Barnard Magazine Spring 2018

SPRING 2018

1968 Protests

Fifty years later, we look back at events that changed the College and students’ lives

I chose Barnard because of what it has done for women, its rigorous curriculum, and because I wanted a big city on the East Coast. We may be in one of the world’s largest cities, but some way, somehow, Barnard makes it feel that much smaller. What surprised me the most was how the professors and administrators here are your biggest supporters. They’re rooting for you!

BEING BARNARD BOLD

COVER STORY

14 Syllabus

Elements of Eloquence 28 1968

FEATURES

16 Break This Down Professor Monica L. Miller explores Zora Neale Hurston ’28’s newly published nonfiction book, Barracoon, about the last survivor of the last slave ship to arrive in the United States

20 Undeterred

18 Salon BOOKS

Nicola Kirkpatrick ’19

by Liz Galst Pioneering civil rights attorney Shirley Adelson Siegel ’37 approaches her 100th birthday with her lifelong sense of justice very much intact

Major Political Science

24 Athletes & Scholars

36 Sources Instruction on the Leading Edge

Barnard’s student athletes compete at the highest level of college sports

38 Alumnae Association

DEPARTMENTS

Relations

2 Letters

Flourishes

3 President’s Page

41 Class Notes

4 Editor’s Letter

Eileen O’Neill ’75 Denise Lewis ’66, Jiji Lee ’01

5 The Rising Sea, on Stage

IN MEMORIAM

6 Through the Gates

74 Last Image

by Beatrice Helman ’14

I’ve done a series of internships—first with Senator Gillibrand’s staff, then in Mayor de Blasio’s office, and now with the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School. Barnard helped me obtain all these opportunities and has been in my corner both in and out of the classroom.

by Rosalind Rosenberg Fifty years later, Barnard alumnae look back at events that helped shape their college experiences and their lives

Springtime Page-Turners

19 Big Science

Funding Promising Scientists-in-Training

NEWS & EVENTS

A New Leader for Alumnae

PRESIDENT’S REPORT

Spring Comes, Barnard

OBITUARY

Your annual gift is a vote of confidence in Barnard.

You can choose to designate your gift for financial aid, faculty support, campus renewal, or wherever Barnard needs it most.

Annual support is a critical priority of The Bold Standard campaign. Thousands of gifts from alumnae and parents add up quickly to have a significant impact on the College each year. In this final phase of the campaign, we are asking all donors to consider increasing their annual gifts to Barnard.

Be Barnard Bold. Make your gift today.

Inauguration PROFESSOR The Fear Factor ALUMNAE The Subtly Subversive Imagination of Alicia Hall Moran ALUMNAE Stroke Warrior EVENTS Strong Women on the Big Screen EVENTS

Barnard.edu/gift

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(212) 870-2520

ALUMNAE PROFILES

76 Last Word

by Lynn Rosenthal Minton ’53

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 1

LETTERS

PRESIDENT’S PAGE

Photo by Elena Seibert ’77

SIAN LEAH BEILOCK

Barnard Moviemakers Barnard Magazine had an excellent feature in the Winter issue on alumnae filmmakers, but left out Gail Freedman ’73.

A documentary filmmaker for twentyfive–plus years, Gail is currently on an international tour with her latest, Hot to Trot, a deep-dive into the fascinating but little-known world of same-sex competitive ballroom dancing.

—Judi Hasson ’73 Good Work I always enjoy the alumnae magazine and I compliment you for your interesting, knowledgeable, and occasionally sentimental articles.

Recently I read about Yaffa Grossberg ’91 and her work in teaching Arab and Jewish children. Kol ha kavod, as we say in Hebrew: good work.

Living in Israel, I would like to share that in the western Galil the interchange/dialogue with Jews and Arabs truly occurs.

Continue to do good work and thanks always for interesting pieces.

—Joyce Rosman Brenner ’61 Greta Gerwig, David Grossman, and Israel Barnard holds a very special place in my heart.

The College had and still has numerous Jewish students who stand by Israel and its right to exist as a nation. As an English major and a politically astute person, I don’t sign petitions and then later backtrack by saying that a friend asked me to sign them.

Greta Gerwig did just that. She signed on to the equivalent of a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions protest against a theatre staging a play by Israeli author David Grossman, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Her apology for signing came only after she realized it might hurt her chances of getting an Oscar nomination. I refuse to see her film, and I was shocked to see my beloved Barnard compromise its ethics by including Ms. Gerwig in the same magazine with the three friends who escaped the Holocaust.

Barnard women stand by our convictions and aren’t afraid to own up 2

to our mistakes. Gerwig doesn’t seem to have any convictions: She is the antithesis of what I expect to see on the cover of my alumnae magazine.

—Judith E. Bluestone ’80 First-Generation Students I want wholeheartedly to second Hallie Metzger’s request in her letter in the Winter magazine for more alumnae dialogue. I had hoped that after the “New York Sister” article appeared in the Summer issue we would hear from more women of the 19501965 generation who, like me, were the first in their families to attend college. Nowadays having students in that category is taken as imposing a burden on the College or a burden on the students. I certainly was aware I was not as well-prepared as many of my classmates. But I attributed that to the fact that they were often graduates of New York’s fine, selective high schools.

—Carol Crystle ’62 Mrs. Mac Alumnae support led Barnard to name the Student Dining Hall in honor of Millicent Carey McIntosh, dean and president, 19471962. Alumnae wrote of the importance Mrs. McIntosh had in their lives. She told them to make use of their education and talents—that marriage and motherhood need not exclude intellectual engagement and professional activity.

A photo gallery of Mrs. McIntosh’s career on the wall outside the dining hall does not include the alumnae’s words of gratitude to Mrs. McIntosh for encouraging and inspiring them in their future lives. A video screen on that wall can present those words and so enlighten Barnard students past, present, and future of Barnard’s unique role as a forerunner in liberating young women’s potential before women’s liberation began. Barnard College should be proud of its unique historical role.

—ProfessorVivian R. Gruder ’57 CORRECTION In our Winter 2018 issue, the Magazine misidentified the class year of Rachel Kranson, author of Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America.

Kranson is a member of the Class of 1997, not 1991.

EDITORIAL Leora Tanenbaum Liz Galst ART DIRECTOR Kristina Deckert STAFF WRITER N. Jamiyla Chisholm STUDENT INTERN Eleonor Botoman ’19

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR EDITOR

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION OF BARNARD COLLEGE PRESIDENT & ALUMNAE TRUSTEE

Jyoti Menon ’01

ALUMNAE RELATIONS Karen A. Sendler

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

COMMUNICATIONS Justin Harmon ASSISTANT VICE PRESIDENT Anna O’Sullivan ASSISTANT VICE PRESIDENT Patricia Keim CREATIVE DIRECTOR David Hopson VICE PRESIDENT

DEVELOPMENT Lisa Yeh

VICE PRESIDENT

Spring 2018, Vol. CVII, 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

A Space of One’s Own A few months ago, I moved my desk to the other side of my office. When I arrived at Barnard in July, it was situated so that my back was to the window. Today, when I sit behind it I can see the grey brick buildings on 120th Street and the trees that are now fully covered in green. Since I spend a great deal of time in 109 Milbank, making the space my own feels important.

In my research as a cognitive scientist, I have explored how the mind and body are connected and how external factors often play a major part in what goes on in our heads. We usually talk about how our brains affect our bodies, but in my work, I have looked at things from the opposite direction—from body to brain. Whether or not you are aware of it, your body can influence your mind, and even change it. That’s why Barnard’s Well-Woman offers many programs with relaxation as a goal, and Dean Avis Hinkson has started a walking group on campus. They understand that when your body can move freely, the way you think tends to follow.

Our surroundings matter, too. And little things we do in relation to those surroundings can have a big effect.

Exposure to nature can help us with concentration and mood, and taking active breaks from work or vexing problems can give your brain a chance to regroup and reboot. Even physically walking away from a problem for a few minutes, or simply looking out a window, as I often do, may help you think better.

This holds true for our students here on campus. The physical surroundings affect their daily lives and, it invariably happens that, over time, they find their space and make it their own. I imagine that when you think back on your years at Barnard, no matter the decade, you can probably recall your favorite study spot, your preferred library, or the bench you sought out when you needed to relax. Chances are, you all remember the spaces and places that were

part of your Barnard experience. Some of you conducted research in the Arthur Ross Greenhouse, performed on the Minor Latham stage, or strolled through what was once called “the Jungle.” Maybe you threw a strike in the bowling alley or lobbed an ace on the tennis courts in front of Milbank Hall. Perhaps you witnessed the building of Reid Hall and Altschul in the 1960s, or were present when McIntosh came down in 2007 to make way for The Diana Center.

Since our founding, Barnard’s campus has steadily evolved, even within the confines of our four-and-one-half acres of land, and even with the complexity of managing construction in the heart of New York City. I wasn’t present for much of this history but I do know that the changes that have taken place on campus over the decades have reflected the changing needs of the College—for more classroom space and lecture halls, for state-of-the-art labs and the latest equipment, for social and meeting spaces, and new residences to accommodate our students.

Of course, with growth comes growing pains. This year’s graduating class has spent a fair amount of their time at Barnard on a campus under construction, as we have awaited our next big architectural milestone—the new Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning, which is truly a library of the future. But, in the same way that four years ago they adapted to the start of college and the independence that came with it, the Class of 2018 also adapted to a campus in transition. They walked new paths, and sought out new favorite places. They found new spots to socialize and new ways to study. They learned to be more patient and more flexible, while still making this place their own.

The Milstein Center is already making its presence felt, and it is now easy to imagine what the rooms and spaces will be like once the building is fully finished, with furniture and facilities in place. You are all invited to the building’s grand opening in October (details to come). I hope you will join us and find a space of your own within it. Like the whole of Barnard, it belongs to you.

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 3

EDITOR’S LETTER

Photo by Dorothy Hong

Examining one of the many awards Shirley Adelson Siegel ’37 received during her career

Changemakers

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Photo by Stephen Yang

In Jeune Terre, the set’s construction fit with the play’s theme: addressing climate change.

How does the theatre department’s commitment to sustainability work in practice?

Sandra: Our initiative actually had its

Carolyn, I was struck by the way that you made the audience part of the landloss problem. Rather than have us sit facing a stage, the audience was sitting on the parts of the bayou that were still above water.

Carolyn: A lot of that was not only in

The Rising Sea, on Stage

In an 1888 essay in The Nation, Barnard

founder Annie Nathan Meyer asked, “Ought we not… begin at once to organize an association for the collegiate instruction of women?”

Barnard women have been changemakers ever since.

That tradition of changemaking is a theme that runs throughout this issue.

You will find a host of stories about how the College and its alumnae have helped transform the world, in ways large and small.

Those who participated in the 1968 protests at Columbia, for instance, are among Barnard’s many graduates who have helped shape the course of history. In commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of those protests, we’ve had the good fortune to learn the stories of many Barnard women who were students then—building occupiers, protestors, and so-called step-sitters, along with those who felt the protests ultimately diminished their College experiences. In fact, an incredible number of you shared your stories with us, in long emails and essays, in grainy black-andwhite photos and bell-clear anecdotes. Even though we weren’t able to include all these remembrances in our article, it is informed and enriched by each one. Thank you!

I’m equally grateful to Barnard Professor Emerita of History Rosalind Rosenberg, author of important (and changemaking) books like the recent Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray, for writing this essay. (To read our Fall 2017 interview with Professor Rosenberg about Jane Crow and Pauli Murray, visit bit.ly/2vCvFk6.)

As a historian of feminism and women’s roles in the twentieth century, Rosenberg brings both a deep knowledge and a bigpicture perspective to this complex and controversial subject.

The Department of Theatre is involved in change as well—climate change. The recent New Plays production of Jeune Terre, a “play with songs” (but not, as the characters explain to the audience, a musical) explored a timely subject: how residents of a small Louisiana town try to cope with

by Liz Galst

Barnard’s March performance of the new play Jeune Terre takes on the issue of climate change Every other year, Barnard’s New Plays

the dangerous problem of climate change– related sea-level rise that is literally putting their homes underwater. Importantly, this production was designed and produced using theatre department sustainability guidelines and practices that have helped the department and the College become leaders in reducing our carbon footprint.

Our profile of composer and mezzosoprano Alicia Hall Moran ’95 highlights the change an artist can create by making connections between her own story and some of our culture’s most famous narratives.

(To check out Hall Moran’s work, visit aliciahallmoran.com and, as you can with almost everything these days,YouTube.)

From Minneapolis, we have the story of physician Marian Rubenfeld ’76, who changes the lives of her stroke patients. A stroke survivor herself, she understands firsthand her patients’ experiences with daily life and medical care. (Rubenfeld’s story and our new Big Science column— tip of the pen here to performance artist Laurie Anderson ’69 for the title—are part of a new Magazine effort to highlight

the College community’s involvement in STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.)

Even Barnard’s athletes are changemakers. As fencer Ester Schreiber ’20 says in our “Athletes & Scholars” photo essay, “I love being able to show younger children—and especially girls—that women can be strong and active and have all the agency that we are often deprived of in media and society.”

Finally, we are thrilled to shine a spotlight on the life and work of pioneering civil rights attorney Shirley Adelson Siegel ’37. As I write this editor’s letter, the determined and brilliant lawyer approaches her 100th birthday. Adelson Siegel spearheaded civil rights and other cases that have profoundly changed our nation.

(You can hear her oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on oyez.org.)

