her away from her poetry. Each morning, as soon as she wakes up, she returns to her work: “Writing,” she says, “keeps me stable.”
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LAST YEAR, NOTLEY RECEIVED THE $100,000 RUTH LILLY POETRY PRIZE, ONE OF THE LARGEST LITERARY PRIZES IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD. HER NEWEST BOOK, CERTAIN MAGICAL ACTS, EXAMINES THEMES SUCH AS CLIMATE CHANGE AND ECONOMIC ADVERSITY.
THE SALON
by Abigail Beshkin
Photograph by Chad Kamenshine
MUSICIAN
Rocker-Poet • With word-conscious lyrics by Sadie Dupuis ’11, Speedy Ortiz takes the indie music scene by storm
• Since the 2013 release of its first album,
Major Arcana, the indie-rock band Speedy Ortiz has developed a growing fan base and garnered critical acclaim. Music site Pitchfork called their second album, Foil Deer, “ferocious and visceral,” and named Dupuis “among the most talented lyricists of her musical class.” The New York Times’ Ben Ratliff has praised Dupuis’ lyrics as “rich and sanded-down and wry, as if designed to be read on a page.” Dupuis in fact has plenty of experience writing for the page. In 2014, she earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she also taught undergraduates who sometimes recognized her from the music scene. But Dupuis never set out to be a poet. After high school, she attended MIT to study music and math but, she says, “I was more interested in writing.” She took time off from college, lived in Texas, and then returned to Manhattan, where she interned at Spin and reapplied to college. “I was interested in attending a women’s college because I had been working in such male-dominated fields. At Spin, some of the editors were women, but the highest-up were always men,” she says. At Barnard, she majored in English with a concentration in creative writing, working closely with English professor Saskia Hamilton, a poet, who inspired her to apply to MFA programs. She also was an events coordinator at WBAR, Barnard’s radio station, and, for the first time, took some studio art classes, which later inspired her to make all the artwork for her album covers.
In 2011, two of her friends died unexpectedly, and she found herself rereading a favorite comic book series, Love and Rockets, about a group of Mexican-American teens in California’s punk scene. When a character named Speedy Ortiz dies, the series becomes, she says, “an interesting exploration of how people process grief. I wrote songs that were connecting the story line.” A band gradually gelled, made up of Dupuis and three other musicians—all men— whom she had known in various musical contexts. The Speedy Ortiz name stuck. Dupuis now lives in Philadelphia and has been touring since 2008, when she played with a now-defunct band named Quilty. “I went on tour instead of going to my Barnard graduation,” she confesses. Over the years, she has seen a subtle but meaningful increase in the number of women involved in the music business. Dupuis is doing her part to proclaim women’s strengths through her music. Pitchfork says her lyrics are “explicitly feminist,” about “asserting oneself, taking power.” The lyrics of “Raising the Skate” are a case in point: “I’m not bossy, I’m the boss … I’m chief, not the overthrown/ Captain, not a crony.”
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NEW & UPCOMING RELEASES FICTION
•Miller’s Valley by Anna Quindlen ’74 Random House, $28 POETRY
•Certain Magical Acts by Alice Notley ’67 Penguin Books, $20 A Color Called Harvest by Faith Paulsen ’77 Finishing Line Press, $14.99 The Connoisseur of Alleys by Eileen Tabios ’82 Marsh Hawk Press, $18 NONFICTION
•The Garden Bible: Designing Your Perfect Outdoor Space by Barbara Ballinger ’71 and Michael Glassman Images Publishing, $45 Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American Century by Sara Woldin Fieldston ’05 Harvard University Press, $39.95 The Out-of-Sync Child Grows Up by Carol Stock Kranowitz ’67 TarcherPerigee, $17 In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri ’89 translated by Ann Goldstein Knopf, $26.95 Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965 by Barbara Miller Lane ’56 Princeton University Press, $49.95 Gender at Work: Theory and Practice for 21st Century Organizations by Aruna Rao ’77, Joanne Sandler, David Kelleher, and Carol Miller Routledge, $54.95 Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema by Elizabeth Reich ’99 Rutgers University Press, $27.95
BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 17
by Eveline Chao
A Harlem Collaboration • The classroom takes root in Harlem for an innovative new program
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Photograph by Dorothy Hong
Professor Tina Campt doesn’t have to
look far for inspiration. The neighborhood of Harlem, right in Barnard’s front yard, has always played an important part in the curriculum of the Africana studies department, where Campt has taught since 2010 and which she has led since 2011. Now, Harlem is once again providing a rich resource for learning through a new series of academic courses. The Harlem Semester offers students an academic immersion in Harlem in partnership with the institutions and people that have made the neighborhood a thriving political and cultural center for the African diaspora. This spring, six courses were taught in conjunction with— and for several sessions at the site of— five venerated Harlem arts and cultural institutions: Harlem Stage, the National Black Theatre, the Romare Bearden Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The initiative was organized by Africana studies and the Barnard Center for Research on Women, where Campt has been director since 2014. More than 120 students took the courses, which will expand next year to include another Harlem giant: the Apollo Theater. Arts spaces have been central to Harlem’s history, enabling it to become a place that is unique to the African American identity. “The courses that comprise the Harlem semester celebrate where we are in New York City and the unique connections between Barnard and Harlem,” says Linda Bell, provost and dean of the faculty. “Beyond that, they are about place-based learning outside of the four walls of the classroom.” The initiative unites site-specific learning with a collaborative approach to teaching. Experts at the partner institutions—curators, archivists, artists, and administrators—co-taught the classes, engaging students in discussions of the history of the institutions and their contributions to the cultural landscape. The students made use of rare archival materials and had behind-the-scenes
access to museums, theatres, and art collections. They went on themed walking tours designed for each class to show them the places that the authors and artists they were studying captured in their work. “I honestly didn’t really know much about Harlem before,” says architecture major Joud Al Shdaifat ’17. “Now I know Harlem is one of the most creative, eclectic, sacred places that I’ve been to in New York.” Sade Lythcott, CEO of the National Black Theatre, says, “Students are learning firsthand from institutions that have been on the frontline of making Harlem one of the most important and culturally rich communities in America, and as the institutions, we have gotten a profound opportunity to tell and teach our stories to the next generation of thought leaders.” The classes drew on numerous themes: art, activism, literature, architecture, religion, and other subjects. Students made architectural renderings for a new building for the National Black Theatre; explored art and social justice during the Harlem Renaissance; created digital storytelling projects in collaboration with the Schomburg Center and the International Center of Photography on the work of playwright and poet Ntozake Shange ’70; participated in a master class with the creator of a new work about James Baldwin; studied the archives of artist Romare Bearden; and examined their own subjectivities in response to a seminal 2001 exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Students read works by Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston ’28, and others, and learned how the authors interacted with Harlem: where they lived and how they were influenced by the people and the culture. “In order to understand Harlem, you have to understand the community and its relationship to this place,” says Campt, who is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In her role as chair of the Africana studies department, Campt frequently
hosted prominent scholars who teach and speak about Harlem, which prodded her to think about creating a more formal way for students to study the cultural and political legacy in and around Harlem. “I thought we could give back to that community by partnering with the people in that community to teach their history and their legacy, and to teach what is in our front yard.” Campt reached out to Columbia’s School of the Arts and, with their help, she presented her idea at a meeting of 15 arts and cultural organizations in Harlem. It was a hit. Pat Cruz, who is the executive director of Harlem Stage, recalls telling Campt, “This is the kind of partnership we have always dreamed about having with a university but never did. And we have it with you, and we love that!” Many of Harlem’s prominent institutions were founded or are run by African-American women, and they are especially interested in nurturing Barnard students, says Campt, who wanted to “make visible the role of AfricanAmerican women in Harlem as cultural leaders, sustaining the institutions that make Harlem great.” Taking classes at these institutions afforded students an opportunity “to appreciate the richness of the area’s history,” says Irina Verona, an adjunct assistant professor who taught an architecture class in conjunction with the National Black Theatre, one of the oldest black theatres in the country. “Harlem has a unique mixture—politics, culture, and religion are intertwined.” Victoria Lee ’17 says the course on the Harlem Renaissance prompted her to consider “which narratives and voices are given space in Harlem.” Attending performances at the National Black Theatre showed her how the theatre’s “approach to its performances and its audience diverges from mainstream theatre productions in a refreshing and incredibly thought-provoking way.” Spending time at Harlem’s most renowned institutions, she says, “has changed the way I see my neighborhood.”
