53 minute read
Discourses
Ideas. Perspectives. A closer look.
“The lower roadway is converted into additional walkable and human-powered transport space that also offers opportunities for local vendors and performers,” explains Shannon Hui ’22, whose “Do Look Down” proposal was named a winner of the Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge Competition. Photo courtesy of Shannon Hui ’22.
16 Arts & Letters 18 Student Perspective 20 Strides in STEM 22 Bookshelf 24 History Lesson
Arts & Letters
A Life of the Mind
Professor Mary Gordon ’71 reflects on retiring during a pandemic, homeschooling her grandchildren, and the lasting rewards of the liberal arts
by Veronica Suchodolski ’19
“It’s not the way I had dreamed of ending my career,” Mary Gordon ’71 admits to me on the phone. The past year has been a tumultuous one. When Barnard closed its campus as COVID-19 tore through New York City in March, Gordon went out to Milwaukee to stay with her daughter and her grandsons. There, amid news of virus cases, worldwide protests, and an election unlike any in recent memory, she taught online courses, homeschooled the boys, and published a new novel, her ninth.
It was a particularly strange time to publish a book. Gordon should know: In addition to the novels, her roster includes several novellas, short story collections, and works of nonfiction. She’s received numerous awards for the lot, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and the honor of State Author of New York in 2008.
Payback, which debuted in September, received good reviews but went without the usual fanfare of publicity tours. “If you weren’t either the election or the pandemic, nobody really wanted to hear about it,” Gordon says. “So I don’t really know. I’m just trying not to think about it.”
But it hasn’t been all doom and gloom for Gordon, Barnard’s Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Writing until she retired in May 2020. “[Teaching virtually] was a very satisfying experience because it meant a lot to the students,” Gordon says of teaching online. “What I taught — literature and writing — I had always wanted it to be a source of refreshment, and in this quarantine situation it really was.” (That said, as one of her former students, I feel confident in stating that Gordon’s teaching had made a substantial impact long before lockdown. Another Barnard alumna and professor, Mary Beth Keane ’99, wrote a tribute to Gordon’s mentorship in The New York Times in 2019.)
Gordon has certainly found her own refuge in the liberal arts over the past several months. In addition to homeschooling her grandkids, ages 8 and 10 — she taught them “what I could,” which meant Greek mythology and Italian, and supervised the co-writing of a novel called Tom Levine: Dog Detective — Gordon set her own personal syllabus.
“I’m reading all the George Eliot that I haven’t read, and I’m determined to learn Spanish,” Gordon says. “I’m reading Elena Ferrante in Italian. I actually finished War and Peace during the pandemic, which I hadn’t read since high school.”
In a way, retiring during a pandemic is a fitting bookend to Gordon’s time at Barnard. As a 1971 graduate, she first arrived on campus right before the historic protests of 1968, a year that has been compared with 2020 in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post for its civil unrest, flu pandemic, and presidential election.
“It was just at the beginning of the women’s movement, and we thought we were going to change the world in about 10 minutes,” Gordon says of her time as a student. “Barnard was really at the epicenter of it. And I went from Catholic school to trying to occupy buildings in the Columbia protests of ’68, so it was a real political awakening.”
The transition from high school to Barnard was a paradigm shift for Gordon. Her school didn’t approve of its students attending Ivy League schools — perhaps in no small part, in Gordon’s telling, because the principal claimed to have met a Columbia professor who said that “within a week he could make a girl lose her faith, her virginity, and all her political convictions.” The administration actually refused to send her transcripts until Gordon called the Barnard admissions office and implored them to intervene.
“I was such a ferocious 17-year-old,” Gordon recalls. “It was like I was being pulled here by some force. And then when I got here, I was thrilled. I felt like I was intellectually on fire from the minute I got here.”
And so returning to Barnard as a professor in 1988 was a dream come true. “I’ve taught other places as a guest teacher, and there’s nothing like Barnard students,” Gordon says. “We are a very special breed of cat.” It isn’t just the singularity of attending a women’s college in New York City, either. “I feel very strongly, and I hope this doesn’t go away, that one of the reasons why we produced a disproportionate number of writers is that we ground our writers in literature,” Gordon says of teaching Barnard writers. “For me, it’s always been very important that the students have read literature and have read older literature, and I think it gives a real depth and texture to Barnard student writing that a lot of other places don’t have.” Still, she felt it was the right time for her to retire, joking, “I didn’t want to be like Carol Channing doing Hello, Dolly! on a walker.” And while she’ll miss the hope and sustenance she felt from her regular interactions with students, she feels secure in stepping aside for a younger generation of professors while she focuses on her own work. “In a way, teaching was always my day job, so it’s not like I’m going to have to take up ceramics or something to fill my days,” Gordon says. “I can write.”
To that end, Gordon is working on a nonfiction book entitled What Kind of Catholic Are You?, in which she compares public figures who all claim that their ideologies are informed by Catholicism and yet hold radically different values from one another. She is, of course, still working on a fiction project, “but I’m superstitious about talking about things until they’re done.”
One thing she can say for certain, though, is that wherever 2021 takes us, a Barnard education will keep paying dividends. “[Quarantine] is when your liberal arts education pays off, because you have the consolation of a life of the mind,” Gordon says. “What the future will be in terms of employment, I have absolutely no idea. But I think that one good thing about it is maybe it will break that mindset that college is vocational school and you train for a particular job, because nobody knows what the jobs will be. In an odd way, it’s a vindication of a liberal arts education, which is critical thinking, mental flexibility, larger imagination. [Those] are the things that are going to pay off.” B
Student Perspective
A Bridge of the Future
Shannon Hui ’22 shares her contest-winning vision for a New York City landmark
by N. Jamiyla Chisholm
Architecture and psychology major Shannon Hui ’22 didn’t wait until she joined a firm to introduce innovative architectural ideas to the world. In fact, Hui and her team (Yujin H. Kim ’19CC and Kwans Kim from NYU’s Class of 2024) have already made their mark as winners of the young adult category of the Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge Competition. The contest was presented by the Van Alen Institute, an architecture and urbanism nonprofit organization, which challenged people to rethink the bridge’s walkway.
