Barnard Magazine Summer 2019

SUMMER 2019

Flipping the Script Time’s Up co-founder and entertainment attorney Nina Shaw ’76 is committed to justice

Beyond Your Path. Your Purpose.

SUMMER IS A GREAT TIME FOR ALUMNAE TO CONNECT WITH BEYOND BARNARD! Dreaming of new career opportunities?

Beyond Barnard is at work all summer.

Beyond Barnard is here for all alumnae, year-round.

Whether you just graduated or have been an alumna for decades, we are here to support you as you define, pursue, or refocus your career path.

barnard.edu/beyond-barnard/alumnae beyondbarnard@barnard.edu | 212.854.2033

ADVISING • WEBINARS • GROUPS • JOB POSTINGS

COVER STORY

5 Through the Gates

Highlight Reel About a Woman Who… NEWS New Leaders on Campus STUDENTS Shelf Life EXTRACURRICULAR Shoulders to the Wheel EXTRACURRICULAR Clothing of Change EVENTS

24 Agent of Change

by Erin Aubry Kaplan Barnard helped Hollywood notable and Time’s Up co-founder Nina Shaw burnish her dedication to empowerment Cover image by Melissa Lyttle; illustrations

by Ash Willerton/Goodillustration.com

NEWS

11 Syllabus

At the CORE of Economics Reaching for the Stars FACULTY PROFILE Beyond Any Shadows of Doubt FACULTY PROFILE Memorized by Heart CURRICULUM CURRICULUM

FEATURES 28 Understanding the Present

through the Past

by Alina Tugend Hoping to make sense of heartbreaking current events, more students are turning to the History Department’s innovative, real-world classrooms

16 Salon

Bridging the Gaps The Ripple Effect ALUMNAE PROFILE Moving in Tandem BOOKS A Literary Springboard ALUMNAE PROFILE ALUMNAE PROFILE

37 Sources 32 Lions & Titles & Bears

by Deb Schwartz Barnard has a long history of studentathletes who bring their “A” games while learning to compete for the next stage

Paying College Forward 38 Alumnae Association

Life of an Alumna PRESIDENT’S REPORT Inspired to Action 41 Barnard Memory

DEPARTMENTS

by Juliane Heyman ’46

2 Letters

41 Class Notes

3 President’s Page

Janet E. Lieberman ’43 Hella Winston ’90, Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert ’08

4 Editor’s Letter

IN MEMORIAM

OBITUARY

ALUMNAE PROFILES

74 Last Word

by Tracy L. Brobyn ’90 76 Last Image

by Sara Eichler ’93

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 1

LETTERS

I loved your Fall 2018 article “Called to Serve” about Barnard women who have served in public office. Like these women, I, too, enjoyed my service in the New Hampshire Legislature, particularly when I was assistant minority leader and really felt I could have an impact on the lives of women. We managed to pass legislation to open adoption records and to get scholarships for displaced homemakers.

We tried to get prorated benefits for part-time workers, and we’re still trying.

I’d be happy to encourage any Barnard students or alumnae who are considering a run. Please feel free to contact me at rnemzoff@brandeis.edu. Just do it!

—Ruth Nemzoff ’62

Barnard Women in Politics I was excited to see your Winter 2019 article “The Year of the Barnard Woman in Politics” but was disappointed when I realized that one particular elected official was not included. Although I am certain Barnard can boast that many of its graduates have run successful political campaigns, there is one I am especially proud of — my daughter Katherine Kazarian ’12. Upon graduation from Barnard, at age 21, after being totally wowed and inspired by President Barack Obama’s Commencement speech, she returned home and declared her candidacy for Rhode Island State Representative.

In 2012, after winning a four-way primary, and thereafter the general election, she became one of the youngest women to serve in the Rhode Island House of Representatives. She successfully ran for reelection in 2014, 2016, and again in 2018. This January, she began her fourth term in office.

And while I am unabashedly bragging, I must add that her sister, Jacqueline Kazarian ’09, serves as her campaign manager. We are forever grateful for our Barnard education.

—Michele H. Kazarian ’77 [Editor’s note: Barnard Magazine profiled Katherine Kazarian in the Class Notes of our Fall 2016 issue.]

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Alumnae Reentering the Workforce The Winter issue’s “Mind the Gap” article offers excellent advice to women wanting to reenter the workforce. The author, Ayana Byrd ’95, also calls attention to the Beyond Barnard office, which is available to provide individual help.