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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 19
Illustration by Vidhya Nagarajan
• The six institutions that have partnered with Barnard to create sitespecific learning experiences for students are some of Harlem’s most revered arts and cultural organizations. In the following pages, we capture their spirit with the professors and institution leaders who taught the classes.
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Photographs by Will Mebane
BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 21
Artist Romare Bearden was born in North Carolina in 1911, but as a young boy he moved to Harlem, which became the subject of much of his most riveting work. Its streets captivated him, and his brightly colored collages vividly capture the buzz and chaos of city life. The class “Romare Bearden: Home is Harlem” was taught in partnership with the Studio 22
Museum in Harlem—which Bearden played a role in helping to establish—and the Romare Bearden Foundation. The course emphasized Bearden’s artwork, his published articles and interviews, and the work of those that influenced him. Diedra Harris-Kelley, who is co-director of the foundation, taught the class, bringing students rare catalogs, books, and videos
from the foundation, whose archives are currently not open to the public. The class explored “how Harlem shaped the artist’s thinking,” she says. In the photo: Diedra Harris-Kelley, co-director of the Romare Bearden Foundation
National Black Theatre, one of the oldest
black theatres in the country, hosted two courses. A class on art, activism, and social justice during the Harlem Renaissance, taught by English professor Monica Miller, examined formal and informal theatre—from a 1917 “Silent Protest” parade along Fifth Avenue organized by W.E.B. Du Bois to the National Black
Theatre’s production of Blood at the Root. In the second class, architecture students created proposals for a mixed-use facility for the theatre, which is considering a renovation and expansion, says adjunct assistant professor Irina Verona. The project prompted Joud Al Shdaifat ’17 to explore ways of “linking social, political, historical, and religious aspects of Harlem
with the architectural concept of the design.” In the photo: (from left) Nabii Faison, director of the entrepreneurial arts program at the National Black Theatre (NBT); Irina Verona, adjunct assistant professor at Barnard; Monica Miller, an English professor at Barnard; Jonathan McCrory, director of NBT’s theatre arts program; and Sade Lythcott, NBT’s CEO
BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 23
The Apollo Theater is one of Harlem’s
most recognizable cultural institutions, with more than a million visitors a year. Its iconic neon sign towers over 125th Street; its marquee advertises some of the biggest names in entertainment as well as its famous amateur night, introduced in 1934. In 2017, Barnard will offer a class in partnership with the Apollo called “Black 24
Women, Performance, and the Politics of Style” that will focus on some of the wellknown—as well as some lesser known— women who have appeared at the Apollo and whose careers have contributed to the wider discourse on entertainment, the performing arts, and iconography. Students will also examine the history of the Apollo and the ways that it intersects
“socially, politically, and economically with Harlem and black culture,” says Shirley Taylor, the theatre’s director of education. In the photo: Shirley Taylor, director of education at the Apollo Theater
Photograph of Ntozake Shange by Adger Cowans
Students pored over personal diaries,
typescript manuscripts, and photo albums from the poet, playwright, novelist, and black feminist Ntozake Shange ’70 as part of a course on digital storytelling. Given in partnership with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the International Center of Photography, the class explored Shange’s life and career,
and made extensive use of the 31-linearfoot collection of materials from Shange, which was recently acquired by the Barnard Library Archives and Special Collections. Students used the material “in some of the most thoughtful and creative ways I have ever seen an archive be used,” says Shannon O’Neill, Barnard’s associate director of archives and special
collections. The class was taught by Kim F. Hall, the Lucyle Hook Chair and professor of English and Africana studies. To watch Shange discuss her collection, visit barnard.edu/magazine. In the photo: Playwright Ntozake Shange ‘70
BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 25
Born in Harlem in 1924, author James
Baldwin was one of the country’s leading chroniclers of the experience of black Americans. Nineteen students spent the spring semester exploring how Baldwin’s work examined “the changing geography of Harlem around race, sexuality, gender, religion, and American power,” says Rich Blint, the associate director of the Office 26
of Public Programs and Engagement at Columbia’s School of the Arts and an adjunct assistant professor at Barnard. In the course, taught in conjunction with Harlem Stage, the students participated in a master class led by Meshell Ndegeocello, whose work in progress, Can I Get a Witness: The Gospel of James Baldwin, is scheduled to premiere at Harlem Stage
in the fall. The master class demonstrated “how widely relevant Baldwin’s work is,” says Tamsin Pargiter ’16. Baldwin has become one of her favorite authors. In the photo: (from left) Rich Blint, adjunct assistant professor at Barnard, and Simone Eccleston, interim director of programming at Harlem Stage
In 2001, an exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem called “Freestyle” helped usher into the limelight a new generation of artists whose approaches to art making “challenged the art world and questioned conventional thinking about art made by artists of color,” says Leslie Hewitt, an assistant professor of professional practice in the visual
arts concentration. Students in her class, “Freestyle and Displacement in Contemporary Art Practices,” explored their own subjectivities in ways that intersected with the concepts examined by the artists in the “Freestyle” exhibition, along with their contemporaries. The students met with some of the museum’s former artists-in-residence, art historians,
and curators. The museum, founded in 1968, was created by a diverse group of artists, community activists, and philanthropists to support practicing artists and provide arts education. In the photo: (from left) Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum; Professor Leslie Hewitt; and Nico Wheadon, director of public programs
BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 27
by Annette Kahn ’67
Global Reach • Students mentor high schoolers and professors make academic connections at the Global Symposium in Paris
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Illustration by Joe Anderson
Hundreds of prominent leaders in
government, business, and fashion gathered in Paris this spring for Barnard’s Global Symposium, an event convened each year by the College to provide a forum for discussion of critical issues facing women, and an opportunity for professors to extend the reach of their research. It also offered Barnard students a chance to mentor a group of international students in leadership and negotiating skills. “Our intention in establishing the symposia series in 2009 was to create conversations that have power and impact, and address women’s issues around the world,” President Debora Spar said in her opening remarks. The symposium has met in Beijing, Dubai, São Paulo, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Shanghai, and New York; this year’s event was the first held in Europe. The symposium offered several lively sessions that delved into gender equality in government and legislation for parenting leave in different countries, with prominent speakers such as the deputy mayor of Paris and Pamela Golbin ’92, the chief curator of fashion and textiles at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The event provided an opportunity for professors to collaborate with colleagues in the region. Six faculty members from several departments, including Africana studies, French, English, and dance, were named symposium fellows. Several of the fellows held a working session with local academics, artists, curators, cultural workers, and community activists to discuss a collaboration regarding the links between the African diasporic cultures and communities in Harlem and Paris. Professor Tina Campt, who is the director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, says the session gave her “the opportunity to connect with other people who do what I do. It means I get out of my comfort zone.” The center hosted a discussion between esteemed writer and former Columbia faculty member Maryse Condé and renowned Franco-Martinican novelist and filmmaker Fabienne Kanor on