The call to update the bridge came as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic upended New York City, adding a new element to consider: how to social distance on the bridge’s overcrowded walkway. The public was invited to vote on entries through July 30, and winners were announced on August 17, via the organization’s website.
Tapping into three guiding principles — preservation, diversity, and future progress for change — Hui’s team designed their “Do Look Down” installation to feature a glass walkway above the bridge’s girders, with an LED projection system for the adjacent bridge spaces to display art that honors the city’s cultures, histories, identities, and more. Hui shares how the pandemic played a role in her design choices, what she’s most looking forward to this fall, and how Barnard faculty gave her the tools needed to think of new uses for a 137-year-old structure.
How did you prepare for this competition, and how did the pandemic inform your approach?
Our team decided to put something together on a whim after seeing a social media ad for the competition. Despite having very different academic interests — Yujin is studying for his Ph.D. in math, while Kwans will be a first-year [undergraduate] and has a passion for the performing arts — it worked because we could each approach the problem with our own agendas, as we have all used the bridge in our own ways.
I think that there has been an urgent drive to reimagine how people can interact with one another and relate to the public realm during and postCOVID, in addition to its intersections with racial and queer justice. This health crisis has violently amplified the systemic inequities that are built into New York’s existing urban infrastructure, and for designers and planners to continue to operate within a vacuum is a position of immense privilege. More than anything, this competition became an opportunity for us to not necessarily provide all the answers to what a “better” Brooklyn Bridge represents but to start conversations about meaningful public spaces where people can feel seen and heard — not just in an idealized future, but now.
What did you learn from Barnard and faculty that helped you with this project?
In developing our proposal, our first and foremost inspirations were the local stakeholders we had the opportunity to engage with and receive feedback from. Throughout this process, we worked closely with representatives of the Van Alen Institute, New York City Council, and other civic institutions who were instrumental to the formation of our final designs.
My architecture studios and lectures at Barnard,
under the instruction of assistant professor of architecture Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Lindsay Harkema [founder of the design collective WIP], had instilled in me the value of embedding historical consciousness and urban theory into my work. And adjunct assistant professors of architecture Alicia Tam Wei and Jason Kim and Barnard studio instructor Todd Rouhe taught me to be intentional with representational techniques as modes of architectural analysis and speculation.
I was also fortunate to do an internship at a lighting design firm in Hong Kong this summer, supported by the Beyond Barnard internship program. This provided me with both a technical and a theoretical foundation to think about not only how the bridge looks during the day but also how intentional lighting design can completely transform the experience of New York City’s public monuments and spaces at night.
What was most exciting — or terrifying — about reimagining one of the most iconic bridges in the world?
Apart from its mobility issues and opportunities to optimize the distribution of available space, I’m not sure anyone really asked to “change” the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s an icon of the City and was a technological feat of its time. When we first started brainstorming ideas for our proposal, we struggled to think of structural interventions that wouldn’t compete heavily with the existing bridge and be upsetting to New Yorkers. This led us to scrap all of our initial ideas and form the three following guiding principles: (1) The current form and aura of the bridge must be preserved, and any enhancements should be kept unobstructive or reversible; (2) As a premier landmark, the bridge has a certain duty to equitably represent the diversity of peoples that it bridges; and (3) The proposal should not be static in its capacities but instead possess enormous potential for future progress and change.
So, I guess both the most exciting and terrifying part about participating in this competition was the Brooklyn Bridge itself.
Do you have a favorite bridge or building?
It’s hard for me to identify a singular favorite structure, but I always like to tell people about the High Line. I participated in a High Line Feminist Field Trip, hosted by the Athena Center for Leadership Studies, during my first year and loved learning about the nonprofit’s efforts to champion civic engagement, social justice, and urban gardening through education and programming. And needless to say, the public space is visually extraordinary.
At the same time, the High Line’s role in the dynamics of its surrounding neighborhoods offers a critical lens to the practice of public art and urban renewal, which drives me to be deliberate and sensitive when considering the communities that I hope to serve as a designer. B
Strides in STEM
The Science of Climate Change
A paleoclimatologist discusses teaching in a pandemic and studying STEM at Barnard
by Veronica Suchodolski ’19
As a paleoclimatologist, Bronwen Konecky ’05 uncovers information from the Earth’s geologic past, stretching back to a time before measurements were taken, and applies that knowledge to present-day climate issues. One of the main goals of her research is understanding how aspects of the global water cycle — the process by which water molecules make their way from the Earth’s surface to the atmosphere and back again — behave when the planet warms or cools.
“Climate change is about much more than global warming,” Konecky says. “If you think of the Earth’s climate system like one big laboratory, then what humans are doing right now is loading the lab up with greenhouse gases and causing it to warm. But we still have lots of questions about how that warming will impact different parts of the global water cycle.”
Such questions — Will monsoons get stronger or weaker? What will happen to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, and why? What are the physical processes that connect changing temperature with the water cycle? — drive Konecky’s Konecky with her father in the rainforest biome at the Biosphere 2 Center in Oracle, research. An assistant professor of earth and planetary Arizona. Columbia formerly ran a “study abroad” program at Bio2 with a semester-long sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, she was earth science program. named a Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering in 2019, making her one of the nation’s top early-career scientists. (She Barnard factors into Konecky’s science career was one of only 22 scientists nationwide to receive this honor.) in more ways than just technical know-how. She
“The Earth has warmed and cooled for many other reasons in the geologic majored in environmental science at Barnard, which past,” Konecky says. “My job is to piece together the Earth’s master lab notebook, she said prepared her for a life in STEM by providing to uncover those past experiments and [learn from them]. Some of those lessons her with a rigorous academic curriculum, great are very relevant to changes we see today or will see in the future.” advisors, and the opportunity to do an original
For a job so far-reaching and complex, Konecky had to undergo a good deal of project for her senior thesis research. She also training, which meant intensive research and hours upon hours of lab work. After minored in English, wrote poetry and plays, and Barnard, she spent three years at Columbia’s Earth Institute before heading to worked as a Writing Fellow. Brown University, where in 2013 she earned her Ph.D. in geological sciences. She “The thing I am most grateful for about Barnard then went on to several postdoctoral research positions, including a fellowship was the liberal arts education,” Konecky says. “My through the National Science Foundation’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace classes at Barnard taught me how to think critically, Sciences at Oregon State University and the University of Colorado Boulder. which is the most important skill for any scientist or
Of course, the suspension of in-person lab work prompted by the COVID-19 any global citizen. Barnard also taught me how to pandemic affected Konecky’s plans. During the shutdown, Konecky’s research write — the secret about being a STEM researcher team pivoted from lab-based projects to data-crunching and modeling that is that we spend much of our time writing and could be done from home. “The pandemic basically threw a wrench into a set of communicating.” carefully laid plans that were years in the making,” Konecky says. “For example, Writing, in fact, is something she says that she I can’t get to my field sites for the foreseeable future, and this will have cascading does every day, whether it’s putting together grant impacts for years to come. But the flip side is that we have all done some really proposals or crafting scientific presentations. “This is cool science that may not have happened if it hadn’t been for the pandemic.” the lifeblood of our careers.”