This effort is not new at Barnard. In fact, back in 1968, Barnard pioneered a program to assist college-educated women — not just Barnard women — to enter or reenter the workforce. With a federal grant, Barnard created the Community Service Workshop, a 10-week, noncredit course that provided such guidance. I created the curriculum and directed the workshop for its first two years.

Prior to that, Barnard readmitted me as a junior after I had taken off nearly 12 years to marry and [then] raise four children. To my knowledge, Barnard’s action was unusual then. Today, it is common for nontraditional students to attend college and even more common for men and women to resume or change careers after a hiatus. Congratulations to Barnard for continuing to recognize this and make transitions more successful.

—Carol H. Stix ’48

Editor’s note: This issue is arriving in your mailbox later than usual because we’ve moved to a slightly different production schedule.

EDITORIAL Liz Galst ART DIRECTOR David Hopson COPY EDITOR Molly Frances WRITER Veronica Suchodolski ’19 STUDENT INTERN Asha Meagher ’21 EDITOR

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION OF BARNARD COLLEGE PRESIDENT & ALUMNAE TRUSTEE

Jyoti Menon ’01

ALUMNAE RELATIONS Karen A. Sendler

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

COMMUNICATIONS Gabrielle Simpson ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT Jennifer Goddard VICE PRESIDENT

DEVELOPMENT Lisa Yeh

VICE PRESIDENT

PRESIDENT, BARNARD COLLEGE Sian Leah Beilock Summer 2019, Vol. CVIII, No. 2 Barnard Magazine (USPS 875-280, ISSN 1071-6513) is published quarterly by the Communications Department 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

Photo of President Beilock by Dorothy Hong

PRESIDENT’S PAGE SIAN LEAH BEILOCK

Notes from the Field My daughter Sarah is something of a

fish — she was introduced to swimming when she was just 3 months old. In the years since, she has often been the youngest in her swim class, so I have lingered by the side of the pool to hold her hand between laps. Now, at age 8, she’s quite a good swimmer, with no hand-holding in sight. She ice-skates, too, and is generally kinetic, and quite competitive, in her approach to the world.

If I sound like a bit of a stage mom when it comes to sports, it’s because I believe in the power of athletic pursuit.

In school I was always interested in math and science, but I was also an avid athlete, mostly playing soccer and then later, lacrosse. I loved the athletic field and was totally dedicated. I even had a chance to play soccer in the Olympic development program at some of the highest levels. They said I had promise. Then the national team coach came to observe, and I proceeded to play the worst game of my life — the worst performance of my short soccer career.

Nonetheless, I will always consider myself an athlete — these days, mostly hot yoga and weekly runs — because the foundation that was forged on the soccer field has never left me. I have drawn on

the skills that I learned as a competitive player in everything that I’ve undertaken since, from the science lab to my work at Barnard, and I am grateful for it all.

I’ve learned that to succeed as an athlete, individually or as part of a team, you have to be a good thinker. You have to process information quickly and often in multiple directions. Intense focus is required, along with the discipline to practice and then practice some more. As athletes, we are used to long hours, rigorous training, and endless repetition. We have to be willing to keep going, even after our brains and bodies are ready to stop. And we have to be comfortable with a constant and exacting assessment of our abilities — the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.

At Barnard, we have some of the most impressive student-athletes you will find anywhere. They combine brilliance in the classroom with the skills their sports require, all without missing a beat. They understand and value how being an athlete informs their college experience. For Sofia Camacho Ferral ’22, competing as a runner has taught her to balance her energy and take care of her body so that she can perform at her best, on the track and in class. Coxswain Maya Esberg ’22 credits the rowing team with giving her a sense of security and community. And fencer Ester Schreiber ’20 describes her pride in being a role model for younger athletes.

Now more than ever, we are choosing to highlight and celebrate these amazing students so that their stories can inspire others.

After all, Barnard is the only women’s college, and one of only a few liberal arts colleges in the country, to offer NCAA Division I athletics, through the ColumbiaBarnard Athletic Consortium. We would love for more students to take advantage of this fantastic opportunity and to experience for themselves how beautifully the

Consortium fits in with academic life.

In March, to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Consortium and in honor of Women’s History Month, we convened “Beyond the Game: Women, Sports and Competition” to look at how participation in sports impacts women’s lives. Do women athletes lead differently? Does professional competition foster success outside the sports arena? These were some of the questions that soccer icon Abby Wambach tackled in May 2018 when she delivered the Barnard Commencement address. She rallied the Radio City crowd, and especially our seniors, with sharply drawn lessons for life taken directly from the soccer field: Make failure your fuel. Lead from the bench. Champion each other. Demand the ball. The speech was such a huge success that Abby just published a book based on it, Wolfpack: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game.