the rich tradition of artists and writers moving between the French-speaking Caribbean and France, which took place at Reid Hall, Columbia’s Global Center in Europe. Colleen Thomas-Young, an associate professor of professional practice in dance, shared her academic research with French colleagues through workshops and lectures. She investigates international dance improvisation and studies how dance is informed by gender and history. As director of the Barnard Dance in Paris program, she has brought more than 40 Barnard and Columbia students to France during the summer to take classes and perform original works. Barnard’s student fellows developed and facilitated, with guidance from the Athena Center for Leadership Studies, workshops for high school girls, held first on the Barnard campus prior to the symposium and then in Paris, where girls from international schools made zines— short magazines—about subjects they were passionate about. Topics included body image, the American presidential election, and the gender pay gap. “My leadership capacities were put to the test,” Melina Dunham ’18 said, “and I learned a lot about myself as a young woman soon entering the work force.” Tina Shan ’18 said the workshop posed the question, “‘What should women’s leadership look like?’ We are talking about redefining the word itself. To lead is not to compete or oppress, but to lift each other up.” One conference panel addressed the way in which legislation for equal gender representation has mandated quotas for boards for nonprofit institutions and corporations in countries such as France and Italy. Réjane Sénac, who is the president of the Parity Commission of the High Council for Gender Equality, an advisory group run by the French prime minister’s office, said that in patriarchal countries with ingrained cultural norms, such legislation is the only way to jumpstart the path to equality. Deputy Mayor of Paris Célia Blauel,
the keynote speaker, reaffirmed the need for legislation to spark change. Initially a critic of France’s gender parity law, which included stipulations on equal representation in politics, Blauel said that she “would not be here today if it weren’t for this law.” She urged women to press their case for gender parity. Legislation pertaining to work and home life was a key focus of a third panel. Willem Adema, a senior economist at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group devoted to helping governments with economic and social issues, pointed out that Japan and South Korea have generous paternity leaves, but that the time is rarely taken because men fear the impact such leaves will have on their careers. During a panel on gender and the fashion industry, panelists discussed how confidence in one’s appearance creates a greater sense of strength. Golbin pointed out that “women who designed for women—Coco Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet, Jeanne Lanvin—created the fashion world we know today.” She began her fashion career at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, where she has worked for more than 20 years; she is one of very few museum curators in Paris not born in France. The museum is currently showing “Fashion Forward: Three Centuries of Fashion,” organized by Golbin, which commemorates the 30th anniversary of its fashion collection, capturing the history of clothing all the way from a court dress made in 1778 to a hooded sheath from designer Azzedine Alaïa. Golbin found the symposium to be an eye-opening experience. “Women’s issues are not so overtly spoken about here in France,” she says. “It was a wonderful opportunity to see the upcoming generation of women interested and proactive about their role in the business realm.” To watch videos from the Global Symposium, go to barnard.edu/magazine.
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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 29
Barnard’s Empirical Reasoning Center, located in the new teaching and learning center, “ensures that our students will graduate with an increasingly vital literacy, enabling them to navigate a world awash in data.”
Getting support from the College’s Joyce Kosh Kaiser ’57 Internship Fund in the Arts last summer “meant I could focus on my internship [at the Philadelphia Museum of Art] and not stress about finding a paying job to supplement it.” Francesca Sisk ’16
Professor David Weiman Faculty Director of the Empirical Reasoning Center “I’m extremely involved with social and political issues relating to women—a direct result of my Barnard education. Barnard gave me the gumption to get emotionally, intellectually, and financially engaged with the world.” Daphne Philipson ’69
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by Jennifer Altmann and Abigail Beshkin
Photograph by Joel Barhamand
Building Barnard’s Future • Scholarship and academic opportunity thrive at Barnard, which is launching its most ambitious fundraising endeavor
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“Barnard opened my eyes to everything that was possible. It changed my life.” Mariany Polanco ’13
“Faculty across different departments at Barnard often work together on important initiatives. There is a spirit of collaboration at the College that I value.” Professor Brian Morton Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences
“Having an endowed chair allows you to think bigger, to be more ambitious with your research goals and in terms of projects you can do.” Professor Kimberley Johnson Director of the Urban Studies Program
BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 31
Mariany Polanco ’13 was born and raised
in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood, a few miles from Barnard’s campus. She wanted to attend Barnard but knew her parents, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, could not afford to send her to college. “If Barnard had not given me a full ride, I would not have attended,” she says. But even more critical than the funding she received was the support of professors who “didn’t give up on me,” she says. “Because they invested so much time in me, I could never let them down.” Wendy Schor-Haim, the associate director of the Writing Program, “helped me revise my essays 100 times,” Polanco recalls. “She would meet me in office hours or after hours. She was so dedicated to ensuring I was successful.” Polanco, the first in her family to graduate from college, has worked at Goldman Sachs since 2013, in the human capital management division. “Barnard opened my eyes to everything that was possible,” she says. “It changed my life.” Financial aid and close interaction with faculty are two of the cornerstones of Barnard’s mission. The College is committed to meeting 100 percent of qualified students’ financial need, and half of Barnard students receive some form of financial aid. But exactly how much students will need each year fluctuates. Financial aid represents the greatest area of unpredictability in the College’s finances, for as the need for scholarships increases, other areas of the budget suffer to bridge the gap. Strengthening the College’s ability to provide financial aid is one of the chief objectives of The Bold Standard: A Campaign for Barnard, the College’s most ambitious fundraising endeavor in its 126-year history, launched in May and announced at Barnard’s Annual Gala. The campaign’s financial goal is to raise a total of $400 million to address the College’s three priorities: growing the endowment, building a new teaching and learning center, and expanding annual giving. The College has already raised a record $265 32
million toward this goal during the socalled quiet phase of the campaign, which began in July 2012. “It’s no secret that Barnard is rich in scholarship, intellect, and academic opportunity,” says President Debora Spar. “But it’s also a known fact that Barnard has never been a wealthy institution. We were founded on an idea—that women deserved equal education and opportunity—rather than on a large financial endowment. And over the College’s 126 years we have actively welcomed immigrants and students who were the first in their families to attend college, opening our gates to all those who deserved to be here.” The College’s endowment, in fact, is only a quarter of those at some of our notable peer institutions. “Quite literally, we ‘punch above our weight,’ doing so much with so little,” says Spar. “But the time has come to change that.” The campaign’s three priorities are: 1 GROWING THE ENDOWMENT. AT $276 MILLION, THE CURRENT ENDOWMENT GENERATES AN ANNUAL INCOME THAT OFFSETS ONLY SIX PERCENT OF THE COLLEGE’S OPERATING BUDGET, LEADING THE COLLEGE TO RELY HEAVILY ON TUITION REVENUE. “THE ENDOWMENT BENEFITS EVERY PART OF THE ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE,” SAYS KIM F. HALL, LUCYLE HOOK CHAIR AND PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND AFRICANA STUDIES. HAVING A STRONG ENDOWMENT BOLSTERS STUDENT FINANCIAL AID, ATTRACTS AND SUPPORTS THE WORLD’S BEST FACULTY, AND GROWS PROGRAMMATIC INITIATIVES.