There are myriad ways to make change in this world. Barnard women seem to be involved in them all.

—Liz Galst Send me your comments: lgalst@barnard.edu

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series commissions a new play written by a woman-identified playwright. This year’s commission, Jeune Terre, explored the timely subject of how residents of a small town in southern Louisiana try to cope with the dangerous problem of climaterelated sea-level rise that is literally putting their homes underwater.

Barnard’s Department of Theatre has been a leader in both the College and the nation in developing guidelines and practices to help improve its own environmental impact. Thus, Jeune Terre, a play about sustainability, was produced sustainably. The Magazine gathered the Jeune Terre team— director Alice Reagan, writer Gab Reisman, designer Carolyn Mraz, and Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Theatre Sandra Goldmark—to tell us more about how that happened and what it can mean for theatre and for us all.

How did Jeune Terre come into being?

Gab: I was living on the edge of this

restoration battle in Southeastern Louisiana.

My girlfriend was a coastal ecologist there, working for a non-profit pushing to save the Louisiana coast. Her intense frustration gave me a lot to work with.

Alice, did you think, “Oh, we want to commission a play about global warming and land loss in Louisiana” or did Gab’s proposal really stand out?

Alice: It stood out. It was a happy accident

that Gab is interested in a topic that’s very much in the Barnard air right now.

origins in another New Plays commission, The Egg-Layers, in which the set was made almost entirely of found objects.

Building with new, green materials is helpful. But reuse is much more effective environmentally. We’ve expanded on that and now we’re working on how to track and budget for sustainability on all of our departmental productions.

Carolyn, did you come in knowing about the sustainability guidelines?

Carolyn: I thought they were exciting, and

also happened to fit with the themes of this play. So I was always thinking about that when designing. The platforming—the islands that people were acting on and that the audience was sitting on—was all cobbled together from existing platforms. And the collage walls—the Barnard shop went through materials they had, to see if they could match what I made in the model. It was sort of amazing how closely those things lined up.

Alice: When you’re costuming a contemporary piece, especially with a lot of young people in it, you go to thrift stores.

So almost nothing was new, except for the cardboard marionettes, which were kind of hybrid costume/prop pieces.

Sandra: Actually, a lot of that cardboard was salvaged from my office. [laughter]

response to the physical idea of land loss, but also the content and flow of the play itself. We had a few scenes on moving boats.

And that made me think we needed an environment we could flow through.

Then there’s the opening monologue where the ecologist has the audience stand and says, “You are all the wetlands we ever had in Louisiana.” Soon, almost half of us sit, representing the “forty percent of the coast” that’s already been lost. Is there something you hoped we would learn from this experience?

Gab: I very much wanted the audience to

see themselves inside the story, but never in a finger wagging or didactic way. The truth is, this was a difficult play to write. I thought, “Uch, this is such a huge problem. There are no easy answers.”

At the same time, I don’t want people to think, “This is hopeless.” We didn’t fix the problems of climate change and land loss in two hours. But continue to be aware that it’s happening right now, really quickly. Maybe that will effect some change.

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 5

THROUGH THE GATES

Photographs by Samuel Stuart and Asiya Khaki ’09 Archival photos courtesy of Barnard College Archives

PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION

Inauguration

The Empire State Building image ® is a registered trademark of ESRT Empire State Building, L.L.C. and is used with permission.

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The February 9th ceremony marked the installation of Sian Leah Beilock as Barnard’s eighth president Across the Morningside Heights campus,

at the Empire State Building (lit up in Barnard Blue), and inside the majestic Riverside Church, the Barnard community united to celebrate the Inauguration of the College’s eighth president, Sian Leah Beilock.

In her address, Beilock emphasized four priorities: science as part of the liberal arts; utilizing New York City’s many resources as part of a Barnard education; strengthening diversity and inclusivity; and ensuring students have the skills to succeed after graduation. For more photos and videos from the event, visit barnard.edu/about-barnard/ inauguration-president-beilock.

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In the photos: 1 President Sian Beilock presents her Inaugural address 2 Chair of the Trustees Jolyne Caruso-FitzGerald ’81 with Vice Chairs Cheryl Glicker Milstein ’82 P ’14 and Diana T. Vagelos ’55 with President Beilock 3 Alumnae gather in Riverside Church 4 The Empire State Building lit up in honor of the Inauguration 5 Student leaders 6 Presidents Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago, Kathleen McCartney of Smith College, and Lee Bollinger of Columbia University with President Beilock

BARNARD’S PAST PRESIDENTS

ANNIE NATHAN MEYER

(1867-1951) petitioned Columbia’s trustees to found an affiliated women’s college.

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ELLA WEED

(1853-1894), a Columbia Trustee, was the first to perform the academic duties of a dean.

EMILY JAMES SMITH

LAURA DRAKE GILL

(1865-1944) was Barnard’s first official Dean, serving from 1894-1900.

(1860-1926), a mathematician, served as Dean of the College from 1901-1907.

VIRGINIA CROCHERON GILDERSLEEVE

(1877-1965), Class of 1899, served as Dean from 19111947.

MILLICENT CAREY MCINTOSH

(1898-2001) served first as Dean and then as President from 1947-1962.

ROSEMARY PARK

(1907-2004), one in a family of college presidents, headed Barnard from 19621967.

MARTHA ELIZABETH PETERSON

(1916-2006) led Barnard through the turbulent years of 1967-1975.

JACQUELYN MATTFELD

ELLEN VICTORIA FUTTER ’71

JUDITH RAE SHAPIRO

DEBORA L. SPAR

(b. 1925), President from 1976-1980, led during negotiations over Barnard’s independence.

(b. 1949), the College’s second alumna leader, served from 1981-1993.

(b. 1942), a cultural anthropologist, was the College’s President from 19942008.

(b. 1963) expanded Barnard’s national and global reach. She was President from 2008-2017.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 7

THROUGH THE GATES

by Michael Blanding

Photos by Ambika Singh

PROFESSOR PROFILE

The Fear Factor Elizabeth Bauer looks at what fear does to brains On a dry winter day, you go to turn off the light and get a shock from the light switch. The next time you go to turn off that switch, you may flinch a bit. That’s what scientists call associative learning, says Elizabeth Bauer, assistant professor of biological sciences. “In this case, you learn to associate something neutral, like turning off a light switch, with something aversive, like a shock.”

In response to such stimuli, the brain starts making associations almost immediately. This all happens within the amygdala, a pair of almond-shaped lobes at the base of the brain, where experiences like these change the structure of the neural pathways. Bauer’s research looks at how we make these associations—and what happens when our fears threaten to take over. Eventually, she hopes, her research will help develop new medical approaches to help people deal with their fears.

The truth is, most people learn to be unafraid just as quickly as they can learn to get scared. Just a few times turning off the light switch without a shock, for example, and we learn to stop flinching. “It’s not that you forgot you got the shock, but you learn it’s now safe,” says Bauer. In some people, however, that fear doesn’t go away, and can even get worse due to abnormalities in the way they learn or extinguish fear responses.

People with generalized anxiety disorder, for example, extrapolate from one association to be afraid more generally. “It’s not just that you worry about one light switch—you get nervous about all light switches,” Bauer says.

Those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), meanwhile, may be unable to extinguish their fears, even when they are in a situation that is now safe.

Much of Bauer’s research focuses on the interaction in the brain between fear, an 8

emotional or physical response to a specific threat; anxiety, a more generalized worry about an unknown future threat; and stress, a physiological reaction to pressures in our environment. She works with rats, often in experiments in which she plays a tone at the same time as she delivers a shock to the animal. The rats quickly learn to associate the tone with the shock and show signs of fear, including a tendency to freeze in place. “It’s

really difficult to study emotion in animals because you can’t ask them what they are feeling, especially happiness or more positive emotions,” says Bauer. “But with fear, it’s easy, because these behavioral reactions and hormonal reactions are really measurable.”

By quantifying the length of time the animals freeze, she can judge the level at which they are learning fear as a response to the negative stimuli. At the same time, she is

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Bauer in her laboratory (left); some of her lab equipment (below).

able to attach electrodes to the animals’ brains to watch, in real time, as particular neurons in the amygdala send electric signals. “If every time a tone is played, the cell is more active, it suggests that contributes to the [fear] learning,” Bauer says. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. But it never ceases to amaze me that you can see it happen in animal after animal. It’s so cool.”

Much of the research in the lab is conducted by undergraduates, who typically work with Bauer for two to three years.

“They do everything—all the behavioral observations, the surgeries, the microscope work,” she says. “It’s not like at larger universities where you have an army of postdocs and grad students and undergrads are washing glassware. Here, they are doing all of these technically difficult experiments.”

Some of her experiments investigate the role played in fear learning by a particular protein in the brain called corticotropin releasing factor (CRF). Bauer started looking at the chemical in 2011, four years after she first arrived at Barnard. Other biologists had observed that the amount of CRF is higher in the brains of people who experience chronic amounts of stress. But no one had looked at how that stress was connected to fear.

Bauer conducted experiments in which she and her students injected CRF into the brains of their rats to see how it affected their ability to learn to be afraid of the shocks. In addition, Bauer and her students used particular antibodies that bind to CRF in the brain to identify which cells were actually affected. Bauer was surprised to find that the increase in CRF didn’t seem to affect rats’ ability to learn at all; they still experienced the fear response in the same way as rats with less CRF. Increasing the levels of protein did, however, seem to affect the brain’s ability to extinguish fear. No matter how many times the rats were exposed to the tone without the shock, they weren’t able to unlearn their fear response, and continued to freeze. That observation suggests that CRF may play a role in conditions such as PTSD in which the brain is unable to recover from learned fear. Addressing levels of CRF in the brain could ultimately play a role in treating such

conditions. “There might be ways, and CRF might be one of them, to affect some kinds of learning and not others,” Bauer says.

Another set of Bauer’s experiments looks beyond the amygdala to another part of the brain called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, or BNST. It’s a collection of small and complex structures that sit above the amygdala. Unlike that brain structure, which seems focused mainly on emotion, the BNST is involved in a host of functions, including coordinating reproductive behaviors, as well as anxiety and stress.

Past experiments have shown that while the amygdala is associated with short and rapid fear responses, the BNST participates in sustained anxiety over time.

The structure is also activated by a class of antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft.

In her experiments, Bauer found that when rats are given SSRIs, then the BNST becomes active and does something it usually doesn’t: interact with the amygdala and participate in short-term fear learning.

Bauer speculates that this change in function could help explain an occasional side effect of SSRIs, an increased risk for suicidal thoughts, especially when someone first starts taking them. “That initial increase in anxiety seems to involve the BNST,” Bauer says. By better understanding how that process works, drug developers may eventually be able to reduce

this dangerous side effect.

Currently she is homing in on how fear and anxiety interact in particular types of rats. The BNST, for example, is one of the few structures in the brain that is different for male and female rats. While most of her experiments so far have been done with male rats, Bauer is starting to look at female rats to see if they process fear and anxiety differently.

Most of her experiments to date have been conducted using adult animals. But Bauer is also examining differences in fear learning among adolescent rats. For humans, adolescence is often a time of increased stress as well as increased risk for developing anxiety or depression. Bauer has already shown that adolescent rats exposed to stressful situations are less able to extinguish fears than adult rats, which could possibly explain why adolescents are more susceptible to long-term anxiety than adults.

In continuing experiments like these, Bauer hopes to get us closer to an understanding of how our fears develop in the brain, ultimately providing some possible strategies for how we might better deal with them. “That could include new drugs or behavioral therapies to affect the brain’s fear-learning processes,” helping people conquer their fears and anxieties and live more productive lives.

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Michael Blanding is a freelance writer and author of The Map Thief.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 9

THROUGH THE GATES

by Camille A. Collins

Photos by Greg Kessler

ALUMNA PROFILE

Alicia Hall Moran performing Breaking Ice at NYC’s Bryant Park skating rink.

the character of Carmen was one of the only traditionally viable opportunities for generations of black and Latinx songbirds— Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman have both played the role. Besides, as Hall Moran puts it, she “didn’t have to do any math to understand Debi Thomas.” Indeed, while the Olympics were taking place, Thomas was attending Stanford University, where Hall Moran’s parents met. And, as Hall Moran readily points out, she and Thomas bear a striking physical resemblance, in addition to a passion for skating.

L’amour Est Un Oiseau Rebelle or Love is a Rebellious Bird

The Subtly Subversive Imagination of Alicia Hall Moran In a new opera, the mezzosoprano brings the story of an Olympic figure-skating rivalry to the ice

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Act I, A square in Seville

An appreciation of composer, choreographer, and mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran ’95 requires at least an elemental familiarity with the central character in Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen.

As Hall Moran says, Carmen is “one of the few characters” in the classical repertoire that “black culture has been written into.”

The motif of Carmen, the marginalized yet cunning cigarette girl from southern Spain, rises again and again in the imagination and oeuvre of Manhattan-based Hall Moran, a multi-genre artist whose performing and composing encompass opera, theatre, and jazz, and who made her Broadway debut in 2012 as Bess in the Tony Award–winning revival of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.

Indeed, Hall Moran’s recently released album, Here Today, features a mash-up of

Carmen’s most famous aria, “Habanera,” with Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” And this January at two ice rinks in New York City, as part of the Prototype festival of new musical theatre, Hall Moran mounted her opera Breaking Ice: The Battle of the Carmens, about the rivalry between figure skaters Debi Thomas and Katarina Witt at the 1988 Winter Olympics. Both athletes—Thomas, an African American, and Witt, from East Germany—skated to selections from the famed opera, offering the media a handy frame of reference with which to explore their glacial rivalry.

