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Barnard College
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Barnard College is a women's liberal arts college founded in 1889. Barnard is affiliated with Columbia University, but Barnard maintains an independent campus in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City, and separate faculty, administration, trustees, operating budget, and endowment. All Barnard College graduates are conferred degrees signed by the College's own trustees, as well as those of Columbia University.
The four acre (16,000 m²) campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets.
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Encyclopedia
Barnard College is a women's liberal arts college founded in 1889. Barnard is affiliated with Columbia University, but Barnard maintains an independent campus in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City, and separate faculty, administration, trustees, operating budget, and endowment. All Barnard College graduates are conferred degrees signed by the College's own trustees, as well as those of Columbia University.
The four acre (16,000 m²) campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets. It is adjacent to Columbia's campus and near many other academic institutions, and has been used by Barnard since 1898.
Barnard is a member of the Seven Sisters.
General information
Barnard College is a Seven Sisters college that maintains an affiliation with Columbia University, though it is an independent institution. Barnard's original 1889 home was a rented brownstone at 343 Madison Avenue, where a faculty of six offered instruction to 14 students in the School of Arts, as well as to 22 "specials", who lacked the entrance requirements in Greek and so enrolled in science. In 1900, Barnard formalized an affiliation with Columbia University, but it continued to be independently governed, while making available to its students the instruction and the facilities. Barnard currently pays an annual fee to Columbia to maintain the affiliation.
The college gets its name from Frederick A. P. Barnard (1809–89), an American educator and mathematician, who served as then-Columbia College's president from 1864 to 1889. Frederick Barnard advocated equal educational privileges for men and women (preferably in a coeducational setting). The school's founding, however, is largely due to the determined efforts of Annie Nathan Meyer, a talented student and writer who was not satisfied with what she saw as Columbia's effort to educate women.
Meyer later wrote: "I confess to a pride in having defended the affiliated college at a time when it was neither popular or understood. To me nothing in the education of women mattered so much as the creation of right standards, and this was effected by the establishment of the affiliated college."
Barnard College is one of the Seven Sisters founded to provide an education for women comparable to that of the Ivy League schools, which (with the exception of Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania) only admitted men for undergraduate study into the 1960s. Columbia College began admitting women in 1983 after a decade of failed negotiations with Barnard for a merger along the lines of the one between Harvard College and Radcliffe College. In 2008, Barnard had the lowest acceptance rate of the five Seven Sisters that remain single-sex in admissions . Barnard has an independent faculty and board of trustees. Most of the school's classes and activities, however, are also open to students at Columbia University, in a reciprocal arrangement to benefit the academic and social life of the College and the University.
Admissions
Admissions to Barnard College is very selective.
For the class of 2011, Barnard College admitted 28.7% of those who applied. The median ACT score was 30, while the median combined SAT score was 2100. Barnard's application includes several required essays.
For the class of 2012, the admit rate was 28.5% of the 4,273 applications received. The early decision admit rate was 47.7% out of 392 applications. The median SAT Combined was 2060, with median subscores of 660 in Math, 690 in Critical Reading, and 700 in Writing. The Median ACT score was 30. Of the women in the class of 2012, 89.4% ranked in first or second decile at their high school (of the 41.3% ranked by their schools). The average GPA of the class of 2012 was 94.3 on a 100-pt. scale and 3.88 on a 4.0 scale.
Barnard Library
About the Library
The Barnard Library is located in Lehman Hall. Its collection includes over 200,000 volumes which support the undergraduate curriculum. It also houses an archival collection of official and student publications, photographs, letters and other material that documents Barnard’s history from its founding in 1889 to the present day. Additionally, Barnard's rare books collections include the Overbury Collection, the personal library of Nobel prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral, and a small collection of other rare books. The Overbury Collection consists of 3,300 items, including special and first edition books as well as manuscript materials by and about American women authors. Alumnae Books is a collection of books donated by Barnard alumnae authors.
Barnard Library Zine Collection
Barnard collects in an effort to document the third wave feminism and riot grrrl culture. The Zine Collection complements Barnard’s women’s studies research holdings because it gives room to voices of girls and women otherwise under or not at all represented in the book stacks. According to its collection development policy, Barnard’s zines are "written by New York City and other urban women with an emphasis on zines by women of color. (In this case the word "woman" includes anyone who identifies as female and some who don't believe in binary gender.) The zines are personal and political publications on activism, anarchism, body image, third wave feminism, gender, parenting, queer community, riotgrrrl, sexual assault, and other topics."
Barnard’s collection documents movements and trends in feminist thought through the personal work of artists, writers, and activists. Currently, the Barnard Zine Collection has over 2,000 items, including zines about race, gender, sexuality, childbirth, motherhood, politics, and relationships. Barnard attempts to collect two copies of each zine, one of which circulates with the second copy archived for preservation. To facilitate circulation, Barnard zines are cataloged in CLIO (the Columbia / Barnard OPAC) and OCLC’s Worldcat.
The collection is curated by its founder, Jenna Freedman, who proposed the collection in 2003. is the library's , as well as its Zine Librarian. The stacks zines started circulating in November 2007. Barnard's is believed to be the first circulating collection of zines an academic library. The Zine Librarian, interns, and student workers blog on the collection's .