“There are many reasons for giving to Barnard and for growing the endowment,” says Lois Champy ’67, a trustee and a longtime financial supporter of the College. “For my husband Jim and me, a wonderful attribute of Barnard is that it has continued to be able to attract the best students regardless of need, through
a generous scholarship program that we continue to support.” Currently, Barnard is able to draw on the endowment to meet only 17 percent of its financial aid commitment. Increasing endowed funds for financial aid by $100 million would enable the College to rely on income from endowed funds to support 30 percent of its annual financial aid commitment. Scholarships help students like Francesca Sisk ’16, who was thrilled to receive the Mary Gordon ’71 Scholarship for Studies in Literature. Gordon, an acclaimed novelist who is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Writing, also served as Sisk’s adviser for her thesis on author Jean Stafford. “It was unbelievable to work with someone so well regarded in the literary world,” Sisk says. “The particular insight that a professor who is also a writer can bring to a discussion is unparalleled.” Sisk also benefitted from the Joyce Kosh Kaiser ’57 Internship Fund in the Arts, which enabled her to spend last summer working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She did research on exhibitions and gave tours for youngsters, which were a “delightful challenge,” she says. “The stipend meant I could focus on my internship and not stress about finding a paying job to supplement it.” Endowment funds also allow the College to recruit top faculty and to support their research, their work with students, and their innovations in the classroom and the lab. Endowed professorships, one of the highest honors the College can bestow on a faculty member, provide support to those “whose scholarship is addressing significant questions and is on the forefront of research,” says David Weiman, the Alena Wels Hirschorn ’58 Professor of Economics. Holding an endowed chair gives a professor “the leeway to be able to engage more frequently in the public realm of discussion on critical policy questions. The professors really are public intellectuals.” So far, the College has raised funds to endow 11 chairs during the quiet phase of the campaign.
Kimberley Johnson, who is a professor of political science and urban studies, was recently appointed to a named chair. “Having an endowed chair allows you to think bigger, to be more ambitious with your research goals and in terms of projects you can do,” Johnson says. She is currently working on a book, Chocolate Cities: Oakland, Newark, and the Future of Metropolitan America, that explores demographic shifts in inner cities and traces the impact of these shifts on local and national politics. The research support she received through the Tow Distinguished Professorship for Scholarship and Practitioners has allowed her to schedule additional trips to California, where she visits archives and conducts interviews. Johnson, who is director of the Urban Studies Program, is also planning to hold a community workshop with residents of East Palo Alto about their city, which will expand her scholarly work into community engagement. Funding from Barnard has allowed her to pursue offshoots of her research that are “really interesting but don’t necessarily fall into boundaries, but I think will be important. That couldn’t be done without having this kind of freedom.” 2 RAISING FUNDS FOR THE NEW TEACHING AND LEARNING CENTER. AN INSPIRING, INTERDISCIPLINARY SPACE THAT WILL BECOME THE COLLEGE’S ACADEMIC AND INTELLECTUAL HUB, THIS 128,000-SQUARE-FOOT BUILDING WILL STAND AT THE HEART OF CAMPUS. THE CENTER, TO OPEN IN 2018, WILL HAVE MODERN TECHNOLOGIES AND INTERACTIVE LEARNING SPACES. THE COLLEGE HAS ALREADY RECEIVED THE THREE LARGEST GIFTS IN ITS 126-YEAR HISTORY FOR THE CENTER, TOTALING $70 MILLION, FROM THREE PROMINENT NEW YORK FAMILIES WHO ARE LONGTIME BARNARD SUPPORTERS: CHERYL GLICKER MILSTEIN ’82 AND PHILIP MILSTEIN; THE TOW FOUNDATION ON BEHALF OF LEONARD TOW AND
DAUGHTER EMILY TOW JACKSON ’88; AND DIANA T. VAGELOS ’55 AND P. ROY VAGELOS.
In addition to a new kind of library with collections supporting a liberal arts education, the building will have a computational science center that will help students with scientific, mathematical, and computational skills. Brian Morton, chair of the department of biological sciences, who will use the center in his teaching and research, says digital competency is “a skill that’s essential in the world today in any number of fields. In the last five years, I’ve noticed a tremendous increase in the number of students who want these skills.” The center will offer a central location where classes can be held—to integrate research skills into the curriculum—and where students can drop in for one-onone assistance. Relocating to the new building will be the Empirical Reasoning Center, which provides students with assistance in visualizing, organizing, and analyzing data. “Students need the skills to understand, evaluate, and interpret this kind of information, and unfortunately many do not acquire them, especially in their first two years,” says Weiman, the faculty director for the center. “We need to make sure that’s not the case.” The center has already helped more than 900 students use software to create maps, study spatial patterns, produce graphical analyses, and wrestle with data in other ways. 3 EXPANDING ANNUAL GIVING. ANNUAL GIVING SUPPORTS MANY AREAS OF THE COLLEGE, INCLUDING FINANCIAL AID, STUDENT TRAVEL AND INTERNSHIPS, SCHOLARLY RESEARCH, CAREER DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS, A VIBRANT CAMPUS LIFE, AND FACULTY-STUDENT RESEARCH COLLABORATIONS. IT ALSO HELPS COVER MANY OF THE COLLEGE’S EVERYDAY NEEDS, SUCH AS BUILDING MAINTENANCE.
Daphne Philipson ’69 believes supporting Annual Giving is the best way to assist Barnard. “I want my funds to go toward the College’s greatest current need. A new paint job for a residence hall, maintaining the equipment in a science lab—these are daily ‘checking account’ expenses, and I like the feeling that I’m helping Barnard meet them.” In whatever way alumnae choose to support the College, their contributions assist faculty, staff, and students to strengthen a school where innovation is paramount, where professors engage in groundbreaking scholarship, and where students receive all the financial assistance they need to make coming to Barnard a reality. “It’s important for the campaign to have the full participation of all alumnae to reach our goals,” says Jolyne CarusoFitzGerald ’81, chair of Barnard’s board of trustees. “For all who take pride in the education they, their daughters, or other family members received, this is the moment to invest in Barnard.” Jareline Guerrero ’15 was able to attend Barnard because of the scholarships she received from the College. She now teaches at a charter school in Newark, N.J., where she is helping to inspire a new generation of young, striving students. “My acceptance to Barnard is one of the proudest moments of my life,” she says. “And I think intelligent, hopeful, hardworking women who did not choose their economic status deserve to feel that kind of validation.”