Hall Moran was a member of her high school’s synchronized ice skating team as those Winter Olympics were underway and was captivated by the international competition: She had an affinity for the black skater and a burgeoning grasp that

Watching the avant-garde production of Breaking Ice, with Hall Moran skating and encircling the cast in an orbit of warm vocals and steady motion, the subjects of race and gender appear like water trapped under its frozen form; they bubble and swish beneath. In the foreground is Hall Moran’s imaginative reach: She has assembled a saxophonist, a taiko drummer, and two tango skaters from the Ice Theatre of New York to enact with her a forgotten Olympic feud and explore what it means to embody Carmen, a dark seductress and ethnic minority in her own country.

It should not be lost that Hall Moran has created this work with insight and a singularity of perspective very specific to her own life experience. Born in California, she attended nursery school in Manhattan and elementary and high school in Stamford, Connecticut. Her father transitioned from a career on Wall Street to corporate America, while her mother worked in publishing. Thanks to her father’s love of seafaring, the family would, on vacations, sail the ocean by day and dock at various marinas by night.

In these luxurious locales, however, Hall Moran and her family felt uncomfortable “in the culture of the other boaters.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that during her 2006 “Wade in the Water” concert at the Museum of America and the Sea, in Mystic, Connecticut, she performed a rendition of “Pirate Jenny,” The Threepenny Opera ballad about a hotel maid fed up with a life of abuse in the

margins and intent on revenge. In recalling her time on her high school skating team, even though she was specifically recruited to join, she still “the only skater of color on the team and the only black skater at the rink.” These experiences of otherness are important in understanding what captivates Hall Moran—her habit of paying tribute to the outcast, often another woman of color, and correcting even ever so finely a past wrong, or elaborating on a fading slight. As for the story that captivated her as a teen, Debi Thomas won bronze in ’88 because she struggled with her jumps. What fascinated Hall Moran was “that this competition went against stereotypes because the sultry performance was done by the white, East Germany skater, not the scholastic, brainy African American skater,” she says.

A square in Seville. At the back, the walls of an ancient amphitheater

In tenth grade, Hall Moran joined her high school’s concert choir and on a trip to Bulgaria, the group went to see a performance by a troupe of Romani musicians and dancers. Two young black American women in the group became the object of respectful fascination to a number of the Bulgarian men. It is a not a

surprising footnote to the black experience in America that she had to leave the country to realize the captivating power of women of color. It is a knowledge that as an adult and professionally trained performer—in 2000, Hall Moran received a bachelor’s degree in vocal performance from the Manhattan School of Music—she has channeled into the role of the swift street hustler specifically. “I’ve felt a lot of validation as a dark-skinned person in the world of Carmen,” says Hall Moran.

At Barnard, she learned invaluable truths that directly shape her life and work today. “Barnard showed me in no uncertain terms that by developing my intellect I was going to bring something to the field of music. I had no reason to be confident about that. But Barnard gave me the tools to write my version of the best world.”

She recalls fondly the support she received from Choral Director and Professor of Professional Practice Gail Archer, and how much she greatly enjoyed studying under Professor Agueda Rayo, who taught African American, Native American, feminist, and Chicana authors.

She lavishly praises these instructors as “artistic intellectuals” who were not afraid of “style,” and who transformed their teaching “into a sort of a song.” Reflecting on these explorations of often-unheralded female writers, Hall Moran’s unique perception is evident. “We were able to read the proof of the questions they posed in their lifetimes,” Hall Moran says. “Many times, you find it’s the questions of strong, intellectual women that become the architecture for progress in a particular discipline.”

As for her own point of view, her passion, and her determination—they’re clear: Rather than see the stories of marginalized women sidelined, “I yearn to be the protagonist and to uproot classic narratives,” Hall Moran says, referencing tales such as Cinderella. “The revelation is, in order to see myself as Cinderella, I’ve created these other [artistic] worlds,” both on the ice and off.

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Camille A. Collins has written about music for Afropunk.com and BUST. She lives in New York City.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 11

THROUGH THE GATES

by Lynette Lamb

Photo by David J. Turner

ALUMNA PROFILE

Stroke Warrior The amazing second act of Dr. Marian Rubenfeld When Marian Rubenfeld ’76 suffered

the worst migraine of her life, she was forty-seven years old, a highly trained neuro-ophthalmologist, and the mother of two young children. She had just finished undergoing a routine cardiac stress test and was recovering at the hospital when she called her husband to cancel their 12

evening’s anniversary plans. Rubenfeld told him she would soon be driving home when her husband, himself a neurologist, insisted on picking her up instead.

By the time he arrived at the hospital, she was unconscious. A CT scan revealed that Rubenfeld had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke—a bleed—on the left side of her brain.

And so began the second part of this physician’s life, when she grew to understood in a far more personal way what so many of her patients were experiencing. It would take nine months of intensive rehabilitation before Rubenfeld could return to work on a part-time basis,

and even today—fifteen years after that catastrophic event—her right side remains weak and she struggles with expressive aphasia, the loss of the ability to speak fluidly. Those early months after her stroke, says Rubenfeld were “a very bleak time.”

Neuro-ophthalmologists like Rubenfeld deal with complex, systemic diseases that manifest in the visual system. A significant percentage of her patients are themselves stroke survivors, struggling with problems in their visual fields, eye tracking, and other ocular disturbances. “Today, any stroke survivor sent to my office is a blood brother or sister,” says Rubenfeld, who has

a four-month waiting list for new patients.

“They get the royal treatment, and we get them in as soon as we can.”

Although she doesn’t immediately tell patients that she is a fellow stroke survivor, she usually confides in them at some point, especially if they are frustrated by their own aphasia. If Rubenfeld witnesses them struggling and anguished during an appointment, “I take them by the hand and tell them, ‘I know how it is, and I will wait for you to get it out. I know what it’s like.’

It’s in those intimate moments that I make a connection.”

Longtime patient and stroke survivor Robert Gerloff has experienced that connection. “When Dr. Rubenfeld told me she’d had a stroke, that immediately made me comfortable,” he says. “She is warm and kind and outgoing, and she talked all the way through my eye exam. That made me feel good.” Adds Janet Mills, the wife of another patient, “Her strength is her true understanding of the patient’s inability to communicate with words. She knows they understand what she’s asking, and are thinking of the answers, but they just can’t easily bring forth the words to reply. Her empathy is her greatest asset.”

Rubenfeld’s recovery was likely aided by the fact that she is no stranger to working hard and overcoming obstacles.

Part of the third generation of a Russian Jewish family living in the Bronx, she was the first person in her family to attend college, earning a scholarship to Barnard after graduating from the Bronx High School of Science.

Even with a generous scholarship, Rubenfeld needed several campus jobs to pay for housing—which she could still only afford for half of each semester. “After I paid tuition and fees I was broke,” she says. “So I lived at home for the first part of the term, then moved into the dorm when I’d saved up enough.” Because living in the Bronx meant a two-hour daily commute to campus, says Rubenfeld, “it felt like deliverance when I could move into the dorm.”

But the biology major never felt set apart by her financial struggles and working-class roots. “Nothing was ever made of it,” she says. “Barnard was very

“Today, any stroke survivor sent to my office is a blood brother or sister,” says Marian Rubenfeld, who suffered her own stroke fifteen years ago. big on scholarships and on seeking out girls from all backgrounds. I was one of a proud group of city girls and firstgeneration students.”

As for her memories of those four years, says Rubenfeld, “I had a wonderful experience at Barnard. The teachers were just divine—so into teaching. They were right there with you on the front lines of learning.

“What I took from it,” she goes on, “is a confidence in myself that my professors gave me. The feeling that I could do anything I wanted to do. I’ll forever be grateful to Barnard for that.”

She proved those professors right, staying in the city to earn a medical degree and a PhD from Columbia and to complete a residency in neuro-ophthalmology and oculoplastics (eye surgery). While in medical school, she met her husband, neurologist Frederick Langendorf, who had grown up in Chicago.

When Rubenfeld was ready to apply for her final fellowship, Langendorf surprised her by announcing that he no longer wanted to live in New York City. “It was quite a shock,” says Rubenfeld, who, like many lifelong New Yorkers, had never considered living anywhere else.

Nevertheless, she gamely set about visiting medical centers west of the Hudson, ultimately choosing the University of Minnesota because of Dr. Jonathan Wirtschafter, the extraordinary man who would become her mentor. “He was a brilliant and loving human being,” she says, “and I was a member of his family until the day he died.”

The next few years raced by as Rubenfeld completed her training and she and Langendorf adopted two children from South Korea. Joshua and Maya, now college students, were just five and four

years old when Rubenfeld suffered what she calls “my unfortunate incident.”

When she returned home from the hospital after five weeks, utterly altered, her preschool children “didn’t want to come near me,” she remembers. “I could barely speak. I slept an immense amount. And the kids talked to the nanny instead of to me. I thought, ‘What havoc have I wrought on our household?’ ” She became so depressed she questioned why she hadn’t died from the stroke.

Then one day in rehab, the speech therapist said she was making great strides, and Rubenfeld told herself, “ ‘I am going to get over this.’ I have lots of positive willpower, it turns out!” says Rubenfeld. “I never really knew it until then.”

Today, despite her busy patient schedule, she still needs more sleep than most people, drags her right leg when she’s tired, and speaks somewhat slowly, occasionally searching for words. “And I can’t rollerblade or serve in tennis anymore!” she laments, although she continues to travel, most recently to Hawaii.

At age sixty-two, Rubenfeld has no thoughts of retiring, despite the fact that her husband recently did. “Some Fridays I’m exasperated, especially with coworkers who talk so fast they leave me in the dust.

But by Monday, I’m all right again,” she says. “I get so much enjoyment from my patients, from fixing each person who comes to see me. I feel as if I’m making a difference in their lives.”

Like so many others who have been through a near-death experience, Rubenfeld has found the devastating stroke she suffered in her forties has changed her in ways less apparent and more profound than a weak tennis serve. “My husband says I’m mellower and more patient,” she says. “I know I listen better, and I think before I speak.

“But the thing that has changed the most in my life is how grateful and happy I am. I got to raise my kids to adulthood, spend more years with my husband, and go back to work. Anything else is gravy.”

•

Lynette Lamb is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 13

SYLLABUS

by Sara Ivry ’91

Elements of Eloquence Barnard is one of only a handful of colleges with a program dedicated to public speaking When Irene Golden ’19 was a Barnard first-year, she took an upper-class seminar in urban studies. Still relatively new to college, she was unseasoned in, and nervous about, high-level classroom exchange.

“The discussion component just flew over my head, and I couldn’t figure out ways to break in,” says Golden, a chemistry major. Before Barnard, her public speaking experience consisted of a single event: delivering her high school commencement address. “So I made a one-on-one appointment and had a really awesome meeting with a Speaking Fellow who helped me get through that course and prepare in other ways for discussion-based courses.”

The Barnard Speaking Fellows Program, begun in 2006, offers peer-topeer mentoring on all manner of public speaking. Over the last eleven years, it has prepared students not only for the rhetorical demands of the rigorous liberal arts education Barnard provides, but also for all that comes afterward, helping graduates become accomplished speakers in all aspects of their lives.

Golden was fortunate that such a program was here for her. That wasn’t the

case before the presidency of Judith Shapiro, who conceived of the Speaking Fellows after noticing that many students “uptalked”—that is, they ended spoken sentences with question marks. The trend nagged at her. “Being able to speak clearly and with authority was just central to everything that Barnard was trying to do for its women,” says Shapiro, who now heads the Teagle Foundation, an educational nonprofit. “It seemed to me obvious that we wanted to help women become powerful and effective speakers, just the way we wanted them to become powerful and effective writers.”

Indeed, the Speaking Fellows Program, which serves more than 1,000 students and at least twenty-three classes a year, is modeled on Barnard’s successful peer-to-peer Writing Fellows mentoring program.

Both programs are highly selective. Each spring Pamela Cobrin, who heads both the Speaking and Writing programs, and Daniela Kempf, the Speaking Program’s associate director, receive some forty-five to fifty applications from prospective Fellows. Of those, they select roughly fourteen students who, to prepare for their new roles, then take Rhetorical Choices, a course the pair

Illustration by Lisk Feng

teach each fall. Fellows learn how to coach other students on ways to improve public presentations of all sorts—speech-making, debating, and other types of oratory— everything from thesis presentation to seminar participation.

“Students come to us with a lot of apprehension about public speaking,” says Kempf, “which indicates they just didn’t have a lot of opportunity to practice it.”

How do the Fellows help ease students’ fears? “Ultimately, it’s a process of exposure, experience, practice, and feedback,” she says.

Add to that some specific techniques: pausing between sentences to reduce stutters or ‘ums’; striking powerful poses so that students occupy their space rather than shrink within it; and directing their attention to a single spot in the room to mitigate feelings of intimidation that can come when encountering expectant faces.

The Fellows, who receive stipends for their work, also run workshops on negotiation, mock trial participation, and topics such as facilitating class discussion, public advocacy, and presenting a prospectus.

At the invitation of individual professors, they work with students in specific courses to help with in-class public speaking. They also organize the annual Cicero Speech Contest, in which students compete in persuasive advocacy and impromptu speech. And the Fellows produce public events, such as February’s sold-out interview with Martha Stewart ’63.