Not everyone can harness the kind of energy that has made Abby Wambach such a star. But we can all learn to appreciate the many dimensions of our lives. Our students can be outstanding scholars and great competitors. They can conduct important research and commit to their sport. And they can learn to balance the rigors of their academic pursuits with their efforts on the field.

Today Sarah practices swimming in Dodge Fitness Center, right alongside Barnard students. I really hope she keeps swimming. And I really hope they do, too.

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President Beilock playing soccer at age 13

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 3

EDITOR’S LETTER

New Purpose in Barnard Traditions Here’s a list of the things I picked up at

AGENT OF CHANGE PG. 24 Nina Shaw leads the Time’s Up charge

PAST TO THE PRESENT PG. 28 History helps students explore the now

LIONS & TITLES & BEARS PG. 32 Student-athletes bring their “A” game

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the used-clothing sale during the recent “Women, Clothing, and Climate” event here at Barnard: two button-down shirts suitable for a day at the office and a brand-new canvas tote bag bearing the Plimpton Hall insignia.

Total price? Six dollars.

The truth is, I love a good bargain. And I love how buying used clothes lets me off the hook for a host of environmental and social ills. After all, the apparel industry plays a significant role in climate change, environmental degradation, and unfair labor practices in many places around the world. By showing us the joys of buying used rather than new, this event modeled and explained how one can help stop that cycle and create a “circular economy.” In that economy, we go back to the oldfashioned notion that resources are valuable and use them again and again to help create a more sustainable future. It’s an economy based on fixing and repurposing what we already have rather than endangering life on earth in pursuit of things new.

So while I loved the event (you can read more about it on page 10), the cynical part of me thought, “What can one small program at Barnard do to stop the profoundly out-of-control freight train that is climate change?”

Then I remembered: Ideas and beliefs that germinate here go on to flourish once students leave campus and travel into the wider world.

Evidence of that is everywhere to be seen in this issue. Our cover alumna, lawyer Nina Shaw ’76, learned at Barnard that her voice, and the voices of people like her, deserved to be heard. She’s gone on to become one of the entertainment industry’s most prominent promoters of the creative visions of African American actors, musicians, and artists. She is also one of the

founders of Time’s Up, the legal advocacy and public policy group working to protect women from workplace sexual harassment and abuse.

Ariella Salimpour ’17, whom we profile in “Bridging the Gaps,” took what she discovered here about the role visual information can play in learning and created a phone app that helps teach medical procedures to students and professionals around the world.

The two cyclists featured in our “Moving in Tandem” profile — Shira Gordon ’08 and Qudsiya Naqui ’06 — were inspired by Barnard’s Civic Engagement Program to move outside of Barnard’s gates into New York City neighborhoods to help address problems such as homelessness and domestic violence. Now, both of them work as public-interest attorneys in Washington, D.C. And then consider the story of Juliet Macur ’92, the New York Times sports columnist profiled in our “Lions & Titles & Bears” feature about alumnae who were athletes during college. Macur was a rower here, and, as our writer Deb Schwartz notes, during practice one very cold morning, the coach kept the team on the water through a driving rainstorm. The athletes were exhausted, soaking wet, their hands numb. Yet the practice kept going, with the boat racing back and forth between the Henry Hudson Bridge and the Broadway Bridge again and again. “I remember thinking if I could do that and not die, I could probably do anything,” Macur recalls. And indeed, that thought has borne fruit. As a journalist in the field of sports writing, which is still largely a boys’ club, Macur has not only opened doors for herself and for other women writers but also used her platform to expose terrible patterns of sexual abuse and harassment at competitive sports’ highest levels.

So, let some places boast that what happens there stays there. (Las Vegas, I’m talking about you.) Here at Barnard, I’m happy to say, what takes root on campus goes out into the world and blooms.

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

THROUGH THE GATES

Photos by Jodie Chiang, Clarissa Sosin, and Justin McCallum

EVENTS

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Highlight Reel Now in its ninth year, the Athena Film Festival continues to celebrate powerful stories by and about strong women

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Sixty-seven hundred attendees feted women leaders in film at this year’s Athena Film Festival at Barnard. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York spoke at a panel following the documentary Knock Down the House, about four political newcomers running for Congress. Entertainment lawyer Nina Shaw ’76 (profiled on page 24) received the Athena Award for co-founding the activist group Time’s Up. Another Athena Award went to writer-director Marielle Heller for her depiction of a sexually confident young woman in The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Writer-director Desiree Akhavan received the Breakthrough Award for The Miseducation of Cameron Post, about a teen lesbian sent to a religious “conversion” camp. Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival, garnered the Leading Man Award for his promotion of women filmmakers.