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THE BOLD STANDARD
A CAMPAIGN FOR BARNARD For video interviews and opportunities to give and have your donation count, visit: theboldstandard.barnard.edu
BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 33
by Abigail Deutsch
Literary Life • Anne Bernays ’52 reflects on books, Barnard, and truth-telling
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Photograph by Dorothy Hong
Last year, in short order, two important
things happened to Anne Bernays ’52: she became a great-grandmother, and she dyed her hair blue. While she didn’t think too hard about the coincidence at first, “after some introspection, I realize that I was protesting the passage of my own time here,” the 85-year-old author wrote in an essay for NPR. “In our peculiar culture, beauty does not, as Keats claimed, equal truth. It equals youth.” According to Bernays’s daughter, the novelist and short story writer Hester Kaplan, the dye job encapsulates her mother’s broader approach to aging. “She never lets age dictate behavior,” Kaplan says. “She’s completely current and curious,” whether posting YouTube videos on Facebook or playing Words with Friends—an activity that, like many twentysomethings, she engages in “compulsively.” Above all, “she very much rejects the notion that because you’re old, you should act like an old person, and that it’s unseemly for old people to do certain things,” Kaplan notes. “I think this is a really terrific example of where attitude, rather than any number, makes the person. She thinks of herself as young, so she is young. She just happens to be 85.” Over a 59-year career as an awardwinning author, Bernays has written beguiling fiction about social themes such as wealth and sexual harassment, as well as nonfiction about writers and writing, at times collaborating on projects with her late husband, Justin Kaplan. After his death in 2014, she wrote about her loss in highly revealing—and boldly honest— terms. Bernays took a winding path to Barnard. She first enrolled at Wellesley, which, with its many rules, was not to her liking: she recalls five classmates being punished for sharing a single can of beer. After two years, she transferred to Barnard, the alma mater of her mother, the feminist and writer Doris Fleischman 1913, for whom a scholarship is endowed. “I loved, loved, loved it. It sharpened that
faculty that makes you ask questions and not accept the expected answer but keep asking and asking.” Bernays, who studied 18th-century literature, recalls a class on writing short stories with an instructor who “would read your story closely and sit you down and ask you questions and say, ‘I don’t want you to answer; I just want you to think about it.’ And the questions were where the holes in the story were.” Bernays honed her writing skills as the Barnard stringer for The New York Times. “I didn’t know anything about writing a newspaper story, but I learned quickly,” she says. She covered campus speakers and other events, and found the task thrilling—if also stressful enough that, every time she left the Times building, she had a bad headache. Bernays also frequented Greenwich Village, where she “hung out with these disreputable intellectual pre-beatniks.” She lived with her parents at the time, which worked well enough. “I guess, for selfprotection, they didn’t question me about where I’d been or what I was doing, which was probably better for all of us.” At 23, Bernays married Kaplan. She spent her early professional life editing the literary magazine Discovery and evaluating manuscripts for Houghton Mifflin, a job she didn’t much like (“You just read bad stuff all day long”). A chance encounter led her to start writing fiction: she ran into an old high school friend who mentioned that she was working on short stories. “This is hard for me to say, but I went home and said, ‘If she can do it, I can do it too,’” Bernays recalls. “Isn’t that awful? Of course, she didn’t turn into a writer and I did, but it was just what I needed, that little prick of competitiveness, and off I went.” Bernays would later turn to novels, finding the short story form too restrictive. “I wanted to know what happened to those people,” she says of her fictional characters. She has published several novels, including Growing Up Rich, Professor Romeo, and Trophy House. Her book What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction
Writers, written with Pamela Painter, has been in print since 1980. With Kaplan, she authored The Language of Names, a study of the social significance of naming, and Back Then: Two Literary Lives in 1950s New York, a dual autobiography detailing the couple’s early years in the city. Kaplan—the author of an awardwinning Mark Twain biography—played an invaluable role in Bernays’s literary life. The pair read each other’s drafts and influenced each other’s work. “He made it impossible for me to be sloppy,” Bernays says. His example impressed on her that “you have to work at it until you get it absolutely perfect. Even in the first draft, the words have to do exactly what you want them to.” Now, nearly two years after Kaplan’s death, Bernays is adjusting to life without him. A remarkable essay she wrote for The Washington Post explored the duality of grief and liberty that has marked her period of mourning. She describes how much she misses him, but then notes an upside to living alone: “I can do anything I want, when I want, how I want.” She eats things that Kaplan avoided, making dinner “a bit of this, a bit of that,” not the balanced meal her husband preferred. “It feels not so lonely,” she says now. “I’ve gotten into certain habits that make me feel good”—such as walking with friends—“and I don’t cry every time I see his picture anymore.” A longtime writing teacher, she continues to give classes at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation and in her home. The Washington Post essay prompted scores of responses, more than anything she’s ever written. Readers said they found it inspiring. “Yet I did not set out to inspire,” she says, an attitude she learned from her husband. “My goal was to see if I could tell the truth, and that’s the hardest thing in writing. I tell my students to write from the pain. If you don’t write from the pain, it’s going to be boring.” And as that blue dye job attests, boring has never been Bernays’ style.
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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 35
by Benjamin Reeves
Illustration by Brian Rea
Love Is On the Air • Three alumnae help create a podcast for The New York Times’ ‘Modern Love’ column
• Every Sunday, readers flock to The New
York Times’ “Modern Love” column, where writers grapple with all aspects of love—from a woman overcoming a fear of small talk at an awkward mixer to an Indian-American woman whose breakup with her fiancé was predicted by a childhood horoscope. The column receives more than 7,000 submissions a year, and the most popular column has been read online more than 10 million times. Now, “Modern Love” has expanded to add a free weekly podcast, with acclaimed actors reading some of the most compelling columns from the last 12 years. And three Barnard alumnae are responsible for the behind-the-scenes work to produce the program, which is created in collaboration with WBUR, Boston’s public radio station. Jessica Alpert Silber ’03, the managing producer for program development at WBUR, handles the podcast’s production. Her colleague at WBUR, Adrienne Lavidor-Berman ’99, focuses on audience development and social media promotion of the podcast. Anya Strzemien ’01 is a deputy editor for digital styles and travel at the Times. Actors Judd Apatow, Jason Alexander, and Emmy Rossum have read essays for the podcast, which also features a conversation among the piece’s author; the column’s editor, Daniel Jones, whose daughter is Phoebe Jones ’18; and Mehgna Chakrabarti, an anchor at 36
WBUR. In January, its first month, the podcast was downloaded more than 1.4 million times. A poignant essay by Dan Barry on how the death of his daughter’s goldfish—“the size and color of a Dorito”—forces him to recall his parents’ death is a humorously dark, existential journey narrated by Jason Alexander. Actor Stephen Bogardus reads “Finding Equilibrium in Seesawing Libidos” by Marc Jaffe, about how his wife’s medication for Parkinson’s disease has the unintended effect of amping up her libido. Each of the essays is transformed for the podcast by the team
of audio producers and journalists at the Times and WBUR. To listen to the podcast, visit wbur.org/series/ modernlove. JESSICA ALPERT SILBER ’03 Majors
Political science and Spanish Career
After graduating, Alpert Silber worked for the U.S. Justice Department and was a Fulbright Scholar in El Salvador before beginning her career in radio. Now she leads the production of the podcast at
and as a social media strategist. She spent more than a decade at The Boston Globe before striking out as an independent consultant last year. Now she works with WBUR to increase the audience and social engagement for the podcast. Based on social media responses, Lavidor-Berman believes that many of the podcast’s biggest fans are longtime readers “who are getting reacquainted with columns from the past.” Her Barnard Experience
Lavidor-Berman grew up loving radio, TV, newspapers, and magazines, and knew she wanted to work in media. Barnard helped her gain experience in journalism while still an undergraduate. “One of the best things about being a student at Barnard is great access to internships,” she says. During college, she worked at McCall’s and several other media companies. ANYA STRZEMIEN ’01 Majors
Film and cinema studies Career
WBUR. She and her team begin by casting actors to read the columns and add music, sound effects, and sometimes silence. In her favorite episode, a mother has to sign papers giving her baby up for adoption. The team originally added the sound of a pen scratching on paper, but “it didn’t feel grounded,” Alpert Silber recalls. So she recorded the cries of all the babies of WBUR employees—“station babies,” she calls them—and layered the sound into the scene. “If you hear that baby cry, it just kills you,” she says. “There’s a human being that’s affected by this; it’s not just signing papers.”