Barnard is now one of only a handful

The Speaking Fellows, pictured here with Martha Stewart ’63, Director Pam Corbin (far right), and Associate Director Daniela Kempf (second from right), at a Diana Center event the group sponsored in February. Photo by Samuel Stuart.

14

of colleges with a program dedicated to public speaking, despite the fact that formal instruction in rhetoric was once considered central to a liberal arts education. And, as with so many of Barnard’s programs, this one is designed specifically with the needs of young women in mind. As a group, they “are uniquely scrutinized for how they speak,” says former Speaking Fellow Sarah Levine ’14, referring to common verbal habits such as up-talk, “vocal fry,” (a guttural growl or nasal tone), and the use of fillers such as “like” and “you know.” Because of that scrutiny, continues Levine, now a first-year law student at Yale, “the content is often lost or undervalued.”

For her, verbal tics and other oftenderided features of speech are entirely valid forms of self-expression. “But the tension,” she says, “is that some people cannot focus on the ‘what’ because the ‘how’ is distracting,

or the ‘how’ makes them necessarily devalue the ‘what.’ ” “We have a lot of debate around what we call ‘gendered speech,’ ” says political science major and Speaking Fellow Shreya Sunderram ’19, echoing Levine. She blames a “societal expectation of women to be more submissive and less assertive in their speech” for the frequent use of vocal fry and up-talk.

While oratory is the program’s focus, much of the Speaking Fellows’s work is taken up with listening. “It’s listening to people express their anxieties,” Sunderram says. “It’s listening to people define their problems and ask for help.”

Cobrin and Kempf are pleased that, over the years, the number of faculty who have requested that Fellows attach to their courses has climbed. Laurie Postlewate, a lecturer in French, has used Speaking Fellows in teaching her Reacting to the Past seminar and

has witnessed the impact of peer tutors on her students.

“Their confidence is way up after they’ve had interactions with the Speaking Fellows.

The proof is in the way that they are able, over the course of a semester, to get stronger and more comfortable with public speaking,” she says.

Biology Professor Jonathan Snow requests Speaking Fellows for the courses he offers, too. “Scientists can be really data-focused, and that’s great. But you can numb people with too much information,” he explains.

Fellows coach his students not to include every factoid and data point. “You want to impress people, so you put in more information. But that’s not what listeners want to hear. Getting feedback from the Speaking Fellows is important.”

The Speaking Fellows Program also helps level the public-speaking playing field, Postlewate says. Not every student comes from a background in which she’s been instructed in public speaking. “It’s a great move toward equity in the way we educate, in the kinds of exposure we give students, and it really helps when you go beyond Barnard,” she says.

That’s been the case for Sarah Levine, who credits the program with helping her at every juncture since graduation: at a tech start-up, an academic fellowship, and now, law school. The program taught her “how to will myself to participate in conversations where I didn’t necessarily feel that my opinions were as valued as others,” she says, “or how to be extra thoughtful in wording anything to make sure there was no possibility of ambiguity.”

It has also been key in interviews for summer positions. “It’s easy to get wrapped up in: ‘Why am I here? What’s the short-term goal?’ And to lose sight of the larger narrative: ‘Who am I? How do I make a story out of my résumé? How do I explain what I’m interested in, but present that in a way that’s coherent with what I’ve been doing so far?’ ” And, of course, it helps in answering that all-important question: “Where do I want to go next?”

•

Sara Ivry is a writer, editor, and podcaster. She lives in Brooklyn, NewYork.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 15

by Leora Tanenbaum

Oluale Kossola, also known as Cudjo Lewis

Image courtesy of Erik Overbey Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama

Barracoon

wide range of Hurston’s work. In 2005, the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s journal, The Scholar & Feminist Online, published a collection of essays, video excerpts of dramatic readings, and archival materials on Hurston. In 2016, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Hurston’s birth, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies Monica L. Miller hosted a scholarly conference on campus to celebrate Hurston’s work and legacy. Presentations made at this conference will be included in a future issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online, edited by Professor Miller.

In this “Break This Down” interview, Professor Miller discusses this text and extraordinary historical milestone.

Monica L. Miller, associate professor of English and Africana studies, on a previously unpublished work of anthropology by Zora Neale Hurston For the first time, the story of the last

survivor of the last slave ship to come to the United States is available to the public. That fact on its own is significant.

What makes it extraordinary is that the anthropologist who recorded the narrative of Cudjo Lewis (ca. 1840-1935)—whose African name was Oluale Kossola—was none other than Zora Neale Hurston ’28.

Barracoon had been previously available in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center of Howard University; this spring, it became available to the public when Amistad/HarperCollins published the text in an edition edited and introduced by Hurston scholar Deborah G. Plant.

Hurston, born in 1891, grew up in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, and is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. An anthropologist and ethnographer as well as a fiction writer, Hurston was a towering figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

At Barnard, where Hurston was the first black graduate, she studied with Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas and began documenting black life in the South — recording personal stories, folklore, and songs (many of which are accessible to the public from the Library of Congress digital collections, available at loc.gov/ collections/).

Barracoon is the result of Hurston’s 16

Why is this text important?

This text is important because there are so few that actually contain an account of the Middle Passage. At the time that Hurston interviewed Kossola, he was the last person alive who had been captured in West Africa, endured the Middle Passage, and endured the racial hierarchies of the American South.

The fact that it was Hurston who recorded it, and the ways in which she recorded it, are historically significant.

This text is an incredible gift.

What is the significance of this text in the context of Hurston’s career?

trips to Alabama, beginning in the late 1920s, where she interviewed and filmed Kossola. This project was funded by a wealthy, white patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, and overseen by Boas. An early version of Hurston’s manuscript, published in The Journal of Negro History in 1927, borrowed heavily from a previously published interview with Kossola conducted by a white, pro-slavery writer—something her mentor Boas easily discovered. Hurston, still learning her craft, was given a second chance; she returned to Alabama and interviewed Kossola again.

Her manuscript from 1931 describes

Kossola’s kidnapping and sale by his own people; the slaughter of his West Africa community; his experience being held in a “barracoon” or enclosure used for slaves; his passage across the Atlantic as human cargo on the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the United States, docking in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in 1859; his enslavement for five-and-a-half years; and his post-slavery life. That life included attempts by Clotilda survivors to return home after emancipation and their later purchase of land to establish Africatown, the only town in the United States founded by Africans and the first to be run continuously by black people.

Barnard has long highlighted the

One aspect that fascinates me is the way Hurston presents Kossola’s own words and his story. It’s not only his own story here but also his story in the way that he would tell it.

When we think about Hurston as a writer, including as a writer of folklore and other anthropological research and not just her fiction or memoir, we recognize her wonderful use of metaphorical language. We go to Hurston for her celebration of African American storytelling—to hear her voice.

But this text does not have Hurston’s voice in it really. There are a few moments when she asks Kossola questions, and he questions her back, which is great. But she is not driving this text—it’s Kossola. She was invested in preserving his history and culture.

When we think about Hurston as a writer, we recognize her wonderful use of language. But these are Kossola’s words—his story the way that he would tell it.

Instead, this is an account of what it means to be black in America in the late nineteenth century in the aftermath of the Emancipation and during Reconstruction.

So this book sits on the side of the slave narrative tradition—not only because of the information he relates but also because slave narratives were mostly stories that were mediated or written down by white people, and Kossola’s story is his own.

Yet at the same time, his story becomes a part of her: She writes about him in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, and it’s clear that she never forgets him.

What about fictionalized slave narratives?

How does this text fit into the Harlem Renaissance project?

One of the priorities of the Harlem Renaissance was recovering African heritage—thinking about the base on which African American culture rests. One of the major questions of the Renaissance, to quote from the 1925 poem “Heritage” by Countee Cullen, was “What is Africa to me?”

This text provides both a literary and literal rendering of an actual relationship of a formerly enslaved African to Africa.

This historical account had been missing in African American history. Had it been published in the 1930s, it would have profoundly resonated.

Yet this account presented to Hurston a conundrum. The epigraph for this edition of Barracoon, taken from Dust Tracks on a Road, is Hurston’s quote: “But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me…. It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory.” This is a lesson she learned from Kossola; he had told Hurston about the way he was captured and his village was destroyed—by other Africans.

This element provides an additional way to think about the relationship between African Americans and Africa. In some ways, it is a productive complication.

How does this text resonate with slave narratives?

This book is not a slave narrative. Kossola doesn’t talk much about his enslavement.

While I was reading this, I kept thinking about Beloved by Toni Morrison. Beloved is full of moments in which the formerly enslaved talk to each other about their trauma. And then one person will put a hand on another, in some ways in order to quiet them—because they can’t hear any more; there’s nothing more to say.

And you see the same thing when Kossola talks about the raid on his village and the decimation of his community. He can’t speak. And Hurston’s reaction is, “I saw his face full of sorrow.” And when he talks about the Middle Passage, she says his face looked like “a horror mask.” So I am struck by the silence around issues of trauma—the silence around survival.

I also thought about the movie Black Panther. Kossola’s narrative shows the conflicted relationship between the African Americans who had been enslaved and the Africans who were the latest arrivals.

In Black Panther, Wakanda is a place in Africa that has not been colonized, and Killmonger comes back to claim his African-ness. It’s in some ways the opposite of Kossola’s experience yet also an expression of the incredible tension about Afrodiasporic identity. In the movie, the characters T’Challa and Killmonger belong to each other yet are also cut off from each other.

When reading this text and thinking about its resonances in African American history and culture, you can’t help but think about the ways in which we belong to each other, the ways we are responsible for one another, and the ways in which we attempt to repair loss and loneliness.

•

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 17

SALON

by N. Jamiyla Chisholm

Springtime Page-Turners

produced. Then, a coworker is discovered murdered in the theatre’s lobby, her body mimicking the pose of a Michelangelo creation.

Rejuvenate this season with books that blossom with history, poetry, and insights into business and medicine

NONFICTION Connecting Research and Practice for Educational Improvement: Ethical and Equitable Approaches edited by Bronwyn Bevan ’85 and William R. Penuel

Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique

by Ramah McKay ’00

Looking at two medical projects in Mozambique through the daily lives of patients and healthcare providers, Medicine in the Meantime shows how transnational medical resources and infrastructures allow for diverse work possibilities and care amid constraints.

A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out

by Sally Franson ’06

Research scientist Bevan and her co-editor present different ways researchers and educators can build more collaborative and ethical relationships in order to improve their practice and work.

Casey Pendergast is an ad agent struggling to find a balance in a world of feminism, pop culture, and social media. When she falls for one of her clients, she can no longer ignore the human cost of her success.

The Informed Patient: A Complete Guide to a Hospital Stay

by Karen A. Friedman and Sara L. Merwin ’77

With the help of the Kennedy sister’s pre-war London schoolgirl scrapbooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist brings Eunice Kennedy Shriver to life in this biography, illuminating the story of the woman who was the visionary founder of the Special Olympics.

This workbook—which includes instructions on how patients, healthcare providers, and medical staff can work together—offers insights that can better prepare patients and families for a hospital stay.

The Theory of Constraints: Creative Problem Solving

by Nancy Oley ’67 and Umesh Nagarkatte

FICTION

M Archive: After the End of the World Alexis Pauline Gumbs ’04

Part poetry, part science fiction, and part black feminist theory, this experimental work imagines a worldwide, catastrophic event and the documentation of black lives that follows.

Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen ’74

The bestselling novelist and Pulitzer Prize– winning journalist returns with a novel about money, class, and self-discovery. Nora Nolan is content with her charmed New York City life until a terrible incident shakes her idyllic neighborhood, forcing her to reckon with what it means to be a mother, a wife, and a woman.

Winter Kept Us Warm

by Anne Raeff ’81

This work of historical fiction follows the lives of three characters over six decades and across three continents, painting a picture of life and love after World War II. Murder at the People’s Theater

by Laura Shea ’74

Newly hired Erica Duncan lands a job at the prestigious People’s Theater, where Michelangelo: The Musical is being 18

Georgian and Victorian Board Games: The Liman Collection

by Ellen Fogelson Liman ’57

Showcasing sixty games from the Georgian and Victorian eras, this book reflects on these time periods’ social and moral priorities.

In Conclusion, Don’t Worry About It

by Lauren Graham ’88

In 2017, the Gilmore Girls star gave the commencement speech at her hometown high school. Now, the actor and New York Times–bestselling author offers graduates everywhere the same advice in a new book about what it means to enter adulthood and follow one’s dreams.

Believe It and Behave It: How to Restart, Reset, and Reframe Your Life

by Kate Harvie ’96

On February 12, 2009, Kate Harvie suffered a traumatic brain injury. In this memoir, she shares what she learned during her recovery.

Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World

by Eileen McNamara ’74

Written for high school and college students, this book offers tools to help students and professionals become more proactive in learning, thinking, conflict resolution, and departmental management.

The Little Book of Feminist Saints

by Julia Pierpont ’08 and Manjit Thapp

The New York Times–bestselling writer offers a vibrant collection of 100 minibiographies and full-color portraits of women who were everything from culture creators to ceiling shatterers. Among them: Maya Angelou, Dolores Huerta, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Malala Yousafzai.

Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography

by Julia Van Haaften ’68

A trailblazing modernist, author, and inventor, Abbott had a sixty-year career as one of America’s most prominent photographers. That career is celebrated in this biography, which includes more than ninety photos.

Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality edited by Anupama Rao, Associate Professor of History

Professor Rao edits an examination of the ways religion, political and economic relations, and debates about sexuality and the politics of representation have reshaped the caste question in contemporary Indian life.

The Marketing Plan Blueprint: The 8-Step Process for Growing Innovative Ideas into Winning Businesses

by Miriam Vializ Briggs ’77 and Lucy D. Briggs

For the marketing novice, this workbook offers low-cost ideas and a step-bystep plan to help win customers, acquire financial backing, and get a team to commit to goals.

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine

by Lynne Viola ’78

The author of The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements returns to the Soviet Union’s interrogation rooms, prison cells, and places of execution with the help of archival documents from the Ukrainian secret police.

POETRY Murder Death Resurrection

by Eileen R. Tabios ’82

Tabios is a prolific writer who has released more than fifty collections of poetry, essays, experimental biographies, and fiction. Her latest poetic assemblage includes an “MDR Poetry Generator” database of 1,167 lines that can be combined randomly to make a large number of poems.

BIG SCIENCE FUNDING PROMISING SCIENTISTS-IN-TRAINING Rachel Nordlicht ’20 and Shoshana

Williams ’20 were recently awarded prestigious Beckman Scholar Awards.

Funded by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, these awards support independent, student-initiated research. With the help of a faculty mentor and a generous stipend, awardees can participate in Barnard’s Summer Research Institute (SRI), then continue their projects throughout the academic year and work at the SRI again the following summer.

Nordlicht, who is completing a doublemajor in biology and computer science, will employ advanced techniques to study neural connections related to fear and anxiety responses in sub-regions of the brain’s amygdala, under the guidance of Assistant Professor of Biology Elizabeth Bauer. (For more about Professor Bauer’s research, read our profile on page 8.)

After graduation, Norlicht hopes to combine a medical practice with research into pediatric genetics.

Williams, a biochemistry major, will undertake her research in the lab of Rachel Austin, Barnard’s Diana T. and P. Roy Vagelos Professor of Chemistry.

Williams plans to study a family of proteins known as AlkB that appear in normal tissues but have also been linked to diseases such as diabetes.

After graduation, she intends to attend graduate school in biochemistry or to pursue an MD/PhD. Barnard’s participation in the Beckman Scholars Program began in 2015; a recent renewal of the College’s grant has extended that participation through 2021. Says Program Director Hilary Callahan, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Biology, “Beckman and Barnard share a belief that well-mentored undergraduates can make early—and brilliant—contributions to research.”

—Eleonor Botoman ’19

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 19

by Liz Galst

Photos by Dorothy Hong

Undeterred Shirley Adelson Siegel’s pioneering legal work laid the foundations for some of the country’s most basic civil rights protections By the time you read this magazine, Shirley Adelson Siegel ’37

will be almost 100 years old.

Consider her age to be the very least of her accomplishments.

The daughter of poor immigrants, Shirley Adelson Siegel entered Barnard on a full scholarship in the midst of the Great Depression, despite what was then not quite a quota on Jews but a general limit on their numbers. She went on to become the only woman in her class at Yale Law School, the first head of the Civil Rights Bureau at the New York State Attorney General’s office, general counsel of New York City’s Housing and Development Administration, and, in 1979, New York State’s solicitor general. One of the country’s most important civil rights lawyers, she participated in and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court landmark cases that helped to prevent discrimination in employment and prove the constitutionality of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The short version of Adelson Siegel’s story—a quintessential Barnard story, really—is that she was “a brilliant young woman who worked very hard, mastered new and important intellectual and societal challenges, and plowed onward, disregarding hindrances society and individuals put in her way,” says Indiana University law professor Florence Wagman Roisman, a longtime friend and admirer. The longer version? You’re reading it here.

Just fourteen when she graduated as valedictorian of her high

school class, Shirley Adelson considered attending only one college: Barnard. It had been good enough for her oldest sister, Dorothy, so it was good enough for her. It didn’t hurt that the family lived on West 110th Street—an easy commute.

Shirley Adelson quickly fell in love with the College; Barnard loved her back. On campus, she made friends from as far away as Brooklyn.

“That was sort of a foreign country,” Adelson Siegel, small-boned and 20

elegant, jokes in her light-filled Upper West Side apartment.

A star student, she led a successful Model League of Nations team whose accomplishments were noted in The NewYork Times. As the head of the Jewish students’ group, The Menorah Society, she interacted with some of the leading Jewish thinkers of her day.

And then there were the Greek Games, that interclass competition featuring togas, torch races, and athletic hoop twirling. “Agathei Tuchei! [In the name of Good Fortune!]” was the beginning of the ancient Greek greeting she employed as a first-year to challenge the second-years to the competition. She can recite it still.

“All the departments at Barnard seemed to be involved,” she says, recalling the preparations. “They were really trying to develop something so that you would think you were in [ancient] Greece.

And I just loved it.”

She loved academics, too. On her papers, she frequently received grades and comments like this one: “A: very good work.

My only criticism: Use thicker paper!!”

Given her wide social reach and academic prowess, it’s no surprise she won the 1937 Student International Fellowship. It was a prize of $1,200—worth close to $20,000 today—that students funded themselves, depositing coins in a box in the lobby of Barnard Hall, in an area subversively called “the Jake,” after the building’s unnamed Jewish benefactor, the banker Jacob Schiff.

The prize would enable her to study with British political theorist Harold Laski at the London School of Economics (LSE). There was only one problem: Not knowing she would win the fellowship (students, nominated by the faculty, campaigned for it in the school’s newspaper and the senior who won the most votes was chosen), she failed to apply in advance. Dean Virginia Gildersleeve came to her rescue, writing a letter of recommendation that said, “We consider her a young woman of exceptional promise,” and closed with the words, “Believe me.”

So it was that in September of 1937, as the Spanish Civil War raged and the Nazis plotted their invasion of Europe, eighteenyear-old Adelson sailed off to study in London and on the Continent. Did she know what was happening there? “Oh,” she says, “I was tremendously aware.”

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 21

For almost eighty-five years, Adelson Siegel has maintained a strong connection to Barnard (left). Some of her meticulously organized papers (right).

Adelson Siegel attributes her desire to become an attorney to

her lineage; on both sides of her family, she descends from rabbis, deciders of Jewish law. It’s just as likely, though, that her mother set her up to it. There’s a family story that at age five, Adelson Siegel spent a two-hour train ride regaling a seatmate with her various ideas. Afterwards, her mother said, “She’s such a chatterbox, she should become a lawyer.” Remember that this was in 1923, when the number of female lawyers in the U.S. was miniscule. In kindergarten, when Adelson Siegel’s teacher asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, “I said I wanted to be a lawyer, without knowing any lawyers and having absolutely no idea what this was all about,” she recalls. She became known as “the girl who wanted to be a lawyer.

This was a very odd way to choose a career,” she says. But it stuck.

In 1938, at Harold Laski’s urging, she chose Yale’s Law School over Columbia’s and entered as the only woman in her class of 125.

Though Adelson Siegel is not one to complain, being a female, Jewish law student and lawyer in that era was not easy. Indeed, notes Jill Norgren, author of the newly released Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers: Lives in the Law, Adelson Siegel is one of very few aspiring female lawyers of her time who survived in her profession.

Many others were categorically refused admission to law schools, denied jobs, harassed, or simply gave up when work was made impossible for them. Adelson Siegel faced many of these problems.

An editor of the Yale Law Journal in her first two years, she was denied a top position in her third. The chair of the Journal invited her on a walk to explain. “I’d never spoken with him before this,” she recalls, still animated by the story. “He [did] all the conversing, telling me I was disqualified because of my gender.”

She graduated among the top students in her class, along with Potter Stewart, later a U.S. Supreme Court justice. But despite her high marks and the fact that titans of the legal profession at Yale organized courses in her fields of interest simply so they could have her as a student, finding a job after graduation proved all but impossible. Initially, she was rejected by forty firms. Finally, contracts professor Arthur Corbin, a giant in his field, wrote a letter of recommendation on her behalf. “She is one of our best in industry, in mental power and in personality,” he said. But “she needs help to get a starting job first because she is a girl, and secondly, because she is Jewish….Anything you can do for her will be a special favor to me.”

The largely Jewish law firm of Proskauer Rose & Paskus eventually hired her as its first female attorney. Judge Proskauer, one of the firm’s founders, told her, “You will be the rose in Proskauer Rose & Paskus.” She chose to take that as a compliment.

While she enjoyed the variety of work she did at the firm, her true love was civil rights and housing law. “During my lunch hour at Proskauer, I went around to the ACLU”—the American Civil Liberties Union—“to see what was going on.” That’s how, before she’d even passed the bar, she began writing a pro bono legal brief on the ACLU’s behalf, challenging the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Once she passed the bar, there were more—briefs that went to the Supreme Court. She was “the only woman and the youngest person” on the organization’s Lawyers’ 22

Panel, Norgren notes. Having studied so-called social housing at the LSE, she joined New York City’s Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a group she later led as executive director. Her reputation as a civil rights lawyer was burnished by fighting housing covenants that legally barred property owners from selling (and sometimes renting) to African Americans and other minorities.

The source of her passion for social justice she states simply enough, as if it weren’t even a question: “I think a lot of Jews are like that.”

By the time New York’s Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz created

the Civil Rights Bureau in 1959, one of the first state agencies in the nation designed to fight discrimination based on race or religion, Adelson Siegel, by then a married mother of two, had a reputation that preceded her. Indeed, Wagman Roisman notes, “I have in my office a [1954] monograph that Shirley wrote with a preface by a lawyer named Thurgood Marshall.” (More than two decades before he became a Supreme Court justice, Marshall served then as special counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.) “She was doing civil rights work when it wasn’t fashionable and it wasn’t valued, except by the people who needed it,” Wagman Roisman says.

At the Civil Rights Bureau, Adelson Siegel began by addressing racial discrimination in employment and then in housing.

Representing the State of New York, she participated in Supreme Court civil rights cases that have changed the nation, including 1962’s landmark Colorado Anti-Discrimination Commission v. Continental Air Lines, which prohibited discrimination in employment. In Colorado, she made her first oral argument as a friend of the court; it didn’t faze her much. There, she represented a group of (male) state attorneys general who, before the federal Civil Rights Act became law, had come to support their states’ rights to prohibit discrimination within their own borders. (You can hear her oral argument at oyez.org/cases/1962/146.) “When there’s a Supreme Court argument at issue,” Wagman Roisman explains, “everyone wants [it.] It’s feeding time at the shark tank.

“Shirley ended up on top not because she elbowed her way there,” Wagman Roisman observes. Instead, “everyone agreed she would do the best job.” (Marlon DeWitt Green, the original complainant in the case whom Continental refused to hire as a pilot because he was black, recalled about the proceedings, “There seemed to be no spark until [Adelson Siegel] got up to speak. She had an effect on the whole courtroom.”) Participation in other pivotal civil rights cases soon followed, including Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, which validated the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act shortly after it was signed into law.

After seven years at the Civil Rights Bureau, and unsure of her place as a white person in the civil rights movement, in 1966 Adelson Siegel left to pursue her other love, housing policy—becoming general counsel of the New York Housing and Development Administration under New York City’s new mayor, John Lindsay.

When that administration ended, her sister Dorothy convinced

her that she “needed a job with a pension.” So in 1975, she returned to the New York State Attorney General’s office, as assistant New York State solicitor general. Soon after, New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the federal government refused to bail it out. (A famous NewYork Daily News headline from the period reads: “[President] Ford to City: Drop Dead.”) Things were tanking fast.

Adelson Siegel quickly devised the legal justification for the strategy that would enable the State to rescue the City. “It was some of my most important work,” Adelson Siegel says.

In 1982, she made a conflicted decision to retire from the attorney general’s office. Not one to sit around, she taught law at Columbia, Yeshiva, and Fordham Universities, and began doing pro bono work that continued for years. During the financial crisis of the last decade, in her early nineties, she learned that the City Bar Justice Center was teaching classes to help lawyers assist individuals whose homes were in foreclosure. Given her lifelong involvement in housing issues, “I decided I’d go to the course,” she says. “This was something I couldn’t pass up.” The NewYork Times featured her story, calling her “a dazzling model of exceptionalism.” And so she continues to be.

In addition to her work, Adelson Siegel has been devoted to

family—her mother, two sisters, two husbands (first, filmmaker Woody Siegel, and after his death, architect Henry Fagin), daughter Ann, son Eric, and grandson Sam. And for almost eighty-five years, Barnard has been a constant in Adelson Siegel’s life. She has spoken on panels, raised money, and provided free legal consultations for the College.

Some of her many meticulously organized papers reside in the Barnard Archives. (A guide to her papers can be found at bit.ly/2HYpzNx.) At the Inauguration of President Sian Beilock at Riverside Church this February, Adelson Siegel, dressed in a brocade suit, attended with her aide, Zabeeda Gafur. Though mentally robust, Adelson Siegel is frail. In the last year, she’s fallen a couple of times and now uses a walker. And the truth is, she’s thin as a stick. On their way out of the building, between the front door and the sidewalk, they encountered a short flight of steps—six or eight, maybe. Staff on hand informed Adelson Siegel and Gafur that they could take the ramp. It would be easier, the staff told them. And safer, too. Adelson Siegel thought for a minute and consulted her aide.

She decided to take the stairs.