With her classes now conducted remotely, the way she teaches has also changed. Konecky’s advice to women looking to pursue She’s created what she describes as a “DIY tech setup” in which she communicates science careers is to develop those communication through Zoom with her students’ faces visible on a big monitor. “I stand there in skills as much as the “hard” science skills. “If you front of the chalkboard and try to make it as interactive as possible,” she says. want to be a STEM researcher, learn how to think
Even though she misses seeing her students in person, she notes a bright spot critically, allow yourself to be challenged, take in her new teaching arrangement: “One of my jobs at Barnard was [working as] classes in subjects you think are interesting but don’t an audiovisual technician for special events, and I had a brief stint as a technical expect to be very ‘good’ at, and above all, learn director for WBAR,” Konecky says. “Those skills I learned really keep on giving!” to write.” B
Bookshelf
Books by Barnard Authors
by Isabella Pechaty ’23
NONFICTION
The Verso Book of Feminism: Revolutionary Words from Four Millennia of Rebellion
edited by Jessie Kindig ’04 Kindig unravels the story of one of the most enduring systems of oppression and the visionaries who have fought against it. Researched on Barnard’s campus, the book follows the common thread of irrepressible defiance connecting feminism across history and cultures. The voices of artists, activists, theorists, and politicians from around the globe are featured and united by the cause of female advocacy.
Lyrical Strains
by Elissa Zellinger ’02 Both political and poetic theory are used to demonstrate how 19th-century liberalism defined itself based on the exclusion of marginalized people. Zellinger examines the work of these excluded communities and how women, Native, and enslaved artists used lyric poetry to defy restricted definitions of identity and individuality established by liberal authors.
Almost Over: Aging, Dying, Dead
by F.M. Kamm ’69 Kamm considers a variety of philosophical perspectives when investigating private and public attitudes towards the dying process. Difficult questions surrounding the pursuit of death, the aging process affecting the will to live, and societal practices of preserving or taking life are all examined, as well as what these moral issues reveal about our own humanity.
Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life: Ravaisson, Bergson, and Simmel
by Suzanne Guerlac ’71 Guerlac offers a new interpretation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, illuminated by the philosophies of his contemporaries Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel. She argues that Proust aims to embrace life’s present moment over recollections of the past and drives this point home by placing the novel in the context of cultural touchstones, controversies, and events of his time.
They Left It All Behind: Trauma, Loss, and Memory Among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants and Their Children
by Hannah Hahn ’76 Employing her training in psychology, Hahn analyzes how oppressive historical events, including anti-Semitic discrimination and the violence of World War I, impacted the mental health of pre-1924 Jewish immigrant families. The stories
— informed by a series of interviews with the eastern European immigrants’ children — reveal the past trauma these immigrants experienced and its effect on subsequent generations.
Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France
by Julia Elsky ’07 During World War II, Jewish authors who had emigrated from eastern Europe to France made a deliberate choice to write in French as a way of asserting their increasingly silenced identities as both Jewish and French creatives. Elsky looks at how these writers — including Irène Némirovsky, Jean Malaquais, and Benjamin Fondane — document and convey wartime life from their own unique perspectives, as both insiders and outsiders.
Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy
by Christy Thornton ’02 Challenging the notion that Europe and the U.S. were at the center of 20th-century economic development, Thornton’s research reveals Mexico’s many forgotten contributions to shaping global capitalist policies. Thornton asserts that the advocacy of Mexican diplomats and economists secured economic progress for themselves, other Third World leaders, and the world.
Mutual Aid
by Dean Spade ’97 As part of a new book series addressing the social and political ramifications of COVID-19, Spade discusses a new kind of service that has arisen during the pandemic: mutual aid. Individual citizens have had to balance cooperative survival work with social justice in the wake of numerous global crises. This book defines, theorizes about, and advises on this historic brand of activism.
The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market
by Nadya Bair ’06 The Magnum Photos agency was responsible for much of the popularization and spread of photojournalism after World War II. Bair studies how Magnum’s influence was able to reach so many people and how everyone from editors and publishers to photographers’ spouses were integral to its process. Magnum’s collaborative and artistic work gave a global visual identity to the human rights issues of the war.
The Book of Help: A Memoir in Memories
by Megan Griswold ’90 In the wake of a major life upset, Griswold goes on a quest for peace, happiness, and emotional balance. Her search leads her on adventures both near and far, from encounters with psychics to remote encampments of the Chilean military. She explores the vast world of alternative medicine, sharing her experiences with different wellness and holistic practices that can sometimes border on the extreme. Readers are invited to draw inspiration for their own journeys towards fulfillment.
POETRY
Corner Shrine
by Chloe Martinez ’00 In this collection of poems, which won the 2019 Backbone Press Chapbook Contest, Martinez contemplates lofty themes of culture and identity and probes transience through the sensory and tactile experiences of travel.
FICTION
Side Effects: A Footloose Journey to the Apocalypse
by S. Montana Katz ’77 Katz’s new novel depicts the decline of the American dream through the personal and married life of a young autistic woman in the 1950s and beyond. This sprawling epic paints a detailed portrait of the postWWII baby boomer generation — bringing into play the music, politics, art, and science of its time — and how it gave rise to a global climate crisis.