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1 Enthusiastic volunteers; 2 AFF co-founders Kathryn Kolbert, left, and Melissa Silverstein, right, with Athena Award winners (L-R) Cameron Bailey, Nina Shaw, Marielle Heller, and Desiree Akhavan; 3 Athena Awards; 4 Virtual Reality sponsored by Google; 5 President Beilock and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; 6 actor and producer Alysia Reiner; 7 I Am Somebody’s Child: The Regina Louise Story panelists; 8 Athena Awards reception attendees; 9 activist-booth swag

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 5

THROUGH THE GATES NEWS

About a Woman Who… Choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer is this year’s Lida A. Orzeck ’68 Artist-in-Residence In 1966, Yvonne Rainer revolutionized modern dance with a solo piece titled Trio A. Unaccompanied by music, it was a four-and-a-half-minute series of movements and gestures, jumps, twists, turns of arms, feet, shoulders, hands.

Since then, she has turned her minimalist, avant-garde aesthetic not only to choreography and performance but also to filmmaking (including her 1974 masterpiece, Film About a Woman Who...), conceptual art, and back again to dance, winning in the process a MacArthur “genius” grant, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and three Rockefeller Fellowships.

Now add to this list the title of Lida A. Orzeck ’68 Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Barnard.

Rainer, still a practicing artist at age 84, will serve in that capacity for the duration of the 2019 calendar year.

“She’s an example of excellence,” says Anne Higonnet, the Ann Whitney Olin professor of art history who helped connect Rainer and Orzeck. Orzeck is a Barnard Trustee who endowed the artistin-residence fund with a substantial gift

in 2015. Rainer, Higonnet continues, demonstrates “the benefits of extremely hard work over decades and of courageously acting according to your convictions even when they’re very unfashionable.”

These days, Higonnet points out, “we look at how Yvonne reimagined dance and how women’s bodies could assert themselves in the public sphere, and we say, ‘Of course!’ But we can say ‘Of course!’ because Yvonne led the way more than 50 years ago.”

Rainer spoke on campus recently at screenings of her films and led an intensive workshop called “Texts/Objects/Movement: Metaphors for Performance,” during which students explored the creative process through exercises based on her work. “I hope that my workshop has exposed them to a wider range of possibilities in this category called ‘dance,’ ” Rainer says of the program. In the fall, she will set one of her dances for Barnard students to perform and will participate in various classes, including a seminar about experimental performance that focuses on Rainer’s creative output and its enduring legacy.

Higonnet says Rainer has “had a galvanizing effect” on faculty and students alike. The faculty, she says, is “acutely aware of how important the long-term quality of her achievements are.” And the reaction of students has been one of “reverence. It’s a little like encountering a very beautiful, powerfully durable tree. It’s beyond the scale of their lives. She’s expanding their time frame, just by being her.

“One of the signature traits of her work was always that it was so affirmative about women’s physical presence in the world,” Higonnet says. “That made her seem like a natural for Barnard.”

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New Leaders on Campus Barnard welcomes a trio of important new leaders.

Leslie Grinage will join Barnard as Dean of the College this August, overseeing the Office of the Dean of Studies, the Registrar, Beyond Barnard, Student Life, Residential Life and Housing, Health and Wellness, and Title IX and Equity.

Grinage was the Associate Dean of Students at her alma mater, North Carolina’s Davidson College. A first-generation college student, she holds a doctorate in higher education leadership and policy.

Ariana González Stokas will become Barnard’s inaugural Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in July, leading strategic initiatives that cultivate a more inclusive and equitable learning environment. González Stokas, also a first-generation college student, has a B.A. in philosophy and studio art from Bard College and a doctoral degree in philosophy and education from Columbia’s Teachers College.

She comes to Barnard from Bard College, where she is the Dean of Inclusive Excellence.

Umbreen Bhatti ’00 began in April as the Constance Hess Williams ’66 Director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies, which cultivates the next generation of women leaders. Bhatti graduated cum laude from Barnard with a degree in political science; she earned her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School. Most recently, she served as director of the innovation lab at the Bay Area’s public broadcasting station, KQED.