•

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 23

Photos by Will Mebane

ATHLETES & SCHOLARS One of the many things students value about their Barnard experience is the opportunity to compete in college sports’ most competitive division, NCAA Division I Athletics, through the Columbia/Barnard Athletic Consortium. Barnard is the only women’s college to offer Division I athletics.

YUDI LIU ’19 MEN’S LIGHTWEIGHT ROWING

E STER SCHREIBER ’20 WOMEN’S FENCING

A coxswain on the Columbia men’s lightweight rowing team, Liu hails from Boston and is majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing while also pursuing the pre-med program. Although she had no prior experience as a coxswain, Liu was determined to incorporate rowing into her college experience. The summers before her sophomore and junior years, she coxed on the Charles River to learn and improve.

Schreiber is a native of Sweden and in 2014 and 2015 was Swedish Senior National Champion. A foilist (using one of the three weapons in fencing), she is a key contributor to the Columbia women’s fencing team, which tallied a perfect 6-0 record this year to earn its eleventh Ivy League Women’s Fencing Championship. Schreiber is pursuing a major in architecture with a minor in philosophy.

“AS A WOMAN ON THE MEN’S TEAM, I HAVE LEARNED SO MUCH ABOUT COMMUNICATION AND TRUST, WHICH PLAY IMPORTANT ROLES IN RELATIONSHIPS ON AND OFF THE WATER.”

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“I LOVE BEING ABLE TO SHOW YOUNGER CHILDREN—AND ESPECIALLY GIRLS—THAT WOMEN CAN BE STRONG AND ACTIVE AND HAVE ALL THE AGENCY THAT WE ARE OFTEN DEPRIVED OF IN MEDIA AND SOCIETY.”

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 25

ADELE BERNHARD ’18 WOMEN’S SQUASH

I SABEL WEISS ’18 WOMEN’S SWIMMING & DIVING

SEANNA BARRETT ’19 WOMEN’S SWIMMING & DIVING

Bernhard was a key contributor to the Columbia women’s squash team and has a 13-15 overall record. She majored in history and minored in political science and is particularly interested in military history. One of her favorite activities around the city is to go to World War I–related museum exhibits, talks, and movies. She even once went on a first date to see the Met’s exhibit on trench warfare sketches.

A diving star who graduated with a double-major in economics and East Asian studies, Weiss is fluent in Mandarin, learning Cantonese, and moving to Hong Kong. She was a key contributor to the Columbia women’s swimming and diving team. She dove at her last meet on February 3, in which Columbia beat Dartmouth 175 to 114.

A key diver on the Columbia women’s swimming and diving team, Barrett is majoring in psychology and planning to pursue a career as a nurse practitioner after graduation. Barrett, who is from West Hempstead, New York, is particularly fascinated by the human brain and psychological disorders.

“THE SCOREBOARD IS JUST A NUMBER. BUT I THINK IT SPEAKS TO THE DEDICATION AND HARD WORK THE TEAM EXHIBITS.”

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“I WORKED IN THE BEYOND BARNARD OFFICE HELPING MY PEERS CREATE RÉSUMÉS AND COVER LETTERS. I LOVE HAVING AN IMPACT ON THE CAREERS OF FELLOW BARNARD WOMEN.”

“WHEN I FIRST VISITED BARNARD, I WAS BLOWN AWAY BY THE CHEERFUL ATMOSPHERE AND THE FACT IT’S IN ONE OF THE GREATEST CITIES IN THE WORLD. I LOVE THAT BARNARD EMPHASIZES THE IMPORTANCE OF WOMEN SUPPORTING OTHER WOMEN.”

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 27

by Rosalind Rosenberg, Professor Emerita of History Photos courtesy of Columbia University Archives

1968

Fifty years later, we reflect on the protests that changed the College and transformed Barnard women’s lives Around the world in 1968, students rose up to challenge what they saw as unjust war and authority. At Columbia, an estimated one-third of the demonstrators were women, about half of them from Barnard.

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 29

Below photo: Bettmann/Getty Images

In 1968, students around the world rose up: In France, Germany,

Mexico, Japan; even in countries ruled by dictators, they picketed, occupied, performed political theatre in the streets. It was a trend, a movement, an earthquake. It was, however it was termed, a phenomenon.

In Morningside Heights, on both sides of Broadway, tensions that gave rise to April and May protests had been brewing for years.

Amidst the sexual revolution, Barnard students were frustrated about rules that restricted whom they could live with and who could visit them in residence halls. African American students and their allies were increasingly dissatisfied with University policies they saw as racist. The United States’ growing involvement in Vietnam and Columbia’s participation in military programs resulted in mounting opposition, led by groups including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

What followed that spring—complete with a fiery debate over cohabitation, the occupation of several Columbia buildings, what a Washington Post writer termed a “police riot,” and even a visit by the band T he Grateful Dead—was transformative for many students.

For others, these events diminished their College experience. Still, no matter where one stood—among the protesters or among those put off by them—one thing was for sure: The events of spring 1968 changed Barnard and they changed its students, forever.

Mounting Tensions

That spring, Barnard students were frustrated by the extent to which the College exerted control over their personal lives. Though Barnard’s administration was more socially liberal than those of many women’s colleges, it still imposed restrictive curfews in residence halls and even stricter limitations on male visitors. Living off-campus with a boyfriend was strictly forbidden. But there was a loophole for students willing to lie on their housing forms: T hey could say they had live-in babysitting jobs, the one form of off-campus housing Barnard would accept for students living too far from home to commute. To live with

Columbia’s plan to build a gym in Harlem’s public Morningside Park sparked protests on campus and off. Photo courtesy of Lee T. Pearcy CC ’69.

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Barnard student Linda LeClair, pictured here, questioned the College’s right to discipline her for living with her boyfriend, Peter Behr (right).

her boyfriend, at least one student, Linda LeClair, did just that. Her story soon galvanized much of the campus community.

At the same time, African American students were growing increasingly upset with persistent racism in American society broadly and in Morningside Heights in particular. Prior to the civil rights movement, their numbers had been small, not more than five per Barnard class. Now, an active admissions recruitment effort meant there were about fifty black students at Barnard in the spring of 1968.

That increase, paralleled at Columbia, enabled African Americans to form their own campus social life for the first time, including, in 1965, organizing the Students’ Afro-American Society (SAS).

Michelle “Shelly” Patrick ’67, an African American debutante from Detroit, took part. Arriving for Barnard Orientation in 1967, she surveyed the card tables advertising extracurricular activities that lined Columbia’s College Walk, thinking she might join SDS. But an older black student tapped her on the shoulder, saying, “Oh no, dear, you belong over here,” at the SAS table; she signed up. Patrick’s new roommate, Ruth Stuart, also a debutante, but from a wealthy white family in Boston, did not share Patrick’s liberal views. But Patrick, delighted to have a roommate, found Stuart to be “sweet” and decided that they would just not discuss politics.

Like earlier black students at Barnard and Columbia, members of SAS were active in the community—organizing rent strikes, condemning police brutality, and joining civil rights demonstrations.

In 1968, they turned their attention to Columbia, siding with Harlem neighbors in opposing Columbia’s decision to build a private gym in Harlem’s public Morningside Park, to which faculty and Columbia students would be welcomed through the front door and neighborhood residents admitted through the back.

Members of SDS cared about the gym, too. But since 1965, the Columbia chapter, along with its national organization, had focused on Vietnam and resistance to the draft, which, in 1968, stopped exempting male graduate students. For three years, SDS and others at Columbia had mounted teach-ins about the war, organized

Among the issues that sparked the revolt were mounting opposition to the war in Vietnam and Columbia’s role in military research; University plans to build a private gym in Harlem’s public Morningside Park; the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Barnard’s role in policing its students’ romantic lives.

busloads of students for trips to anti-war demonstrations, protested ROTC drills on South Field, defied University rules by blocking access to military and CIA recruiters inside Columbia buildings, and condemned the University’s ties to the Institute for Defense Analyses, which conducted classified research for the Pentagon. Columbia officials responded not by opening dialogue, as the protesters wanted, but by placing them on disciplinary probation.

Sexual Protectionism

Between January 30 and April 4, a series of events triggered the student revolt. The Tet Offensive gave lie to American claims that the U.S. was winning in Vietnam. Mark Rudd, a Columbia junior, was elected chairman of its SDS chapter on a platform titled, “How to Get the SDS Moving Again and Screw the University All in One Fell Swoop.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. And an article about cohabitation, appearing in The NewYork Times, included an account of an unnamed Barnard student who, unbeknownst

to College officials, was living off-campus with her boyfriend.

Barnard’s dean of studies quickly identified the student as LeClair.

The dean brought charges against her for lying on her housing form to Barnard’s judicial council, a committee of students, faculty, and administrators, with disciplinary authority over student conduct.

Defiant, LeClair questioned the College’s right to determine where she lived. She asked in the Barnard Bulletin, the College newspaper, “If women are able, intelligent people, why must we be supervised and curfewed?” Before the College’s judicial council, LeClair elaborated: “Although I am old enough by law to marry without my parent’s consent; support myself, which I am doing; live anywhere I want, without parental control; I am not old enough, according to Barnard, to live outside the dorm except as a domestic.” Obliged to enforce College rules but clearly on LeClair’s side, the council—including Barnard English instructor and pioneering feminist Kate Millett— ordered that LeClair be denied snack bar privileges and urged that the College policy be revised.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 31

Photos courtesy of Gerald S. Adler, photographer, 1968

Press reports were soon picked up nationwide. Barnard’s new president, Martha Peterson, found herself deluged with demands that she expel Barnard’s wayward student. Fearing the effect on a new capital campaign, Peterson vetoed the council’s ruling and considered expelling LeClair. But over the weeks that followed, Barnard students, including a delegation that presented Peterson with a petition signed by half the student body, rose in LeClair’s defense. The group threated to stay until Peterson agreed to accept the council’s ruling and allowed LeClair to remain. Peterson relented.

Occupations

Unlike at Barnard, when Columbia students made demands, President Grayson Kirk often simply said, “no.” By April 23, the leaders of SDS and SAS, along with a number of supporters, determined to take drastic action. They proceeded to rally at Low Library to demand that President Kirk hear them out.

Blocked by other students, mostly athletes outraged by recent challenges to the University, two Barnard students, standing on a bench, shouted, “The gym!” At that, the protesters headed to Morningside Park to take down the fence that cordoned off the construction site and reclaim the land for Harlem. When the police arrived and started to make arrests, leaders diverted the remaining protesters to Hamilton Hall, which they occupied.

At first, the occupation had a carnivalesque quality. A student band played, attracting more students, Patrick among them.

Columbia’s acting dean, Henry Coleman, entered and demanded access to his office; students allowed him to pass. Mao posters went up, and then balloons. Candy wrappers and other detritus began to litter the floor. As Patrick remembers, “For the black students, this was not an acceptable thing.” They came from “a long civil rights tradition, where our grandparents, and our grandparents’ grandparents said, ‘Every time you leave your house you represent the race. When you walk down the street, when you’re in a 32

Left: “Liberated Women Remember Your Pill” notice on a Fayerweather blackboard. Right: Women occupiers sleeping on floor of Fayerweather. Women occupying Hamilton, Low, Avery, Fayerweather, and Mathematics often found themselves assigned to administrative or menial work by male strike leaders.

classroom, when you’re in public accommodations, you represent the race….You behave in a dignified fashion at all times.’ This was getting to be not such a dignified fashion.”

Moreover, the demonstrators’ goals began to diverge. SAS wanted the University to stop the gym’s construction; SDS wanted to stay in the building until Columbia severed its connection with the CIA and defense research. “Well,” Patrick worried, “we would have been in the buildings for two years.” At around midnight, SAS requested that SDS leave. “I remember being sad about it,” Patrick recalled, “because I was coming at a time when black and white together—‘We Shall Not Be Moved’—was the motto of the civil rights movement and what made it so effective…. But I knew that it had to happen. . . .

We knew what we had to do to represent [the race], and that was to maintain [the cleanliness of] this building. We had to scrub the floors.

We had to make sure that nothing is destroyed.” Before starting to clean, SAS released Dean Coleman.

Evicted from Hamilton, some fifty white protesters headed to Low Library, where they took over President Kirk’s suite. Over the next four days, other protesters occupied Avery, Fayerweather, and Mathematics Halls before settling in for a siege. Judging from later arrest records, about a third of the protesters were women, roughly half of them from Barnard. Ellen Feldman ’69 was “one of the first” to enter Low, “fervent” in her “opposition to the war, discrimination against African Americans, and the evils of capitalism.” Like everyone else, she waited in line to call her parents on the one phone in the office. Nancy Biberman ’69 also joined at Low, an experience she found “intense, intoxicating, and profoundly pre-feminist.” Like many of her Barnard friends, she cherished her relationships with the men in SDS, “at least in part because without them we could not have participated in [the] endless, informal, high-level meetings [that were] taking place.Yet, quietly, we resented being there on male sufferance, or if our consciousness had not yet clarified those amorphous feelings into resentment, we were at the very least confused.”

Photo courtesy of the Barnard Archives and Special Collections

Most of the women were channeled into traditional gender roles: cook and office assistant. Cathy Tashiro ’68 organized all the cooking in the Mathematics building. Women did the same in the other buildings, but they harbored doubts. Biberman later saw a sign in Fayerweather she would “never forget.” It read: “To all women:You are in a liberated area.You are urged to reject the traditional role of housekeeper unless, of course, you feel this is the role that allows for creative expression. Speak up. Use your brains.” Inspired, Biberman wrote an article criticizing “male ego-trips” and declared women were trying to create a new form of leadership, “one that recognized us as women, yet also as political people with thoughts and actions which must be communicated.”