Song of the Old City
by Anna Pellicioli ’01 The richly illustrated children’s book follows the daily life of a little girl in Istanbul. With poetic narration, Pellicioli tells a story of warmth and generosity as her protagonist receives gifts from the inhabitants of the city and shares them with others. B
History Lesson
A Book of Our Own
A new, illuminating tome chronicles the history of Barnard College
by Lois Elfman ’80
In 1928, Virginia Woolf stood before audiences of female students at Girton and Newnham — the first two colleges for women at the University of Cambridge — to make the case that a woman must have a “room of one’s own” to nurture her creative mind. Paying homage to Woolf’s famous words (and essay), emeritus professor of history Robert McCaughey titled his new book A College of Her Own: The History of Barnard. It details Barnard College’s path, from its inception to its current vibrant existence, as an institution that has provided women the space to think and create.
Since joining the Barnard faculty in 1969, McCaughey has seen the College navigate political upheaval, the feminist movement, and the pressure to merge with Columbia College, and he carefully documents how Barnard has evolved as a women’s institution with an ever-expanding mission, academic reach, and physical footprint. In particular, he showcases how the College’s location makes Barnard unique when compared with the other Seven Sisters schools. McCaughey originally titled the book The Gotham Sister to reflect how the College’s character has been shaped by its urban setting.
“‘Gotham’ struck me in trying to distinguish this particular women’s college from the other women’s colleges that we tend to compare it with, almost all of which are either in pretty wealthy suburbs or in small towns,” McCaughey says. “[The word] suggested a kind of heterogeneity and hyperactive circumstance that I think does characterize the city and does imbue Barnard with quite a different dayto-day aura.”
As a faculty member, McCaughey has worked with six Barnard presidents, and his time serving as dean of the faculty under President Ellen V. Futter gave him invaluable insight into the College’s operations. He is also the author of Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754-2004, which includes a comprehensive view of Barnard’s relationship to the University.
We had the opportunity to speak with McCaughey about A College of Her Own as well as his experiences over his 51 years in Morningside Heights.
In 2014, you prepared a detailed interactive timeline for Barnard’s 125th anniversary celebration. How did that propel you into this book?
Robert McCaughey: It was in the back of my mind at that point to write a history of Barnard. A couple of years later, I decided that I would see if there was interest, and indeed there was. By then, I had as good an angle on Barnard as anyone. Academic history is a fairly small field, and writing institutional histories is not a particularly favored activity among academic historians, but there’s a tradition of it. … One of the ways a place sustains itself is having people have some ongoing
familiarity with what had gone on before them.
Opposite, from left: Students march onto campus as part of Class Day 1899; Dean Virginia Gildersleeve. This page, clockwise: Barnard president Millicent C. McIntosh and President Dwight D. Eisenhower; student antiwar protesters at Commencement 1972; longtime Africana studies professor Quandra Prettyman; Barnard cofounder Annie Nathan Meyer.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE BARNARD COLLEGE ARCHIVES.
In the early 1980s, Barnard not only refused to merge with Columbia but also survived the University’s decision to go coed and emerged from this transition even stronger. How did that set the stage for A College of Her Own?
Barnard did emerge — with lots of credit to Ellen Futter — stronger for the unilateral move on the part of Columbia College. In this book, I certainly don’t want to understate the concerns that affected Barnard by Columbia’s move. It was slow coming, so there was some anticipation, but nonetheless it was pretty gloomy in 1981-83 around the Barnard campus as far as what the future looked like. That was a dicey moment, and Ellen — with others — just said, “It’s going to be all right” and set about doing things that helped.
What about Barnard’s location came into sharper focus for you as you wrote the book?
The origins of Barnard are late 19th century, but it was still very much a peculiarly New York undertaking, and it had to meet New York conditions. The organizers, from [co-founder] Annie Nathan Meyer to the early trustees to Virginia Gildersleeve [dean of Barnard, 1911-47], were all in one way or another — often in different ways — New Yorkers. This student body, despite efforts to make it more national, remained overwhelmingly a New York City ethnic community of kids who went to what turned out to be good public high schools where the college preparation was equal to some of the better private schools around the country.
What do you see as some of the most interesting and noteworthy events in Barnard’s history?
Certainly, the response to Columbia going coeducational in 1983. That was a lifeor-death situation. Connected with that was the decision the trustees made in 1985 to build Sulzberger Tower. They didn’t have the money. It was questionable whether the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York was going to come up with funds. They were laying everything on the table. That was a gutsy decision. Earlier, the quiet setting aside of the admissions policies that had the effect of discriminating against Jewish applicants. That occurred in the [President Millicent] McIntosh era [and], belatedly for sure, quietly corrected a serious miscarriage in the way Barnard operated in an earlier period. Not that it didn’t have lots of Jewish students, but it did operate, I think, quite consciously to limit the number. That had to be done away with if Barnard was to be a better place.
Meet three alumnae who have devoted their careers to fighting racial injustice by opening hearts and changing minds
by Erin Aubry Kaplan
ANTI-RACISM, like green energy jobs, has become the work of the American future. After the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 touched off massive protests and exposed the entrenched nature of racism in everyday life, the national conversation turned to what to do now and how to do it. The urgency of the conversation is laudable, but the reality is that many people have been doing “the work” for decades and have much to tell us about what racism is made of and what it will take to overcome. Martin Luther King Jr. said it often, but it bears repeating: Changing laws is necessary, but changing hearts and minds is essential.
Three Barnard alumnae — Michelle Maldonado ’91, Vernā Myers ’82, and Enola Aird ’76 — have forged distinguished careers facilitating the changing of hearts and minds. All are Black and former lawyers who realized early in their careers that combating injustice and inhumanity in its everyday form was their greater purpose. They do it in different ways: Maldonado develops mindful, compassionate business and organizational leadership; Myers redefines diversity and inclusion as meaningful action rooted in self-reflection, hard truths, and empathy; Aird heals Black communities by consistently exposing the lie on which racism is built. Each endeavor is powerful on its own, but together they are a clearinghouse of anti-racist practices that each of us can adopt to some degree right now. Maldonado, Myers, and Aird have done the essential work. And they continue to do it, now more vitally than ever.