Culture and student life
Student organizations
Every Barnard student is part of the Student Government Association (SGA), which elects a representative student government. Students serve with faculty and administrators on college committees and help to shape policy in a wide variety of areas.
Student groups include theatre and vocal music groups, language clubs, literary magazines, a weekly news magazine called the Barnard Bulletin, community service groups, and others. Barnard students can also join extracurricular activities or organizations at Columbia; Columbia students are allowed in most, but not all, Barnard organizations.
Barnard's McIntosh Activities Council (commonly known as McAC), named after the first President of Barnard, Millicent Mcintosh, organizes various community focused events on campus, such as Big Sub and Midnight Breakfast. McAC is made up of 5 sub-committees which are the Multi-Cultural committee, Time-Out committee, Network committee, Community committee, and the Action committee. Each committee has a different focus, such as hosting and publicizing multi-cultural events (Multi-Cultural), having regular study breaks and relaxation events (Time-Out), giving students opportunities to be involved with Alumnae and various professionals (Network), planning events that bring the entire student body together (Community), and planning community service events that give back to the surrounding community (Action).
Two National Panhellenic Conference organizations were founded at Barnard College. The first, Alpha Omicron Pi Fraternity, was founded by Stella George Stern Perry, Elizabeth Heywood Wyman, Helen St. Clair Mullan and Jessie Wallace Hughan on January 2, 1897. The second, Alpha Epsilon Phi, was founded by seven Jewish women, Helen Phillips, Ida Beck, Rose Gerstein, Augustina "Tina" Hess, Lee Reiss, Rose Salmowitz and Stella Strauss on October 24, 1909. Though no longer on campus, these two organizations continued to grow and expand nationally over the next century. Currently, Barnard students participate in four NPC sororities that are active and recruit on the Barnard and Columbia campuses. They are Alpha Chi Omega, Delta Gamma, Kappa Alpha Theta, and Sigma Delta Tau.
Traditions
- Midnight Breakfast marks the beginning of finals week. As a highly popular event and long-standing college tradition, Midnight Breakfast is hosted by the student-run activities council, McAC (McIntosh Activities Council). In addition to providing standard breakfast foods for hungry students, each year's theme is also incorporated into the menu. Past themes have included "I YUMM the 90s," "Grease," and "Take me out to the ballgame." The event is a school-wide affair as college deans, trustees and event the President herself, Debora Spar, serve food to about a thousand students. It takes place the night before finals begin every semester.
- On Spirit Day, there is a large barbecue, the deans serve ice cream to students, different activities are hosted, and the whole student body celebrates. The school sells the popular "I Love BC" T-shirts, and gives out free Barnard goodies. The event is co-organized by the student-run activities council, McAC (McIntosh Activities Council) and the Student Government Association (SGA).
- At the Fall Festival, cider and caramel apples are served.
- During the fall semester, students help to construct--and then quickly devour--a mile-long sandwich known as THE BIG SUB. Every year another foot is added onto the sub as it stretches across campus. The event is organized by the student-run activities council, McAC (McIntosh Activities Council).
- In the spring of each year, Barnard holds the Greek Games, which brings together each class for friendly competition. The event is organized by the student-run activities council, McAC (McIntosh Activities Council).
Athletics
Barnard athletes compete in the NCAA Division I and the Ivy League through the Columbia/Barnard Athletic Consortium. There are 15 intercollegiate teams, and students also compete at the intramural and club levels.
Scandals and controversies
In the spring of 1960 Columbia University President Grayson Kirk complained to the President of Barnard that Barnard students were wearing inappropriate clothing. The garments in question were pants and Bermuda shorts. The administration forced the Student Council to institute a dress code. Students would be allowed to wear shorts and pants only at Barnard and only if the shorts were no more than two inches above the knee and the pants were not tight. Barnard women crossing the street to enter the Columbia campus wearing shorts or pants were required to cover themselves with a long coat similar to a jilbab.
In March 1968, The New York Times ran an article on students who cohabited, identifying one of the persons they interviewed as a student at Barnard College from New Hampshire named "Susan". Barnard officials searched their records for women from New Hampshire and were able to determine that "Susan" was really 20-year- old Linda LeClair, who was living with 20-year-old Peter Behr, a student at Columbia University. She was called before Barnard's student-faculty administration judicial committee, where she faced the possibility of expulsion. The student protest took the form of 300 other Barnard women signing a petition admitting that they too had broken the regulations. In the end, the judicial committee compromised: LeClair would be allowed to remain in school, but would be denied use of the college cafeteria and barred from all social activities. LeClair briefly became a focus of intense national attention.
A minor national controversy grew around the issue of granting tenure to Nadia Abu El Haj, an anthropology professor. Critics allege that her book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, denies the existence of the ancient Israelite kingdoms. Fund-raising was hurt as donors withdrew support when El Haj was granted tenure.
Notable Barnard alumnae and faculty
Actresses
Writers
Musicians
Choreographers
Politics
Nine Ways of Knowing
There is a program of required courses for graduation termed the Nine Ways of Knowing, a program of distribution requirements. Requirements include one course in each of the following disciplines: social analysis, cultures in comparison, historical studies, reason and value, quantitative and deductive reasoning, visual and performing arts, and literature. The program is very flexible, as students choose from a long list of courses in each area. Each student is also required to take two courses in one laboratory science, and study a foreign language through the fourth semester.
See also
Footnotes
External links
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