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Illustration by Jerome Corgier

by Asha Meagher ’21

THROUGH THE GATES STUDENTS

Shelf Life Students create and support a textbook library that helps low-income peers access required materials Motivated by staggering statistics and camaraderie, students established the Barnard FLIP Library, which lends textbooks to first-generation, low-income (FGLI) students who might otherwise be unable to afford them. Students know firsthand the accuracy of reports that show textbook costs rising 88% from 2006 to 2016 (four times the rate of inflation) and how the average student spends $1,250 per year on books and materials, with two-thirds of those surveyed having skipped buying or renting some required course materials because they couldn’t bear the cost.

The product of campus collaborations and student initiatives, the FLIP (First-Generation Low-Income Partnership) Library housed on the fourth floor of the Milstein Center is run by students in cooperation with the Barnard library. To date, 414 students have signed up for the program.

The idea originated in the Inclusion and Equity Committee of the Student Government Association (SGA); its proponents had taken note of a similar program in Columbia’s Butler Library.

Barnard Library staff embraced it, including Vani Natarajan, a research and instruction librarian involved in the process.

Before the FLIP Library came into being, “every semester, the first questions we’d get related to strategies and tools for accessing textbooks,” she explains. Staff often felt dismayed by how limited options were, with scant course reserves available for a short, two-hour checkout.

“The FLIP collection has expanded options for students,” she says, “and it’s great to see this is starting to make a difference.”

Identifying as a first-generation or low-income student often carries a stigma.

To protect users, student organizers examined floor plans before the Milstein Center opened for where best to situate the collection, which now includes more than 600 books. They decided that it should be in regular circulation to make the checkout procedure as easy and unobtrusive as possible. They also chose the location where the books are now shelved. The spot “makes you feel like you have more privacy — not everyone is looking at you,” says Kaoutar Afif ’21, the FLIP Library’s student manager.

FLIP enjoys widespread support on campus. The Barnard library provides significant financial support, underwriting the student staff position and purchasing of books. Barnard EcoReps, a student group that leads environmental initiatives on campus, ran a book drive at the end of the fall semester to provide hundreds of textbooks. And the Class of 2019 donated more than $5,000 through its Senior Fund.

While the library is off to a strong start, there is still a way to go before the needs of every low-income student can be met.

Many can’t afford required textbooks’ expensive, online components that are accessed through codes publishers won’t release to libraries. Associate Dean for Student Success Jemima Gideon has been working to obtain these codes, but additional funds are still needed. Also in demand are STEM textbooks.

Barnard offers need-blind admissions and has a long-standing tradition of encouraging equity in education and student mobilization; the FLIP Library is a prime example of both those traditions in action. “It’s exciting to see students so involved,” Afif says, “to know that we have a voice, and to see our struggles at Barnard be taken seriously.”

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Asha Meagher ’21 is an intern at Barnard Magazine.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 7

THROUGH THE GATES EXTRACURRICULAR

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by Liz Galst

Photos by Lucy Schaeffer

Shoulders to the Wheel At the Barnard Clay Collective, a malleable material offers students a solid chance to connect and unwind Located in the basement of Plimpton Hall, the Barnard Clay Collective is many things: a 24/7 ceramics studio, an instructional program for beginning and intermediate potters, an intergenerational community, a nonacademic learning opportunity, a place to de-stress, and more.

Begun in the late 1960s, it provides instruction and studio access each semester to about 50 students (and some alums); the waiting list for entry is at least as long.

Jane Schachat ’73 (pictured, center), a one-time professional potter, teaches the two beginning and two intermediate ceramics classes that the Collective offers each week. She’s offered classes at the studio, almost without interruption, since 1971. “It’s enormously rewarding — total joy and satisfaction,” she says of her work teaching the next generation of Barnard ceramicists.

And while students learn the clay basics — hand-building, mixing glazes, throwing on a wheel — the Collective and the practice of ceramics itself impart other important lessons, starting with community: Many of the students become close friends with one another and with Schachat.

Then there’s the learning that can come from allowing oneself to be really, really bad at something for a while. (Ceramics, like many things, is not nearly as easy as it appears on YouTube.) This is especially true for the high achievers that Barnard attracts: “Nothing that I make looks good. It’s humbling,” says beginner Carly Frederickson ’21. “But it’s cool to be learning something like this because I feel like all I do is study.”

Indeed, the studio’s function as a stress reliever is not to be underestimated.

Says Sonia Cisneros ’19, who served as one of the Clay Collective’s five student coordinators, “This is a space where you use your hands and your mind in a really different way than you do at school. When I get here, I never want to leave.”