Her Barnard Experience
“One thing I got from Barnard was the value of speaking up,” Alpert Silber says. “There’s the sense on campus that if you want to do something, you work hard and you can do it.” ADRIENNE LAVIDOR-BERMAN ’99 Major
English Career
After Barnard, Lavidor-Berman leapt into digital media right after the dotcom bust, finding success as a product developer focused on growing web traffic
After graduating from Barnard, Strzemien held positions in interior design, but later went to work at Life and The Huffington Post before joining the Times in 2015 in the midst of a major digital push for the company. Now she’s the producer responsible for making sure the podcast gets published to the web and gets attention from editors. Strzemien promotes the podcast at the daily “Page One” meeting, where editors and producers advocate for their pieces to appear on the front of the website. “After a meeting filled with stories of politics, war, the economy, and obituaries, discussion of the ‘Modern Love’ podcast is welcome,” she says. Her Barnard Experience
Strzemien credits her study of film at Barnard with helping her develop her love of storytelling. “I had incredible advisers and writing coaches, and that helped me tremendously later in my career,” she says. “Barnard really emphasizes a certain cultural literacy. Plus the sisterhood out of Barnard is pretty remarkable. You run into them everywhere. It’s a strong network of women.”
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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 37
ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION
Photograph by Brandon Schulman
PRESIDENT’S LETTER
Ambitious Endeavors •
SUPPORT BARNARD
If you are interested in learning more about these and many more programs and support opportunities, please contact: Alumnae Relations alumnaerelations@barnard.edu 212.854.2005 Career Development ocd@barnard.edu 212.854.2033 Annual Giving annualgiving@barnard.edu 212.870.2520 Planned Giving plannedgiving@barnard.edu 212.870.2520 Or visit barnard.edu or alum.barnard.edu.
Contact us to contribute to Barnard’s exciting new campaign.
THE BOLD STANDARD theboldstandard@barnard.edu 212.870.2520
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Springtime at Barnard means many things: Admission of a new class, and saying farewell to the Class of 2016 but also welcoming them as our newest members of the Alumnae Association. This year, spring also means the campus is undergoing a transformation as Lehman Library is deconstructed to make way for the new teaching and learning center. While it wasn’t officially springtime, I was thrilled to attend Barnard’s eighth annual Global Symposium, “Women Changing Europe,” held in Paris on March 18. Along with over 150 alumnae, many trustees, alumnae board members, and Barnard parents participated. There was a lively discussion about the benefits of generous family leave policies in Europe and the impact of legislation on increasing female board representation across the continent. One Parisian-based alumna told me that her challenge was deciding which board to join. Hopefully we can continue the conversation and European alumnae can leverage the experience of Barnard alumnae and trustees who currently serve on corporate boards. University of Cambridge Professor Sucheta Nadkarni stressed that legislation is only part of the solution, saying “we need to make the numbers count” by having women serve on influential committees and increasing the number of women in corporate leadership roles. If you weren’t at the symposium, I hope you will go to youtube.com/barnardcollege to watch clips from the panel discussions. Videos include interviews with Barnard parents Philippe Fortunato, CEO of Givenchy, and Philippe D’Ornano, the president of Sisley cosmetics, as well as Pamela Golbin ’92, the chief curator of fashion and textiles at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Back on campus, a revitalized Professional and Leadership Development Committee (PLDC) held an extremely successful event on negotiation in early January, attended by over 100 alumnae from across the decades, including many mother-daughter pairs. The goal of the committee is to offer programs that address the needs of professional alumnae and provide opportunities for networking. PLDC’s next event will focus on storytelling as a key communication tool for business, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits. The event is Monday, July 18 and will be run by storytelling organization Narativ. I encourage alumnae in the tri-state area to join us for this event and create their own compelling stories to advance personal and/or professional goals. As the academic year comes to a close, I am excited to participate in Barnard’s recently announced The Bold Standard: A Campaign for Barnard, and to work hard engaging as many alumnae as possible in our efforts to provide a solid foundation for the College’s financial future. The Scholarship Gala on May 3 served as an exciting kickoff to the ambitious endeavor. To learn more about the campaign, visit theboldstandard.barnard.edu. I look forward to seeing you soon on campus, virtually, or at a regional event. Until then, wishing you an enjoyable spring and summer filled with warm, sunny days.
—Terry S. Newman ’79
ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION NEWS & NOTES
3,000 MILES FROM BROADWAY: BARNARD IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY
In December, over 100 alumnae attended a panel discussion at The Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles. Alumnae from across generations enjoyed candid conversations about gender in Hollywood and, spurred by this gathering, area graduates formed a West Coast chapter of Barnard Women in Entertainment (BWE), a professional network for alumnae in all facets of the entertainment industry.
Barnard On the Road • Bringing the campus to your neighborhood
• A Barnard education propels its graduates to every corner of the globe. For more than 15,000 Barnard alumnae who make their home outside of the New York City metro area, returning to campus regularly is difficult. For this reason, Alumnae Relations plans a season of events each year that aims to bring a bit of Barnard to these communities. The gatherings connect alumnae, parents, and friends to campus life, keep them upto-date on College news, and acquaint them with Barnard’s brilliant faculty and accomplished administrators, as well as fellow alumnae in their communities. Throughout the 2015-2016 academic year, over 500 alumnae turned out to hear featured speakers at events where alumnae engaged with each other and discussed an array of scholarly and topical subjects. The season kicked off with Barnard President Debora Spar’s visit to Dallas, where she met with alumnae at the Nasher Sculpture Center, a stunning art space.
BARNARD IN BOSTON & WESTCHESTER WITH PROFESSOR TINA CAMPT
In February and April, alumnae gathered for receptions with Tina Campt, Barnard professor and director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW). They enjoyed hearing about the thriving scholarship and activism at BCRW and various campus initiatives, including the Harlem Semester and this year’s Scholar and Feminist Conference. The events were held in the homes of Barnard Trustee Lois Champy ’67 in Boston and Sharon Dizenhuz ’83 in Westchester. BARNARD IN SAN FRANCISCO WITH DEAN OF THE COLLEGE AVIS HINKSON ’84
In February, alumnae and guests attended a reception at Altman Siegel Gallery, owned and operated by Claudia AltmanSiegel ’95. Barnard Club of Northern California President Lisa Lin ’98 and Nikila Kakarla ’15 spoke about the lively Barnard community in the area and the new group for young alumnae in Silicon Valley, which Niki is spearheading in 2016. ALMOST IN SIGHT OF OUR SHORES: BARNARD IN SOUTH FLORIDA WITH PROFESSOR NARA MILANICH
In March, Associate Professor of History Nara Milanich gave a talk titled “Almost in Sight of Our Shores: Rifts, Revolutions, and Rapprochement in the History of U.S.-Cuban Relations” to groups of
alumnae in Palm Beach and Miami about the history of U.S.-Cuba Relations, and facilitated intimate discussions around the topic, which holds considerable meaning for alumnae in South Florida. PEACELAND: BARNARD IN WASHINGTON, D.C., WITH PROFESSOR SÉVERINE AUTESSERRE
In April, Associate Professor of Political Science Séverine Autesserre delivered a talk on her latest book, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, to a Barnard audience at the Dupont Circle Hotel. Autesserre spoke about her pioneering research on civil wars, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, and African politics. FOUNDATIONS: BARNARD ON THE MAIN LINE (PHILADELPHIA) WITH PROVOST LINDA BELL
In May, Provost Linda Bell facilitated an engaging conversation on Foundations, the new Barnard curriculum, for a group of alumnae, friends, and incoming students at the home of Judith Meyer ’66. The event was an impactful connection of Barnard’s past, present, and future. “Nothing can make you feel more at home when you land in a new or strange place as connecting with other Barnard alumnae,” says Pat Tinto ’76, Regional Networks Chair for the AABC. “I know when I found myself in a new city and state, the Barnard College Club of Fairfield County, Conn., embraced me and gave me a chance to plant new roots without eradicating the old ones.” Exciting events such as these help plant those new roots. Supplementing the tremendous efforts of over 30 regional clubs across the country and around the world, each program offers a unique view of where Barnard has come from, where it is now, and where it is going. The College hopes to increase this engagement as a way to make sure that our home on Broadway is never out of the hearts and minds of all Barnard alumnae.