INNER WORK, OUTER BEHAVIOR
For Michelle Maldonado, big change is all about inner work. She is founder and CEO of Lucenscia, a leadership development and business strategy firm that sees compassion as the basis of good leadership and of good living — compassion, after all, is the spiritual foundation of anti-racism. To build compassion, one must cultivate emotional intelligence, which Maldonado defines as the ability to effectively parse and monitor the feelings and emotions of oneself and others. Such self-awareness creates a kind of equanimity that leads to social awareness, a move from “me” to “we” that is the essential dynamic of compassion and its corollary, kindness.
Mindfulness and other meditative practices are the core of Maldonado’s experience; she has been a certified mindfulness teacher for five years. Raised Catholic — her family has roots in Cape Verde, a predominantly Roman Catholic country — she had a kind of awakening as a 7-year-old during a summer visit in Wyoming with a great-aunt. The aunt, a practicing Buddhist, introduced Maldonado to a daily meditation and affirmation routine that she intuitively embraced and continued to practice after she returned home to Falmouth, Massachusetts. The experience seeded and helped shape Maldonado’s later conviction that inner work determines outward behavior and action, on the job and in every other realm. In some ways, the realms are all the same. “Self, family, community — this is what we bring into work with us,” says Maldonado, who works with many sectors, including tech, government, and law enforcement. “It all comes in and affects how we create protocol, policy, hiring policies, determines who gets visibility. Resting on all of that are biases that have grown within us over time.”
While Maldonado views people similarly no matter what field they work in (“It’s all humans in the same spaces”), she says law enforcement poses specific challenges. Her clientele has included the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. With these groups, Maldonado says, she seeks rather than avoids the “tender points” — things about work and people’s feelings about work, and about themselves — the topics most difficult to discuss. “I always have to figure out: How do you maintain humanity on the other side of the equation?” she asks. “The first time I asked that question, there were crickets in the room. Silence. That’s because law enforcement is hierarchical, militaristic. It’s about following orders. But at the same time, there is a desire to uphold humanity. They’re exposed to trauma every day, which manifests in incidents of brutality.” Though she is compassionate, Maldonado is not naive. “Of course there’s racism,” she says. “But there are cops who are just as sickened by the bad incidents, and they feel powerless to make accountability happen.”
The drive to make a difference was instilled in Maldonado during her years at Barnard. Dissatisfied with the selection of majors, she created her own, a hybrid of Spanish language and Latin American studies. Her thesis proposal was a bombshell: the Catholic influence on the oppression of Mayan people and the corporate exploitation of labor in Latin America. And she proposed to write it in Spanish. “Nobody wanted to be my advisor,” she recalls, laughing. “Too controversial. But that was the beginning for me — I saw organizations showing up badly in the world. That was something I wanted to tackle.” (The thesis earned an A+ and honors.)
In 2012, Maldonado was working in data metrics at an online company when something else dawned on her: Successful leadership is less about what you do and more about how you do it. “That’s why I was successful — my how,” she recalls. “I was able to translate that, to show people that ‘how’ impacts revenue, achievement, everything.” That realization led her to start her own business but with a new ambition that went beyond the notion of “business.” “My purpose is very broad and very short — I want to alleviate suffering in the world,” she says.
Though she’s a big believer in doing, Maldonado believes even more in being. That’s something that task-obsessed Americans often miss. But understanding and clarifying one’s state of being is imperative. “Think of something, and then observe your physical response to it. These responses seem small, but they affect our decisions, our biases, any of the ‘isms.’ If we’re not paying attention, we’re just at the whim of these feelings,” she says. “How does empathy and compassion play a role? How do we create psychological safety? How do people feel safe making a mistake? These are the jobs of leaders [to do the work] so that others can do that work.” Maldonado’s status as one of those leaders was recently reaffirmed when she became a member of the Brain Trust of Representative Democracy, which is dedicated to increasing and instituting diversity and inclusion in Congress, where she, along with fellow practitioners and experts, offer tools and leadership that further the organization’s mission.
Ultimately, she thinks, overcoming racism and other isms is less about tactics and more about honing a vision of the world outside the mind. “We label all the things we fight against, but what I want to do is describe the outcome we desire,” says Maldonado. “Organizations” — and she could be speaking of America itself — “still have lots of people who feel like they don’t belong. We need to fix the system, and the system is us.”
DIVERSITY, EQUITY, REALITY
After the cultural reckoning following the killing of George Floyd, veteran diversity strategist Vernā Myers’ professional life substantively changed. “Now I sit in a
Michelle Maldonado ’91
PHOTO BY LIONEL MADIOU
company that’s interested in doing the work and allowing me to lead the work,” says Myers, who is vice president of inclusion strategy at Netflix and head of the Vernā Myers Company, which provides diversity, equity, and inclusion training and guidance to corporations, government agencies, and others. “I feel bolder,” she adds. Bolder, and also humbled. With the new corporate interest in justice and dismantling institutional racism came new responsibilities for Myers — and some realizations about herself.
“After the George Floyd event, I spent lots of time prepping leaders for conversation. That’s when I realized that I’d been spending all my energy on white men, not Black men,” she recalls. “Black men told me that’s how they felt, that I was not spending any time on them, and that’s kind of heartbreaking. So many people like me said the same thing: They were writing memos for people, but they were focused on the wrong people.” Myers realized that she had been engaged in “system beating” — doing what was necessary in order to succeed in a white environment, even if that white environment was asking you to advocate for Black people oppressed within its system. It’s a multifaceted irony that Myers saw as her own wake-up call in a country that appeared, at long last, to be waking up.
One of the good things about the anti-racist movement is that the traditional pressure on Black people in every line of work to assimilate is easing up amid conversations about what real equality looks like. “Now we have the concept of allyship — giving everybody a job,” says Myers. “I am seeing white people, straight people, acknowledge privilege — and they’re starting to understand how to leverage it to create the kind of world they say they want.” Most encouraging, she says, is that “they’re willing to take risks, stand up, get into it with their family, discover hatred they didn’t know existed. Now when people say, ‘What do I do?’ there’s no excuse anymore. If you are not anti-racist, you are part of the problem. Because the status quo is racism.”