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 9

THROUGH THE GATES

by Liz Galst

Photos by Jonathan King

Sustainability and Climate Action Sandra Goldmark thanked attendees for participating in the March 27 event, which was designed to help “rethink the value of what we have.”

Indeed, the program highlighted the potential of what’s increasingly being called “the circular economy.” It’s one that creates economic opportunities by reusing and repurposing existing things such as clothing, rather than dumping both resources and poisons — energy, water, pesticides, and toxic dyes — into new items that will likely soon find their way to a landfill. (Worldwide, 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions are linked to the apparel industry; nearly 60% of clothing winds up in landfills or incinerators within a year of manufacture.)

To show just how the circular economy might work, the event was a celebration of reuse. The Diana Center played host to a used-clothing sale, complete with mending and tailoring lessons.

It attracted several hundred bargain hunters and environmentalists, as well as bargain hunters who might become environmentalists, like Jin Oh ’22. “I knew the environment was part of it,” Oh says, “but I wasn’t that concerned. Now I think I should be.”

At the Milstein Center’s Design Center, three teams participated in a design challenge, using old clothing, textiles, and even plastic packaging to make new couture. Explained Calixto Galan ’12SPS, a designer who oversaw the competition, “We want to show people we can create new things out of things we thought were at the end of their life.”

The event closed with a panel discussion about the dangers the apparel industry currently poses and about new opportunities to turn it around. Panelist Deborah Drew of the World Resources Institute told attendees, “Whatever you consume, make sure it says what you want it to say about you.”

EXTRACURRICULAR

Clothing of Change Barnard’s “Women, Clothing, and Climate” event demonstrates how used threads might jumpstart your wardrobe — and a sustainable economy At a daylong, interactive event, “Women, Clothing, and Climate,” the Barnard community explored how the apparel industry impacts our environment and the people who produce the clothes we wear — often low-income women in developing countries. Barnard’s Director of Campus 10

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Photo of Homa Zarghamee by Jonathan King

by N. Jamiyla Chisholm

SYLLABUS CURRICULUM

Reaching for the Stars Physics and Astronomy Dept. Chair Laura Kay’s textbook covers the cosmos

At the CORE of Economics Barnard professors collaborate with experts worldwide to create digital textbooks accessible to all When the financial crisis hit in 2008, leaving individual lives and entire economies devastated, one of the things it laid bare was that economics as it has been traditionally taught in colleges and universities around the world couldn’t adequately explain why the crisis happened. “In fact,” says Barnard economics professor Rajiv Sethi (who is profiled on the next page), “old models for teaching economics didn’t pay much attention to the financial sector at all.”

“To the surprise of many noneconomists and prospective economics students,” explains Assistant Professor Homa Zarghamee, “undergraduate economics education in the U.S. contains almost no mention of the pivotal economic turns

that shape the modern world, like the rise of agriculture 10,000 years ago or the Industrial Revolution 300 years ago, no mention of where the current globalized capitalist economic structure sits in the history of economic structures, and no mention of the history of economic thought.” Perhaps even more surprising, she says, “is how little the introductory undergraduate textbooks and pedagogy have changed over the last 75 years.”

That is, until the 2017 debut of CORE (Curriculum Open-Access Resources in Economics). Barnard economics faculty, including Sethi, Zarghamee, and Assistant Professor Belinda Archibong, played a key role in creating and disseminating that curriculum, which has won rave reviews from students and academics alike.

Sethi, Zarghamee, and Archibong also launched CORE USA, an outreach hub for economics professors and graduate students interested in using CORE. And later this year, with funding from the Teagle and Hewlett Foundations, members of the Barnard-Columbia economics community — CORE USA project manager Sarah Thomas, economics adjunct professor and CORE USA consultant Rena Rosenberg ’96, and Suresh Naidu, associate professor in economics and international and public continued on page 73

If the first photos ever taken of a cosmic black hole, revealed in April, piqued your interest in things celestial, Barnard’s got a resource for you. Namely, the textbook 21st Century Astronomy, co-authored

by Professor Laura Kay, chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department.

Due out in July, this sixth-edition primer for nonmajors (and nonstudents) leads readers through topics such as “Thinking Like an Astronomer,” “Gravity and Orbits,” and, of course, “Relativity and Black Holes.”

Designed to make learning interactive, the textbook comes complete with a first-of-its-kind video game. Links to active telescopes and spacecraft missions enable users to “get the latest results and observations,” Kay says, as do connections to citizen science projects, which allow nonscientists to contribute to the analysis of new astronomical data.