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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 39
ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION NEWS & NOTES
Advancing the Election Process • The AABC offers new ways to expand participation
• The Nominating Committee of the Alumnae Association of Barnard College (AABC) plays a quiet yet vital role in preserving and enhancing our alumnae community. You have likely noticed the annual election announcements and have (hopefully) voted for new members of the committee. You have likely also wondered what exactly the committee does. Each year, the nine-person committee collects a list of potential leaders to fill vacancies on the AABC Board of Directors, and reaches out to active members of the alumnae community, as well as to college administrators, to solicit possible nominees. Historically,
the AABC bylaws have limited the committee to nominating two candidates for each nominating committee vacancy, and just one candidate for each of the other vacancies on the board of directors. Because of that limitation, the annual process has lacked a real sense of “election” and seemed to some as more of an informative list of people who will govern the AABC. Next year, however, the committee will be able to select more than one candidate for each of the vacancies—not just the nominating committee itself. In the last few years we have had a substantial increase in voting participation from just over 100 votes five years ago to over 700 this year. The committee hopes that the expansion of the slate will lead to even higher voter turnout next year. Additionally, we are hoping to do even more to expand alumnae participation in the AABC. Did you know that there are currently 13 committees that alumnae can join in addition to your Class Reunion Committees? We hope you will visit the alumnae website (alum.barnard.edu), call Alumnae Relations, or let us know which committee you are interested in joining. —Hannah Roth ’06 Chair, Nominating Committee
ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION
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The Alumnae Association of Barnard College was established in 1895 to further the interests of the College and connect alumnae worldwide. Learn more online at alum.barnard.edu. PRESIDENT & ALUMNAE TRUSTEE
Terry Newman ’79 VICE PRESIDENT
Francine Benzaken Glick ’77 TREASURER
Kathie Plourde ’73 ALUMNAE TRUSTEE
Camille Kiely Kelleher ’70 ALUMNAE TRUSTEE
Jyoti Menon ’01 ALUMNAE TRUSTEE / ANNUAL GIVING COMMITTEE CHAIR
Linda Sweet ’63 BYLAWS CHAIR
Rosalind Marshack Gordon ’62 DIRECTOR-AT-LARGE
Leila Rafizadeh Bassi ’94 DIRECTOR-AT-LARGE / WEBSITE ADVISORY COMMITTEE CHAIR
Anastasia Andrzejewski ’97 DIRECTOR-AT-LARGE / ALMA MATERS COMMITTEE CHAIR
Amy Blumberg Schrader ’92 FELLOWSHIP COMMITTEE CHAIR
Melissa Nathanson ’78 LEADERSHIP ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE CHAIR
Jennifer Feierman ’09 NOMINATING COMMITTEE CHAIR
Hannah Roth ’06 PROFESSIONAL & LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE CHAIR
Rochelle Cooper-Schneider ’84 PROJECT CONTINUUM COMMITTEE CHAIR
Doralynn Schlossman Pines ’69 REGIONAL NETWORKS CHAIR
Patricia Tinto ’76 REUNION COMMITTEE CHAIR
Merri Rosenberg ’78 YOUNG ALUMNAE COMMITTEE CHAIR
Julie Malyn ’09 SGA PRESIDENT
GET INVOLVED
Do you know someone who would be great on a particular committee or for a leadership position on the board of directors? Let us know! We are working to create easier ways, through a revamped alumnae website, to signal your interest in participating or suggesting peers who might want to join. In the meantime, reach out the old fashioned way—through email or phone: Nominating Committee of the Alumnae Association of Barnard College alumnaerelations@barnard.edu 212.854.2005 alum.barnard.edu
Shivani Vikuntam ’16
ALUMNAE RELATIONS
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Alumnae Relations partners with students and alumnae to carry out engagement initiatives to further the mission of the College. EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF ALUMNAE RELATIONS
Caitlin D. Tramel SENIOR ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF ALUMNAE ENGAGEMENT
Jennifer Roesch ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF ALUMNAE COMMUNICATIONS
Matt Hamilton MANAGER OF REGIONAL & INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT
Lauren Glover ’09 MANAGER OF YOUNG ALUMNAE & STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
Shelli Luchs ASSISTANT TO THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Clara Bauman DEPARTMENT ASSISTANT
Greta Boorn 40
SOURCES
by Elicia Brown
Photographs courtesy of Barnard Archives and the Chamberlain estate
GIFT
Barbara Chamberlain
Sister Act • The Chamberlain sisters shared a passion for Barnard, even though only one was an alumna
• Theirs is a tale of sibling devotion—to each other, and to a cause. Born early in the 20th century, two sisters—Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30, an elementary school teacher, and her younger sister Barbara Chamberlain, who spent her career at the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency— managed to amass more than $4 million. They lived simply, invested wisely, and believed strongly in the importance of
Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30
promoting women’s education. Without heirs or living husbands, they retired together to a small town in Cape Cod and remained of one mind when it came to Barnard. Helen’s alma mater, an institution they both believed in, would figure prominently in the will of each sister. This shared generosity is even more remarkable because Barbara was a 1944 graduate not of Barnard, but of another prominent liberal arts college. “It was a very pleasant surprise,” says Bret Silver, who is Barnard’s vice president of development. The estate gift “reminded my colleagues and me of the strong connection that Barnard alumnae— and their families—feel to the College, to its academic mission, and to the young women who follow in their footsteps and choose to study here. We were honored that these two sisters, one of whom had no official ties to Barnard, chose to create a permanent legacy here in such a meaningful way.”
