Big Woman on Campus

Debora Spar, the new president of Barnard, has been hired to bring a new dynamism to New York's premier women's university.

Few people use the term “bluestocking” anymore—a rather pejorative word for an intellectual woman (perhaps the concept became unavoidable)—but until recently, many used it to refer to Barnard. It’s not that the girls of Columbia’s sister school are smarter than they are elsewhere, but rather that the college has a stuffy reputation (as antiquated as the word bluestocking itself). The school seems like part of another era; it didn’t merge with Columbia in 1983 when it had the chance—Radcliffe melded with Harvard and Pembroke nuzzled next to Brown—and Barnard stayed a pillar of all-female, second-wave feminist education. Unfortunately, it started to seem then like Columbia’s shrewish sister—a second choice for those who couldn’t get into the grander school.

At 45, she is the first Barnard president to have come of age after the feminist revolution, so she has the easy confidence —not stridency—of someone who grew up feeling that all doors were open to her, even if she later realized that some were only open a crack.

Since the 80s, Barnard has had a hard time shaking off its image as a relic; a bra-burning enclave that has yet to modernize for today’s woman. The campus itself can seem dauntingly serious-minded with its wrought iron Victorian gates, perched on Broadway and 116th street like a private entrance to the past, and its inner quadrangle, sprinkled with gas lamps and Ionic columns.

Enter through those gates: Debora Spar.

The new president, Spar is young (45), headstrong, and prepared to turn Barnard’s reputation from that of a schlumpy all-girls academy into one of excellence and forward thinking. As cliché as it sounds to say she is shaking things up, there is no better way to describe what she intends to do on campus.

Previous presidents have not been so successful: 1983 was a crisis moment for Barnard, and the board made a bold decision. It chose a young lawyer and alumna, Ellen Futter, to be president—she was barely 30 and didn’t have a Ph.D. In a decade at the helm, Futter (who later became president of the American Museum of Natural History, despite no science background) steadied the ship...somewhat. She launched a huge fundraising campaign and built a new dorm to make the campus fully residential. She made it clear that, concerns or not, Barnard was not going away.

Still, the school did not attract the world’s attention despite the efforts of Futter’s successor, anthropologist Judith Shapiro, who was supposedly well-liked by the faculty, but who made few waves beyond Barnard’s walls.

Spar comes from the co-ed world, a seemingly plain credential but one that will give her an enormous advantage at Barnard. She was a professor and associate dean at Harvard Business School, and knows how to compete in one of the toughest academic environments around. Writer Anna Quindlen and the Barnard board were smart to reach beyond the universe of single-sex schools and into a heavily male institution for their next pick. Spar thrived at Harvard, and knows how to place Barnard not alongside its women-only counterparts, but also up against the co-ed giants that now dwarf it.

Speaking with the Daily Beast, Spar acknowledge that brightening up Barnard’s image is her first task, a problem right out of Marketing 101.