“It’s a great book for people who aren’t students but who are interested in astronomy,” says Kay’s co-author Stacy Palen, of Weber State University. With 21st Century Astronomy, the only limit is the sky.

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 11

SYLLABUS

by Ayana Byrd ’95

Illustration by Anita Rundles

based on predictions about the economy.

But his most celebrated accomplishment to date is his participation in the creation of the Curriculum Open-Access Resources in Economics (CORE), a collection of highquality resources written by 23 economists from across the world. Completed in 2017, it is distributed free online and has earned praise from academics, students, and publications such as The New Yorker, which called it “engrossing.”

Barnard’s economics department recently received a $1 million grant to support CORE Academy, an initiative dedicated to the reform of economics

education and the enrichment of economics discourse. (For more about CORE, see our story on the previous page.)

For CORE’s creators, Sethi says, the idea of charging the industry textbook standard, which can be higher than $400, is outrageous. “We wanted the broadest possible access to it, so people who wanted to learn economics didn’t necessarily have to be involved in an academic program,” he says.

Anchoring this humanitarian notion was sound numerical reasoning. “Economic principle justifies this,” Sethi explains.

FACULTY PROFILE

Beyond Any Shadows of Doubt How Rajiv Sethi’s experiences as an immigrant inform his work in economics To the untrained eye, numbers and economic theories might not seem like the ideal instruments for answering questions about why humans act the ways they do.

But for Barnard professor Rajiv Sethi, these are exactly the tools he needs to both explain and predict behavior. Using them, along with a deep-seated passion born in childhood, he has built a career answering questions about everything from Brexit to police shootings. Ambitious?

Absolutely. But also work essential to Sethi, the chair of the Economics Department.

This desire to suss out what motivates humans first arose when Sethi was just 11 years old. At that age, he relocated with his family from India to the United Kingdom. Growing up as an immigrant of color in the U.K. had a profound, lifelong impact on him.

“I was suddenly a minority and sometimes not treated well,” he says.

“From that time, I have thought about stereotypes and identity — how people make inferences from physical cues and the beliefs they form from these cues.”

That interest stayed with him when he moved to New York City to attend The New School, where he received his doctorate in 1993. Today, memories of past discrimination inform his work in microeconomics and game theory, with applications to inequality, crime, communication, and finance.

He also researches and develops economic forecasting processes, assessing the likelihood of certain geopolitical events 12

“The cost of producing a book is primarily a fixed cost. Once you pay the cost, making additional copies is essentially free. So the cost of producing another copy of CORE is nothing if it is up on the website.”

CORE has been incorporated into the course materials of schools that include University College London and Sciences Po, in Paris. In addition to the digital option, print versions are for sale, but for less than the price of most economics textbooks. “It has a cost of production,” Sethi adds.

As an academic focused on issues of equality, Barnard’s mission of female empowerment is important to him. Prior to coming to Barnard in 1995, Sethi — who is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico — had little experience with all-women’s education.

“Like many Barnard faculty, I have taught courses at both Barnard and Columbia, including graduate courses. But my favorite courses are always those in which a majority of students are from Barnard,” he says. “The admissions office does an incredible job of assembling amazing cohorts of really serious and thoughtful students year after year, and the best part of my job involves interacting with these students while they are here and taking pride in their accomplishments after they leave.”

He hopes students will collaborate with him on one of his newest projects: adapting CORE for American students.

“Depending on funding, we will hire a lot of students to work in various capacities,” says Sethi, adding that students already provide a steady stream of feedback on the material, which he’s overseeing along with colleagues Homa Zarghamee, assistant professor of economics at Barnard, and Suresh Naidu, associate professor of economics and international affairs at Columbia.

The “Americanization” of CORE is just one of four projects Sethi has been working on this year. In April, his first book, Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice, was published.

The result of work with his frequent collaborator Brendan O’Flaherty, an

economics professor at Columbia, it explores how stereotypes can shape the ways incidents unfold. Chapters draw on real-life examples such as the 2016 Delta flight in which a black female physician was blocked from assisting a sick passenger because her race and gender made a flight attendant skeptical that she was a doctor. Sethi and O’Flaherty explore this and other situations using cognitive psychology, data, and strategic decision theory in order to see how justice can be better served.

“The book is informed by economics but is not an economics book,” Sethi explains. “We start with psychology because of its work with stereotypes.

Economics deals with incentives. The existence of stereotypes creates incentives — the choices that people make are affected by the stereotypes they hold, as well as the stereotypes they think that others hold about them. And this link between beliefs and behavior is where economics can make a contribution.”

Research on the book brought one surprising insight to Sethi, and it is the basis for the third of his current projects.