Occupied buildings were not the only places students gathered.

Hundreds more rallied outside, observed by dozens of reporters and photographers. Some students came looking for their classes. When Beverly R. Johnson ’71 (later Basha Yonis) discovered that protestors had occupied the Mathematics building, where she was taking calculus, she was incredulous. “Why the Mathematics building? What kind of military-industrial grants can be going to a math department?”

She admired the protesters. But she could not “imagine joining them in the occupation.” To her relief, she saw her professor had commandeered a portable blackboard and was teaching outside. She was “very proud of Professor Kolchin for honoring the occupation and still teaching.”

Others came to show their support. Constance Brown ’71 was one of the “step sitters and sympathizers,” as she describes herself.

So was her classmate Mary Gordon ’71 (now Barnard’s Millicent C. McIntosh Professor in English and Writing), who grew up workingclass. By day, Gordon “would go over to Columbia and chant and demonstrate—[I] never went into the buildings because I was on scholarship. I thought, ‘If I fall off this rung of the ladder, I’ll never be able to get up again.’ ” Alison Hayford ’68 took a place on the steps in front of Low Library, where she ventured to make “what must have been my first political speech.” She recalls “the tendency of males . . . to demonstrate a kind of eye-rolling tolerance when women spoke.”

Bonnie Fox Sirower ’70, initially “horrified” to see students occupy university buildings, within days “spent one night in Avery,” eating “oranges and peanut butter,” and talking “all night long about how we would make a difference.” The next morning, having second thoughts, she “sneaked out a window” to make her “feelings known another way.” She “coordinated a candle-light demonstration that started at Milbank and wound around all the Barnard blocks three times.”

Not everyone was sympathetic. The Columbia undergraduates who blocked access to Low on April 23 established a ring around the Library to show their opposition. They tried to prevent food from getting into the building. As sympathizers formed an outer ring around Low (and faculty inserted themselves as a buffer to prevent fights), sympathizers threw packages of food to occupiers standing in the windows, which the opposition did their best to intercept. That did not stop the flow of supplies. Damaris McGuire ’70 watched the successful execution of one delivery: “A middle-aged woman, carrying a large grocery bag, pushed her way through the various rings, shouting her son’s name. From one of the windows a boy

To commemorate the 1968 protests, the Barnard Center for Research on Women this spring produced a photo exhibit in the Tunnel Gallery and a March 6th event, both titled “1968 and Its Afterlives: Reflecting on Campus Activism Past, Present and Future.” (This photo, of an anti-rape march, was among those in the exhibit.) The panel, featuring four alumnae and one student, explored activism then and now, the campus as a place of protest and mobilization, and how to empower people with non-dominant identities—women, people of color, and sexual and gender minorities. To read more, visit bit.ly/2qYsuxN.

popped his head out. ‘Yeah, Ma?’ She handed up the grocery bag, told him to be careful, and left.”

Police Violence

On April 29, seven days into the building takeovers, President Kirk called for New York City Tactical Police Force to clear the buildings.

Police officers poured into the tunnels under the central campus and filled College walk. They cut telephone and electrical lines and turned off water to the buildings. Early in the morning of April 30, they received the order to move in.

In Hamilton Hall, the first to be cleared, the arrests proceeded peacefully, in large part because the students had political officials on the outside negotiating on their behalf. These allies opened lines of communication between the students and police commissioner.

Together, they agreed that if the University sent in the police, the students would not resist arrest but rather would walk out peacefully.

Karla Spurlock-Evans ’71 later reflected that “the police that I saw were [all] black….[T]here was not a majority of black policemen in New York City at that time. So I think they had been identified and selected to come in to take this group of black students.”

In other buildings, the story was different. There were no advance negotiations, no agreements about resisting arrest. Some did walk out.

Others locked arms in peaceful resistance. And a few fought back. The Continued on page 73 BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 33

THROUGH THE GATES EVENT

Photos by Kris Connor/Getty Images for Athena Film Festival; Jo Chiang; Avi Edelman; Samuel Stuart; Ian Stroud

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Strong Women on the Big Screen Now in its eighth year, the Athena Film Festival continues to embrace and uphold the power of women

At the eighth annual Athena Film Festival, 6,000 attendees celebrated the

power of women on screen and behind the scenes. Tennis legend Billie Jean King spoke at a packed, opening-night screening of the 2017 film Battle of the Sexes. Documentarian Barbara Kopple received the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award for her Academy Award–winning, social justice–focused films. British screenwriter and director Amma Asante received this year’s Athena Award in recognition of her extraordinary accomplishments and leadership. Writer, director, and producer J.J. Abrams P ’22 won the Leading Man Award for the strong female characters in his movies. And a surprise award in recognition of her service was bestowed upon Kathryn Kolbert, the Athena Center’s festival co-founder and departing director.

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1 A United Kingdom Director Amma Asante accepts the Athena Award 2 President Sian Beilock and Provost Linda Bell with tennis champion Billie Jean King 3 Showing support for women in film at the red carpet photo booth 4 Athena Center Director Kathryn Kolbert receives a leadership award 5 President Sian Beilock poses with filmmaker J.J. Abrams P ’22 6 Director Valerie Red-Horse Mohl, activist Gloria Steinem, activist and documentary subject Wilma Mankiller, and Executive Producer Gale Anne Hurd speak at a post-film panel for Mankiller

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 35

SOURCES

by Jenn Z. Chowdhury ’06

Photos by Ambika Singh

From left to right: Professors Lisa Son, Rajiv Sethi, Brian Morton, and Brian Mailloux

help students develop a firmer grasp on the material. The students like the reverse classroom setup and find that it’s an effective way to integrate coding into environmental science. “I use examples that are pertinent,” he adds. From tracking atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over time to mapping sea-surface temperature levels, Mailloux uses data directly from his own research or from other environmental scientists so his students can learn how to analyze real data, much as they would while working as professionals in the environmental field.

FIT has also underwritten other work in computer programming. Lisa Son, associate professor of psychology, and Rajiv Sethi, professor of economics, will use their second FIT grant to build a new Coding Fellows Program, modeled after Barnard’s highly successful Writing Fellows and Speaking Fellows peer-mentoring programs. (See page 14 for more on the Speaking Fellows program.) The pair will offer two new, FIT-funded courses as well: Coding Markets and Coding Cognition.

The Coding Fellows Program, set to begin

in the 2019-2020 academic year, will provide computer-programming training to a group of advanced students who will then commit to working with their peers as they seek to incorporate coding into course projects and research.

“The FIT has enabled us to demonstrate that coding is not a niche skill,” Sethi says.

“It’s something everyone at Barnard can develop, in much the same way we expect students to develop writing and speaking skills.” This funding is “fostering an environment in which students can become truly independent in their own learning, in their lab courses, or beyond Barnard,” Son adds. “This program shows they’re here to learn and learn for the long term.”

The idea for the Coding Fellows program grew out of a 2016 course that Sethi and Son designed and offered also using FIT funding: Computer Programming for Behavioral Sciences.

Created for students with little or no programming background, the courses were designed for students who want to learn how coding is used to conduct research in economics and psychology. Thanks to FIT

funding, Barnard is now among a handful of colleges in the nation to offer coding to economics and psychology students.

Courses like Son’s and Sethi’s also instill in Barnard students the confidence to create, design, and watch what they build as it goes into practice. “Coding is very difficult learning,” Son explains. “But by the end of the semester, the students can’t believe how confident they’ve become and how much they’ve learned. Because this course is taught at Barnard and is primarily for women…it’s counteracted any kind of anxiety with any kind of STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math] learning that women sometimes experience,” Son explains.

Projects supported by the Fund have encouraged bold risk-taking based on sound reasoning, but they have also adhered to the Blumenthals’ philosophy that learning should be fun. That was the idea Biology Professor Brian Morton had in mind when he developed a smartphone teaching app for his Molecular and Mendelian Genetics course. “My students seemed to really enjoy using their phones, so I figured an app

DONORS

Instruction at the Leading Edge Endowed by Tom and Lisa Blumenthal P ’19, the Fund for Innovation in Teaching supports new approaches to learning, inside the classroom and out In September 2016, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal P ’19 endowed Barnard’s Fund for Innovation in Teaching (FIT) to encourage professors to push the boundaries of traditional instruction and to test new ideas in education, all with the aim of enhancing students’ learning experiences. To date, the Fund has underwritten seven projects, many of them with outstanding results.

One of these projects belongs to Associate Professor of Environmental Science Brian Mailloux. He’s used FIT funding to create videos for his hands-on, “flipped-classroom” model of pedagogy in his Big Data for Python course. (Python is a complex computer programming language.) Rather than delivering in-class lectures on programming, Mailloux now asks his students—who come to the course with no programming background—to prepare for class by reading the course packet or watching a series of instructional videos he developed about each session’s fundamental principles. The students then work on coding activities during class in order to learn with an instructor present.

“They are learning by doing,” he explains.

With FIT’s generous support, Mailloux was able to purchase a new computer and software to create the instructional videos his students use and to launch a new podcast series next year that will 36

made sense,” he says with a hint of humor.

He had already begun work on the app when the FIT funding came through. The financial support enabled him to develop the app further. The end result: “They love it,” he says. The Gene Tutor App was initially developed to be a study tool with content that was tailored to the way Morton teaches his course. Built to be user-friendly, the app includes study materials he wrote.

Morton realized the next step would be to turn the tool into the equivalent of a textbook, making it a central component of the course.

“The FIT grant will allow me to further develop the app as a full-fledged pedagogical tool, which has never been done before. It will be the first in the field of genetics to serve as an actual course tool, not just as a supplement to a course,” he adds. To ensure wide applicability and usage, the app’s elements will be created in collaboration with Jennifer Mansfield, associate professor of biology. The two professors have noticed that the app has already helped students improve their problem-solving skills. In its expanded

form, the app will be a virtual tool for hundreds of science students on campus and will also be available to thousands of others at colleges and universities across the country through Apple’s App Store and Google Play. For Morton, building and developing the Gene Tutor App has been a diverting and interesting experience. His students appreciate his tailored content, especially the practice questions: “To make things more engaging, I asked my former students to send me their pictures. So when current students work on multiple-choice questions, they get these playful pictures as a kind of feedback—a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Now the app is kind of a time machine! It’s like a history of the course.”

It is the future of courses as well.

As Morton and his colleagues have demonstrated, with the generous support of Tom and Lisa Blumenthal, learning at Barnard is increasingly cutting edge and fun.

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Born in Dhaka and raised in Brooklyn, Jenn Chowdhury ’06 is a writer and storyteller.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 37

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

by Jyoti Menon ’01

Photo by Asiya Khaki ’09

NEWS & EVENTS

vision and strategy for the years ahead.

I also spent four years across the street as an undergrad with many Barnard friends, and graduated from an all-girls high school.

So I appreciate the benefits of an allwomen’s education.

What are you most excited about in your new role?

Barnard has a rich history of producing extraordinary graduates. To have the opportunity to work with the College’s alumnae to help them expand the powerful global network that passes on the Barnard tradition to the next generation and advances the College’s mission excites me.

What’s the last book you’ve read?

A Piece of theWorld by Christina Baker Kline, a novel about Christina Olson, the inspiration for Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting Christina’sWorld. That painting is the first work of art I remember learning about in elementary school. It made such an impression on me that many years later I made a point of visiting the Olson House in Cushing, Maine, where the painting was done. When I heard that this book was coming out, I knew I had to read it.

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

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 our.barnard.edu PRESIDENT & ALUMNAE TRUSTEE

Jyoti Menon ’01 VICE PRESIDENT

Merri Rosenberg ’78 TREASURER

Kathie Plourde ’73 ALUMNAE TRUSTEE

Leila Rafizadeh Bassi ’94 ALUMNAE TRUSTEE

Terry Newman ’79 ALUMNAE TRUSTEE

Linda Sweet ’63

Your favorite sports team?

ALMA MATERS COMMITTEE CHAIR

The Philadelphia Flyers. I was a fan growing up and continue to be to this day.

Amy Veltman ’89

What do you see as Barnard’s biggest assets?

You’re a New Yorker. Do you have time for hobbies?

Adrienne Serbaroli ’02

The people, programs, and resources that allow the students to develop as individuals and achieve excellence.

Actually, I love crafting and needlework— knitting and quilting, in particular. Now that I’ll have a commute on the #1 train, I look forward to having dedicated time each day to work on the many knitting projects I have that are in progress. And in a nod to my husband’s Scottish heritage, I’m attempting to learn the art of curling.

ANNUAL GIVING COMMITTEE CHAIR

Randi Jaffe ’74 BYLAWS CHAIR

What are some challenges you are looking forward to tackling?

I’m not sure I’m qualified to accurately answer that question at this point since I’m so new to the position. Having said that, something I do look forward to tackling is expanding Barnard’s global base of support to ensure that as many graduates as possible have a stake in the future of the College.

A New Leader for Alumnae Relations AABC President Jyoti Menon talks with the College’s new Executive Director of Alumnae Relations Karen Sendler about women’s education, expanding Barnard’s global base of support, and one of her favorite pastimes: knitting on the #1 train 38

Jyoti Menon: What got you interested in working at Barnard?