That’s long been true, of course. But Myers says Americans typically default to individualism when faced with a huge abstraction like racism; it’s how we survive. But now that cover of individualism no longer works. Which isn’t to say that individuals can’t make a difference or be part of the anti-racist solution that depends on changing hearts and minds, often one at a time. Voicing objections to racist comments made at the workplace or around a dinner table with an uncle or a grandma is a form of enlightened self-interest. “Once you realize you’re doing it as much for yourself as for anybody else, you’re good,” says Myers. “It’s not, ‘Oh I’m doing it for society.’ It’s you — you have a stake.”
Myers graduated from Barnard with a degree in political science before going to work in corporate law. Before realizing that “it wasn’t for me,” she worked at a firm where all the partners were Black, something she assumed represented great progress. It did, and it didn’t. “I wasn’t trying to prove my competence,” she says. “But it was a gender thing. You’re working for a bunch of men, and they don’t necessarily understand.” With a new baby at home, the corporate work ethic — one year she found herself doing a deal on Christmas Eve — became less and less appealing. She took time off, eventually accepting a position as executive director of an organization of law firms interested in furthering racial diversity. By the time Myers started her consulting firm in 1998, she knew the lay of the land, and the issues, intimately.
Myers knew from the beginning that diversity wasn’t just about improving the demographics of job sites or offices. “Diversity work is usually about hiring and recruiting, exclusively,” she says. “I knew that wasn’t enough. It was much more about the environment they were inviting people into. Even with diversity, firms figure out how to exclude. These environments are shaped by white and male supremacy.” That view was not always an easy sell before this year and in some
Vernā Myers ’82
PHOTO BY LAURIE BELL BISHOP, THE VERNĀ MYERS COMPANY
ways still isn’t. “The firms that hired me, I sometimes discovered, didn’t have the commitment,” she notes, with some understatement. Her Barnard education taught her plenty about commitment. Though the environment was supportive, Myers and the other relatively few Black students struggled with other things — attrition, a lack of money. But Barnard gave her the opportunity to soar, literally: Her first plane ride was across the Atlantic when she was a sophomore, the result of applying for a program in England that she discovered by faithfully “reading the boards” on campus. That exceptional school experience, among others, “gave me a huge sense of what I could do as a woman,” she says.
Myers says that one of the things we have to commit to changing is language: For too long, diversity and inclusion have been soft-focus terms that tend to shield white people from the discomfiting truths about racism. As a diversity and
inclusion specialist, Myers is on the front lines of change, moving us all away from those soft-focus terms to more confrontational — and accurate — terms like “bias,” “anti-racism,” “anti-Blackness,” and “centering.” Changing language, she says, changes the way we think about inequality.
Of course, thinking about inequality and fixing it are two different things. On a recent trip back to her native Baltimore, Myers found herself asking the question: Why, after so much time, do Black people still struggle? “It’s because leaders still decide against marginalized groups, over and over,” she muses. “That’s intentional.
It’s designed to keep the people in power in power. Rather than put resources where they’re needed, they say, ‘Let’s put all the development money in the harbor project where white people are; the benefits will trickle down to everyone.’ It never does. How about centering the people at the bottom?”
Myers’ question is both hopeful and unnerving: Do we have any courage? Echoing Maldonado, she declares that we must “equip everyone with confidence, courage, and compassion. That’s necessary for inclusion. If leaders do that, then everyone will come with them.”
UNRAVELING WHITE SUPREMACY
For Enola Aird, racism and inequality persist because of one fact: We are living a big lie. White supremacy, for all its real power in shaping the American way of life and the fortunes of people of color for hundreds of years, is a lie that will lose its power only when we stop believing it. Aird says this is especially critical for Black people who have internalized the lie of Black inferiority — the complement of white supremacy that has wreaked havoc on Black people’s collective selfesteem. Dispelling the inferiority myth is the core work of the Community Healing Network, the nonprofit that Aird founded in 2006 in New Haven, Connecticut. “Why are we here in 2020? Why George Floyd, Breonna Taylor? Because we have cast Black people out of the circle of humanity,” says Aird. “Our work is about reclaiming our place in the circle. This is much more than about racial justice. It’s about being recognized as humans.”
Enola Aird ’76
PHOTO BY KARISSA VAN TASSEL
Aird applauds the fact that white supremacy and white privilege have become mainstream notions suitable for public discussion. The next and more crucial step, she says, is understanding the reasons why these paradigms continue to dominate our imaginations and our reality. “We really haven’t dealt with the lie and how to get it out of our lives and institutions,” she says. “Acknowledging the reality of white supremacy now is fine, but we’ve got to go deep. We’ve got to grab that thread and pull it out, more and more and more,” until it unravels completely. The lie pervades not just the U.S. but any country with a history of colonialism or slavery or both. Aird is from Panama, and the story of her own birth — told and retold to her by her mother when she was growing up — made her aware early on of the dehumanization behind the lie. “When I was born, my family was very happy, because they had been trying to have a child,” she says. “In the midst of all that excitement in the hospital, the white Panamanian nurses said, ‘Look, they love their children.’ In Panama, you sit between a sense of Latin racism and American racism.”
That family story figured prominently into Aird’s earlier career as an advocate for mothers and motherhood. In the mid ’90s, she worked for a violence prevention program at the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., and later founded and directed the Motherhood Project at the Institute of American Values. The Community Healing Network (CHN), with its framework of a global Black family, is a natural outgrowth of that work. “The question of values became important to me,” says Aird, a mother of two. “It led to the Motherhood Project, which was mothers working for a human future. All my activism is rooted in my experience as a mother.”
When she was 9, Aird moved from Panama to New York. She chose Barnard mainly because the watchful aunt with whom she lived wanted her to stay close to home. It proved a good fit, and her college experience gave her the confidence to abandon her first career as a lawyer, a profession that had seemed almost inevitable for many Barnard grads. But along the way she did “learn that lawyers can do more than lawyering. They’re problem solvers,” she says. “I was at Barnard just after a big social revolution involving women like Angela Davis and other radicals. They were always in my mind. I admired people who did things about problems that they saw. If they weren’t satisfied, they attempted to change conditions they didn’t like.”