The bequest will support academic life at Barnard in a variety of contexts. The College will create the Barbara Chamberlain and Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Professorship of Anthropology, which is particularly fitting given Barbara’s global experience. During her tenure at the State Department, she lived in South Africa and Greece as well as Paris and London, and traveled to many other countries in Europe and Africa. The sisters’ charitable contributions during their lifetimes also suggest a strong interest in advancing women’s education and rights, according to Richard O. Perry, who served as their lawyer. The bequest will also help fund the Barnard Center for Research on Women, student internships, and financial aid, as well as other programs. “It’s especially nice when we have this link between the generations,” says Audra Lewton, the director of gift and estate planning. “The gift will have an impact on BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 73
Barnard students for many years to come.” The College also plans to use a portion of the sum to encourage others to follow the example set by Barbara and Helen, who planned so thoughtfully for Barnard in their estates. In this initiative, expected to launch in June, an alumna who informs the College of her plans to include a gift to Barnard through her estate will enjoy a new form of special recognition. Using money from the Chamberlain gift, the alumna will be honored by an immediate contribution in her name to a scholarship fund for current students, according to Silver. He adds, “This means that gifts that will take effect in the future will also have an impact now.” With few of their acquaintances still living, limited information about the sisters is available. Helen died in 1999 at the age of 90 and left her estate to her younger sister. Her husband had died many years before, shortly after they married. Barbara died last September at the age of 93, after struggling with dementia for about a decade. She never married. The sisters grew up in Tenafly, N.J. Their father, Robert Chamberlain, was treasurer of a cable company in New York City. Their mother, also named Helen, was a homemaker. A middle sister, Frances, died at a young age. An undated photograph among Barbara’s possessions shows five teenage girls, all attired in white dresses, standing in a large, shady front yard. The adolescent at the front of the line casually drapes her hands on the shoulders of a little girl in a plaid dress, who wears an enormous bow in her hair and a grin on her face. The pair seems to be Helen and Barbara, according to Donna Gorton, a nurse and longtime caregiver to Barbara. Gorton believes that because Barbara was born more than a decade after her big sister, Helen played a maternal role in Barbara’s life. Helen, a resident of Brooks Hall at Barnard, earned a master’s degree at Columbia Teachers College. She is remembered for her dedicated teaching of sixth graders at a Tenafly elementary 74
school, which included weekend trips to museums in New York City as well as hikes and nature lessons. Barbara didn’t speak much about her work in the Foreign Service and for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is part of the Department of Defense. But over the years Perry learned that upon receiving her undergraduate degree, her goal was to work for the State Department. She told him that she applied but was denied—they were only hiring women as secretaries. So she got a secretarial degree from Katherine Gibbs in New York City in June 1945 and joined the Foreign Service that month as a secretary in the Bureau for Intercultural Education. Among her papers, Perry located a letter of commendation received on her retirement from the Defense Intelligence Agency, where she worked from 1969 through 1986. The letter made special note that “the Intelligence Community [has] recognized you as the most knowledgeable person on the Caribbean.” And another congratulatory letter from a male employee included this telling line: “The Agency will miss your hard work, efficiency, and great filing!” Perry finds this notable as evidence that her goal of equality for women had not yet been obtained. Perry and Gorton both note Barbara’s strong and steadfast nature. Perry recalls finding a correspondence between Barbara, who was living in London, and a New York-based stockbroker, dated 1962. Barbara was requesting investment advice for $10,000. The broker suggested a safe stock, U.S. Steel, recalls Perry. But Barbara wrote back, “No, I don’t think so. There’s this awful drink everyone’s drinking.” She bought $5,000 worth of shares in Coca-Cola, as well as $5,000 in AT&T. “Barbara was a person who would fix her mind on something like a bulldog on a mailman’s pants,” says Perry. Although Barbara wouldn’t hesitate to spend money on her sister or her beloved cat Tootie, she was generally cautious about her finances. She proudly described to both Perry and Gorton how she had
purchased a Ford when she was living in London, had it shipped to her in England, drove it around the country, and then resold it for more than she had paid. Gorton recalls that even as Barbara’s health was failing, she spoke often of her sister, and also of how her money shouldn’t be spent on frivolities, as it was destined for Barnard. Since Helen loved Barnard, which stands for the ideals that were so important to the sisters, “it was clear from the beginning that Barbara wanted her money to go to Helen’s school,” Perry says. Gorton concurs: “Her sister was her life.” Their shared commitments—to each other and to the education and advancement of women— will now live on at Barnard.
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PRESIDENT’S PAGE Continued from Page 3
financial aid, and to construct our new library. We need all of our alumnae to participate, supporting whatever priorities move them most and acknowledging both the joy and responsibility of sustaining the next generation of Barnard students and faculty. And we need to be clear about our request. Giving to Barnard doesn’t mean agreeing with every single action the College has ever taken, or ever will. It doesn’t mean rewarding the College for a specific act, or program, or beloved faculty member. It means taking a stand for women, for opportunity, and for the power of education to change lives. It’s the right thing—the bold thing—to do.
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LAST IMAGE: CALL FOR ENTRIES
Do you have an amazing image or work of art that you would like to share with fellow alumnae? Please send submissions to David Hopson at dhopson@barnard.edu.
LAST IMAGE
by Letícia Wouk Almino ’08
A Drawing A Day 5 x 7 inches (each), watercolor
BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 75
LAST WORD
by Chaya Deitsch ’86
Illustration by Libby Vander Ploeg
Embracing a Wider World
“Welcome to Barnard, Class of 1986!”
the joke: the passage was from a 1950s handbook. Amid the relieved laughter of my classmates, I crumpled a little. Yet this was what I’d always dreamed of: a true college experience, sitting crosslegged (and jeans-clad) on a campus lawn, debating Nietzsche with a friend. It was a fantasy spun from movies like The Paper Chase and the hippie Yale students I had ogled on my way to the mall as a teenager in New Haven. My daydreams were very different from my presumed future, which mirrored the lives of my mother, aunts, and grandmothers—women who were given few choices outside of building a traditional home for their families. I’d already been relegated behind the curtain at synagogue. I dreaded disappearing even further, into marriage, before getting a chance to sample the forbidden fruit that beckoned—not least a bachelorette pad like Mary Tyler Moore’s, complete with a giant “C” hanging on the wall. In my junior year of high school, a lifeline had appeared in the form of a new English teacher. Rosette Liberman ’58 was brash, openly secular, and completely out of sync with the values of our little community. She sniffed me out immediately. I read voraciously, wore jangly earrings, and spouted unorthodox ideas, particularly about women. “You’ll go to Barnard,” Rosette announced. “My alma mater.” I’d never heard of it. But it was all female and close to home, so there was a chance I’d get my parents to agree. They weren’t necessarily opposed to college, but they (rightly) worried about my religious commitment. In the meantime, Rosette taught me how to write a proper essay and sent away for an application for me. Now here I was at Barnard Hall, slacksless and wondering what I’d gotten myself into. The woman to my left turned to me and wiped her forehead in mock relief. “Whew! I believed her for a minute,” she laughed. “I’m Ariadne.” I gave her my hand and smiled back. I was in a new world—and that was just fine.
• Chaya Deitsch ’86 was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in New Haven, Conn. Her recently published book Here and There: Leaving Hasidism, Keeping My Family is a memoir
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Thus began my college orientation in the auditorium of Barnard Hall. The woman at the podium waited for the cheering to subside and got down to business. First were instructions on how to navigate the rolling walls of graffiti otherwise known as the New York City subway system. Then she read us a passage from the Barnard student handbook: “Students shall respect a 10 p.m. weeknight curfew. No men shall be allowed in your rooms.” She looked up. “And slacks may not be worn in class.” Gasps rippled across the auditorium, but I felt a surge of hope. Having grown up Hasidic, I’d arrived with a suitcase full of long skirts and cross-my-heart promises to my parents that I wouldn’t date. Now, I thought, maybe fitting in wouldn’t be so hard. After a moment, she let us in on
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