Karen Sendler: Well, given the current

spotlight in our national discourse on the experiences of women and girls, with movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp, and the momentum toward positive change, I can think of no more important place to be than at an institution dedicated to the education and advancement of women. In addition, the arrival of a new leader, President Beilock, brings with it exciting opportunities, and I wanted to be part of the team that supports the overall

You have a strong background in regional and international programming.

What is the importance of this type of engagement?

No matter where alumnae end up, they take their Barnard experiences with them. From my experience building the European alumni network for Columbia and strengthening the North American regional network for the U.K.’s Cambridge University, I saw that the farther away graduates were from their college, the more keen they were to connect with fellow alumni, regardless of their class year or area of study. They were changed by their experience of being far from home and wanted to connect with local alumni with whom they shared a common experience. Developing strong local alumni clubs and regional programming reinforces that connection and helps to create a robust global alumni network.

DIRECTOR-AT-LARGE

Anastasia Andrzejewski ’97 DIRECTOR-AT-LARGE

Gloria Mamba ’89 DIRECTOR-AT-LARGE

Linda Chang Reals ’92 FELLOWSHIP COMMITTEE CHAIR

Lori Hoepner ’94 LEADERSHIP ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE CHAIR

Jennifer Feierman de Lannoy ’09 NOMINATING COMMITTEE CHAIR

Michele Lynn ’82 PROFESSIONAL & LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE CHAIR

Rochelle Cooper-Schneider ’84

What is your most frequented Upper West Side eatery?

PROJECT CONTINUUM COMMITTEE CHAIR

Doralynn Schlossman Pines ’69 REGIONAL NETWORKS CHAIR

Getting fresh rye bread and black-and-white cookies from Orwashers Bakery on the Upper East Side has been a tradition in my family since I was a child. (Though I grew up outside Philadelphia, my parents were New Yorkers and we visited often.) Now that Orwashers has an outpost on the Upper West Side, I’m thrilled that it’s even easier to stock up on my favorite treats!

Patricia Tinto ’76

Tell me about a New York City cultural institution you think should not to be missed.

Karen Sendler

As a Chelsea resident, I have neighborhood pride in my ‘local’ museum, the Whitney.

To stroll down the High Line, another one of my favorite cultural institutions, go to an exhibit or lecture at the Whitney, or just sit on one of the couches in the museum that overlooks the river and enjoy the view amidst all of their wonderful art, is, to me, one of the many things that makes our city so special.

Matt Hamilton

REUNION COMMITTEE CHAIR

Shilpa Bahri ’99 YOUNG ALUMNAE COMMITTEE CHAIR

Alyss Vavricka ’12 SGA PRESIDENT

Angela Beam ’18

ALUMNAE RELATIONS

Alumnae Relations partners with students and alumnae to carry out engagement initiatives to further the mission of the College.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF ALUMNAE RELATIONS SENIOR ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF ALUMNAE ENGAGEMENT

Kelly De Felice ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF ALUMNAE COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER OF REGIONAL & INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT

Elissa Verrilli ’11 MANAGER OF YOUNG ALUMNAE & STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Greta Boorn MANAGER OF ALUMNAE ENGAGEMENT

Ann Goldberg ASSISTANT TO THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Clara Bauman DEPARTMENT ASSISTANT

Gina Borden ’14

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 39

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

Photos by Juliana Sohn, Asiya Khaki ’09, Courtesy of Barnard Communications, Samuel Stuart

PRESIDENT’S REPORT

Spring Comes, Barnard Flourishes As the 2017–2018 academic year comes to a close and campus clears out, we look forward to many things that are blooming for Barnard. The Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning will open in just a few months; eight new members of the AABC Board of Directors will begin their terms on July 1; and President Beilock’s vision for the College is already making an impact. Even when class isn’t in session, there’s so much to reflect upon and look forward to at Barnard! I hope to see many of you at Reunion 2018, and as always, you can stay connected with the College and each other at our.barnard.edu. Thank you for your continued engagement with Barnard!

—Jyoti Menon ’01, President, Alumnae Association of Barnard College

If you haven’t yet, I highly encourage looking back at the Inauguration of Sian Leah Beilock as the eighth president of Barnard College.

Recap, remarks, and video at barnard.edu/ inauguration

You can also enjoy the excitement of Commencement 2018, including speeches from Anna Quindlen ’74, Rhea Suh ’92, and a keynote by soccer star and activist Abby Wambach (above).

Recap, remarks, and video at barnard.edu/ commencement/archives/commencement-2018

Another new Regional Club to announce!

The Barnard Club of Houston has recently been resurrected by PJ Douglas Sands ’98.

Connect at our.barnard.edu/regionalclubs

Get a glimpse of enlightening discussions that Barnard professors engage in today with the new video series, From the Faculty Lounge.

Video at barnard.edu/feature-stories/ faculty-lounge

Please take a moment to make a gift to Barnard before June 30. Your support helps ensure the College’s continued academic excellence.

Give online at barnard.edu/gift or call 212.854.2520

Making travel plans for the summer? Use the Online Alumnae Directory to locate and reach out to your classmates for a Barnard catch-up session.

Visit our.barnard.edu/findalumnae

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1968 Continued from page 33 police, all white this time, broke down doors and made their way through the furniture barricades. Perhaps resentful of the students for the privileges the officers never had, they used their flashlights and night sticks liberally.

Then, to everyone’s shock, the police turned on the crowd of spectators. Some in the crowd were supporters; others hoped to prevent violence against the occupiers; many had come out of simple curiosity about what had been advertised across campus as a peace demonstration. The police attacked them all.

Hayford, on the steps of Fayerweather Hall, remembers “being thrown over a hedge and seeing students with blood streaming down their faces.” Susan Krupnick Fischer ’68 stood outside the buildings hoping to “protect the protestors from the police. How innocent and naïve we were,” she recalls. “The police came, saw us, clubbed and threw us around, arrested those who weren’t fast enough to run away.”

The worst were the mounted police, swinging their nightsticks. “Some even went into the [Columbia] dorms where students were minding their own business and started hitting people on the head with clubs,” recalls Sirower. The mounted police did not stop with clearing the Columbia campus. They chased fleeing students out to Broadway and down 116th Street, clubbing them as they went. “It was truly horrifying to see,” says Joy Horner Greenberg ’71, one of many who watched from Barnard residence-hall windows.

The police “riot,” as The Washington Post called the attack, had a dramatic effect. A protest that had initially attracted only a small minority of the University population now won the support of thousands of students and faculty who condemned the University for excessive force and failure to listen to students’ grievances. The Grateful Dead gave an impromptu concert in support. Students threw up picket lines around classroom buildings. Some professors moved their classes to their apartments or held them on the lawns outside buildings. It was, as Elizabeth Langer ’68 observed, a “transformative moment.”

Other classes continued as before, however, and many Barnard students, even those sympathetic to the protesters, objected to the picket lines that blocked them from attending.

Some feared losing their scholarships if they did not finish their coursework. Grace

Druan Rosman ’68, who felt that the uprising diminished her Barnard experience, remembered having “a lab experiment in progress for my senior project” that she was unable to complete. “Fortunately, I was able to convince the protesters to let me in and turn it off to prevent the chemicals from overflowing!

I was also unable to complete my Mishnah course and got a pass rather than being able to submit my final paper. Luckily, Barnard carried on and I could take my biology comprehensives as well as complete my student teaching.”

Later that spring, there were two more occupations and two more mass arrests.

Langer was among those locked up. She worried that jail meant the end to her dream of becoming a lawyer, but nevertheless felt proud that “I had taken a stand and crossed a line.”

For the most part, Barnard students felt luckier than their Columbia peers in having their own separate community. They were able to create the feeling of a “safe haven” away from the violence on the other side of Broadway, as well as an alternative to the sense among Columbia students that administrators and even many faculty were distant, rigid figures to whom students could not talk.

What Changed

Although the war in Vietnam continued for seven more years, the protesters were, in many ways, successful. They persuaded Columbia to put an end to classified war research, cancel construction of the Morningside Park gym, ask ROTC to leave, and stop military and CIA recruitment. Barnard, for its part, entered a new era. When, in the fall of 1968, SAS leaders began talking about the need for political assassinations, Barnard’s black students left to form their own organization, the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters. BOSS enabled black women to focus on the issues that mattered most to them and to speak without being drowned out by SAS’s men. Feminism was not at first an issue for them. As one black student asked, “How can I fight for white women to get jobs that black men still can’t get?” They wanted more black women on campus and the chance to read about blacks in their courses. Increasingly alienated from campus life, they demanded the right to live on an all-black floor in the dorm.

Black students were not the only ones feeling alienated in 1968. Rather than agree to the condition that President Peterson imposed—that she abide by College rules— Linda LeClair dropped out. Others left, too, estranged from academic life. Many recalled the late sixties as a lost time, a time of chaos.

For others, however, being at Barnard in 1968 meant “freedom,” “feeling intensely,” and the chance to embark on lives that had been impossible for their mothers.

Feminism took hold on the campus. Within a year, Barnard allowed students to live where they wished. Women from Barnard joined the campaign to end New York’s ban on abortions, which finally became legal in the state in 1970, three years before Roe v.Wade. Some students like Barbara Bernstein ’71, “after four years of looking for the right man,” came to realize “I was looking in the wrong direction,” and embraced a lesbian identity. More courses on women, and later gender, began to appear in the course catalogue.

Many Barnard graduates went on to pursue careers in law, economics, and science. Many devoted themselves to social activism. Peggy Farley ’69 helped start New York State’s Higher Education Opportunity Program, which supports disadvantaged college students, and dedicated her life “to global egalitarianism.” Perry-Lynn Moffitt ’68 became a draft counselor and reports that she “never lost a client to the Army.”

Ruth Stuart Bell, despite having been opposed to the protests, left Barnard with a broader sense of life’s possibilities, and with greater empathy for those less fortunate.

She married, moved to Midland, Texas, and remained a conservative Republican. But she also became president of Planned Parenthood in Midland and helped found a shelter for battered women there. Many others were also deeply affected, perhaps no one more than Carol Santaniello Spencer ’71. She grew up on Long Island, “only fifteen miles but many worlds away” from Barnard. When her father, upon learning of the demonstrations, demanded that she return home, she announced that she wanted to live in the city.

“You will leave this house either in a bridal gown or a casket,” he declared.

She left, wearing blue jeans instead.

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 73

LAST IMAGE

74

by Beatrice Helman ’14

As an undergraduate English/writing major at Barnard and a graduate student working toward an MFA in creative writing, Helman has explored the line between fiction and nonfiction. In much the same way that people write to remember, they photograph to remember. This idea of the photograph as a preserved memory is a critical factor in her work. Helman is influenced, she says, by strange and unusual stories and big skies.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 75

LAST WORD

by Lynn Rosenthal Minton ’53

Illustration by Hanna Barczyk

BARNARD MAGAZINE ONLINE

MORE TO EXPLORE Now you can read great stories about Barnard and its alumnae, enjoy exclusive audio and video, and easily share content on social media.

Surviving Loss After losing her husband and daughter in quick succession, Lynn Rosenthal Minton had an epiphany that led her back to life Until the last couple of years, my life was not drastically different from the New York lives of many of my friends. I married and divorced (after twenty-four years) my college boyfriend, had three great kids, made a good living writing and reporting.

When I was 71, I met and married a remarkable man, a lawyer and naturalist who became a volunteer educator at the Cloisters.

We went white water rafting in Utah, on safari in Tanzania, and relished together the cultural smorgasbord that is New York.

Then my life changed.

After nine deeply happy years, Ed began to develop Alzheimer’s. He gradually lost himself, dying in 2016.

Then, just months after, my daughter Kathy died, after a brave fight with 76

glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor.

Kathy was my best friend and confidant.

She phoned me every day. She designed a walk for me in Central Park, because she thought I wasn’t getting enough exercise.

Once, when I fell in the street, she arrived before the ambulance. With Kathy living nearby, it felt safe to grow old.

My life darkened. It deadened. I stopped reading because I didn’t want to think or reflect. I stopped exercising. For many months I stopped going out of the house except to shop for food—and go to a therapist. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone or doing anything.

One thought finally forced me out of my chair: These are the years I have.

If I became ill and was forced to remain indoors, unable to breathe in fresh air, walk on the streets, be among people, I would hate it. Why do it to myself?

I went out the door. And back to Kathy’s exercise walk—although, at first, I always saw her sweet face in front of me. I discovered that grandchildren actually answer if you text them—instead of leaving phone messages they don’t listen to or emails they don’t read.

Kathy’s son James texted: Go take a trip around the world! (Not likely, but

it’s nice to know he thinks I can do it.)

My granddaughter Rachel and I text and talk regularly. My grandson Alex suggests plays we should—and do—see together.

I’ve gone back to gym class. I’ve gotten wireless earbuds and I’m listening to Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth as I walk.

Yesterday, I had dinner with Electra Slonimsky Yourke ’54. (I still remember our all-nighters, studying for Professor Robertson’s Shakespeare quizzes.)

Symphony Space, a vibrant theater on 95th and Broadway (which now includes the Thalia where I watched foreign films as an undergrad), recently installed a plaque in memory of Kathy’s twenty-five years as director of literary programs. I hadn’t been back to Symphony Space. I didn’t want to see the programs Kathy developed and produced put on by others. But it was time.

And right after Reunion—my 65th—I’m taking all six grandchildren to Paris.

These are the years I have. This is the life I have now.

Sometimes I think about what I had, and I long for it.

But I live in the present. I look forward.

I’m grateful for what I had—and for what remains.

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