The Community Healing Network is such an attempt, though the breadth and depth — not to mention longevity — of the condition it seeks to change seem especially daunting. But Aird is optimistic. CHN seeks to heal racial trauma by following ubuntu, an African set of beliefs that sees the self and the community as united in a web of reciprocity — or, as Aird puts it, “a person is a person through other persons.” It is in stark contrast to Western individualism, embodied in philosophical statements like “I think, therefore I am.” No country on earth is more wedded to individualism than the United States, a fact that’s made racism here that much harder to fight, and more corrosive. “Black people have to get healthy together,” Aird says. “As we come out of this culture that has so devalued our lives, we are the key to each other. We have to be in community together to fully blossom, to come back to ourselves.”
Contrary to the view of some that the Black fight for equality is eternal, Aird believes there is — there must be — an end to 600 years of struggle. To that point, CHN has declared that the 2020s will be the decade in which Black humanity will flourish and white supremacy will recede or disappear. Impossible? Not to Aird. “Ending the lie can happen,” she says. “We’ve just got to keep grabbing that thread and pulling and pulling until the fabric doesn’t exist anymore. Then we have to create a new one.” B
TUNED IN
The first thing Theo Balcomb ’09 thinks about when she wakes up in the morning — aside from her chubby-cheeked infant, Nola — is The Daily, the weekday news podcast from The New York Times. As executive producer, Balcomb directly affects how 4 million people start their day.
“My favorite part of my job is that I get to take things that are really complicated — difficult to understand, overwhelming at times — and make them clear to people,” she says, cradling Nola while on a FaceTime call from her family’s dairy farm in Maine. “We tell stories that are grounded in people’s individual experiences. And we don’t gloss over stuff. We don’t gloss over the gray areas; we live in those areas. And I think that helps people understand where we’re coming from.”
Balcomb ended up at The Daily after a circuitous path, with pit stops in broadcast and nonprofit communications. After landing at NPR, she progressed from intern to supervising producer in charge of All Things Considered, mentored along the way by legendary journalist Susan Stamberg ’59. Then the Times came calling.
“I came in, and [host] Michael [Barbaro] and I just started piloting things,” she told The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter, this past May. “After a month of trying stuff out, we launched. That’s what we’ve been doing ever since.”
Balcomb is far from the only alumna who found her calling building one-onone relationships through storytelling; the school has a long tradition of nurturing narrative artists across genres, from writing (both fiction and nonfiction) to dance. But podcasting is a medium uniquely suited for this moment.
For years, podcast downloads have been largely attributed to commuters. The coronavirus put a stop to that, along with many other mundane aspects of daily life previously taken for granted. But after a slight dip in early March, podcast consumption skyrocketed. Podcasts are a way to travel while stuck close to home, to experience intimate human connection through voice and story from a safe social
Theo Balcomb ’09
distance, to build empathy and understanding in a time of bitter partisan divides. With voices right in their earbuds, listeners can’t help but relate to the travails of others, a connection that’s avoidable when confronted with an imposing wall of text.
“When you hear somebody telling their story, that can be much more impactful than just reading a few quotes,” says Balcomb. “We hear a lot from young people who say, ‘I didn’t really pay attention to what was going on, and now I do, and I’m acting differently.’ I think there’s kind of an awakening that can happen. Which makes sense — if you’ve been hearing the same kind of news and not really getting it and then you hear someone talking to you … that can change your behavior.”
According to Rebecca Lee Douglas ’10, podcasting’s uniquely connective qualities make it a perfect fit for the sort of intellectual curiosity and openness fostered within the Barnard gates.
“It’s an intellectual field, but it’s also very creative,” says Douglas, a senior producer at the Freakonomics podcast, where she works with executive producer Alison Craiglow ’88. “I feel like it’s journalism, but there’s also artistic room, and there’s that intimacy there, too, that allows you to really connect with your audience that’s hard to get in any other medium, which seems very Barnard to me. … It makes sense to me that a lot of people would gravitate toward that medium.”
Douglas also took a winding route toward audio before falling in love with the medium, a journey that, like Balcomb’s, predisposed her to see the value in forging connections to others.
“I thought I was going to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature,” she says. After Barnard, “I went to England for a year, to Oxford, to study the metaphysical poets. … It sort of gave me a sense of what I might be doing as a Ph.D. student, and I was like, ‘This is not for me. If I just have to be alone with my thoughts researching all the time, I’m going to be clinically depressed for the rest of my life.’ One of
Rebecca Lee Douglas ’10
the things that was really helpful for me was I would go on really long walks in England, and I would listen to Radiolab and This American Life. … Those stories were really comforting for me.”
The warmth and companionship Douglas found in public radio inspired her to pursue journalism. She got her master’s at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, then took a job in Barnard’s communications department. On the side, she created a well-reviewed mental health podcast, Group — co-hosted by therapist Catherine Drury ’09 — but still longed to work in radio full-time. Inspired by the Barnard students around her, she took the chance.
“It felt very scary to take the dive and go pursue what I wanted to do, but I saw all these 22-year-old women doing it and killing it, and I’m just, like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to go for it.’”
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
Podcasting has been a viable career only since the early aughts; the genre was first integrated into iTunes in 2005 and became a formidable media presence with the viral success of the series Serial in 2014. Podcasting has since been through the media boom-and-bust cycle. By 2018, mainstream outlets like BuzzFeed and Slate had built podcast teams only to dismantle them.
The Times’ own 2017 foray into podcasts — The Daily launched 12 days into the Trump presidency — started with far less fanfare; when Balcomb joined the company, she was part of a four-person team. But The Daily has grown into an audio empire by adapting the company’s reporting and prose into a format palatable to broader audiences, an initiative largely driven by Balcomb’s passion for inviting everyone to the table. The paper’s “Modern Love” column, which was converted
Maggie Penman ’12
into an ongoing podcast that premiered in 2016, was another breakout success driven by multiple Barnard alumnae.
That team included Jessica Alpert ’03, who then worked for WBUR, one of Boston’s public radio stations, and now runs her own Boston-based podcast production company, Rococo Punch.
“COVID has been terrible for so many industries, but it has been an incredible boon for audio,” she says.
She, too, took the scenic route to a podcasting career. She worked at the Justice Department and then did a Fulbright year collecting oral histories of Jews in El Salvador. She returned to start a Ph.D. in history, working with the histories she’d collected the year before, but discovered that she couldn’t stomach the thought of thinking about the same thing for years on end.
“I kept pushing myself toward things that were more traditional, a path that was straight,” she says. “And it was pretty clear to me that there was no way in hell my path was going to be linear in any way. And after a while, I just embraced it instead of fighting it.”
So she decided to pivot to radio, taking a semester-long production boot camp and then getting an internship, at 27, at WBUR.
“It was very humbling. It was me next to a ton of college kids,” she recalls. “I learned a lot — I just kept my head down and tried to learn as quickly as possible.” She ended up on staff, left briefly to work at a startup, and then returned to help produce Modern Love and other projects, before starting her own podcasting company to produce in-depth storytelling.
“All of these twists and turns gave me so much more perspective as a storyteller. I just think that nothing is wasted,” she says.
Jessica Alpert ’03
THIS IS WHAT WE WILL NO LONGER TOLERATE · DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
PICKING UP THE THREADS
A nonprofit turns to a time-honored art form to help heal and empower women across the world
by Mary Cunningham
In 2010, Rachel Cohen ’77, a clinical psychologist, was living abroad in Geneva, Switzerland, when she received an email that would set her on a new path. A friend, Cohen learned, would be curating an exhibition on the work of the late artist Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, who had expressed her experiences of the Holocaust through embroidered fabrics. Struck by Krinitz’s powerful images, Cohen, who was taking a course with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma at the time, mentioned them during an online discussion with her classmates. She was swiftly inundated with similar examples from around the world, including a photo of a Hmong woman holding a textile depicting her family’s flight from Laos to Australia during the Vietnam War.
“It seemed to me,” Cohen says, “that [these cloths] might be an amazing tool for trauma therapy to use in order to access the stories that people have a great deal of trouble disclosing at all — or accessing for themselves.”
For centuries, women have embroidered textiles — or “story cloths” — to document everyday life and the more tumultuous narratives of war, migration, and violence. The Hmong, for instance, have a folk tradition called paj ntaub, meaning “flowery cloth,” an art form that was later adapted to record their exodus from Laos in the mid-1970s. In Chile, during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (19731990), women sewed patchwork arpilleras to silently record the atrocities taking place inside the country.
Cohen started to investigate ways to integrate story cloths into different approaches to trauma therapy. The standard school of thought tends to be verbally oriented. Cohen observed, however, that these therapies leave out where trauma lives: in visual images and in physical sensations. A story cloth could provide a channel for women to log their memories and emotions in a way that defies words. What’s more, the rhythmic effect of stitching could help the women maintain a sense of calm in a different way than the standard art therapies.
In 2012, Cohen founded the Common Threads Project (CTP), a nonprofit that fosters trauma healing for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence through the creation of story cloths. Since its inception, approximately 300 women have participated in the program in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, and Nepal. During the six-month program, women take part in “healing circles” in which clinicians — trained, mentored, and supervised by CTP — guide them through team building and help them develop coping skills to manage severe distress. Alongside other women, participants engage in art therapy exercises, undergo body work such as somatic therapy, and learn basic sewing techniques (often with the help of local craftspeople) to embroider the fabrics.
While the circle conversations are an integral part of the program, much of the work is nonverbal as women unpack their suffering and loss through stitching. “We’re finding that survivors who can’t speak about [their trauma] can draw it and sew it,” Cohen says. “Women need each other to create a new narrative about what has happened to them to replace the self-blame and guilt with a sense of solidarity and pride.”
The resulting cloths are intricately made and often infused with vibrant colors and patterns, despite the somber narratives that they tell: scenes of fleeing refugees, rape, bloodshed, and more. Some incorporate a bit of text; others rely simply on imagery. Upon completion, women can choose to keep
their story cloths private or have them displayed at their local circle and at other local events or as part of online exhibitions, like CTP’s current one, “The Fabric of Healing.”
The goal of the therapy is enduring, transformative healing — something Cohen says CTP has been able to successfully measure through a reduction of mental health symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. These indicators, coupled with the written testimonies from the program’s participants, are evidence of this art form’s power.
In September 2019, Cohen traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to meet with a healing circle known as Kamba Moja. When she arrived, the women greeted her with a warm welcome and showed her some of their collectively made story cloths. One, titled This Is What We Will No Longer Tolerate, is a profusion of colors and patterns around a backdrop of brown mountains meant to illustrate the exploitative and often violent conditions of their work in gold mines. “We want you to take this with you,” the woman said, according to Cohen. “We need people back in America to know what’s going on back here. And we need to tell our story.” B
To explore more story cloths, visit the online exhibition “The Fabric of Healing,” which features 22 story cloths made by women in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, and Nepal. Commonthreadsproject.org/the-fabric-of-healing
Previous page: In This Is What We Will No Longer Tolerate (Democratic Republic of Congo, 2018), a group of women from a Kamba Moja (“the thread that unites us” in Swahili) circle depict the exploitation and violence they face at work at the hands of their bosses in the gold mines.
Right: Finding My Peace (Ecuador, 2013) conveys the comfort one circle facilitator finds on the banks of the river in the Amazon. “I let go of the feelings, but now I can also set limits. I can enter and exit memories, and they do not hurt me,” she says of her personal recovery process.
Far right, from top to bottom: A woman sews the border of her story cloth in Ecuador. When participants make story cloths, they start by sewing the border while discussing issues related to boundaries and containment.
A participant from one of the Kamba Moja circles in the eastern DRC shares her story cloth.
Women talk in small groups at a Sajha Dhago (“common threads” in Nepali) circle in Nepal.
FINDING MY PEACE · ECUADOR