As he and O’Flaherty investigated the incidence of police officers’ use of deadly force across the U.S., they learned that the rates are “quite staggering” in western states, like New Mexico, compared with those in the Northeast. Unsure what would cause such differences, Sethi and O’Flaherty are focusing instead on the implications of the discrepancy.

“I’m [now] working with a statistician, José Luis Montiel Olea at Columbia, and my co-author,” says Sethi about the Geography of Lethal Force project.

“The three of us are following up as to what these differences could be about.”

They’ll examine geographic variances that reflect practices and culture of local law enforcement training, organizational culture, and availability of firearms.

“The primary mode of analysis will be statistical,” Sethi continues, but he and his colleagues have also formed an interdisciplinary working group, including experts in law, criminology, sociology, economics, and statistics, to determine the

sources of these discrepancies.

Another project, SAGE (Synergistic Anticipation of Geopolitical Events), also moves beyond pure economics, in that it’s related to computer science.

“One thing I’ve been interested in is how financial markets work, and especially how they can be used to make predictions about various outcomes, like [results] of elections. Or like if the Brexit decision will be implemented,” says Sethi.

Working with a research team led by the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering, the SAGE research team has a four-year grant to combine human judgment with machine-based models in order to accurately predict worldwide socioeconomic issues such as disease outbreak, elections, and conflicts between nations.

As Sethi’s work continues to deconstruct stereotypes, the biggest one may be that economics is an emotionless discipline.

In his research and his understanding of incentives, costs of production, and game theory, Sethi is motivated by the most human of emotions: the desire to make the world a better place.

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 13

SYLLABUS

by Ayana Byrd ’95

Photograph by Maria Baranova

FACULTY PROFILE

Memorized

by Heart Dance professor Gabri Christa explores her mother’s life and dementia through her multimedia piece Magdalena

Something was not right with Gabri Christa’s mother. It took the Barnard assistant professor of professional practice in dance some years to know what was wrong. In that time, as her mother’s personality changed and her memories started to fade, Christa asked her mother to write down how she was feeling.

Christa had her mother’s letters and, eventually, in 2014, Josephina Magdalena Aleida de Jong had a diagnosis: dementia.

“I wanted to do something with [the 14

letters],” says Christa, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning choreographer and multimedia artist, who joined Barnard’s faculty in 2016 and now also directs the Milstein Center’s Movement Lab. From this correspondence, Christa created Magdalena, a 60-minute multimedia excavation of life, aging, and illness — a personal narrative of a parent and child, which premiered in New York City in September. The one-woman show combines film, poetry, and dance to tell the

story of a mother, as well as a daughter’s reaction to her illness. It’s an attempt to piece together her mother’s past, including her childhood in the wartime Netherlands and her interracial marriage to a black man from the former Dutch colony of Curaçao, along with Christa’s own efforts to accept the future after her mother’s diagnosis.

“I really wanted to do something meaningful,” says Christa, who initially conceived of the project as a film. Then she changed her mind about the medium and

was drawn to the idea of a performance in a small space. “I had different writings, different stories,” she says.

Those stories were hard to tell. For four years, she wrote and wrote, with no end in sight. Eventually, Christa, who grew up in Curaçao speaking Dutch, met Dutch theatre director Erwin Maas.

They spoke in their native language about the potential in her stories. Being able to discuss the project in her mother tongue helped to shape the piece.

“I was talking to him about all these writings, these ideas that I had, and he said, ‘Now, that should be your piece,’ ” she recalls. What became Magdalena has received rave reviews and opened up conversations about the sometimes misunderstood topic of dementia.

A MULTIMEDIA WORLD OF DANCE The seeds for what would become Christa’s interdisciplinary approach to storytelling were first planted in 1988 in Cuba, where she moved after attending university at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. In Cuba she became a founding member of an experimental performance collective, DanzAbierta. She and the company used music, dance, and visual art to create social and political pieces about the culture and state of the country.

In 1994, Christa joined the worldrenowned Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, settled in New York, and, in 1999, launched her own company, DanzAisa. In 2002, she widened her artistic gaze and began exploring how to capture dance on camera. The result: an award-winning short film series, Another Building, which uses history and heritage sites to tell stories. The series includes Quarantine (2007), set in slavery-era Curaçao, and Kasita (2014), which takes place in slave quarters on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. She is currently completing an as-yet-untitled short film that is set in a New York synagogue and explores the history of the city’s Creole Jewish community.

For Christa, this global focus has had both personal and professional payoffs.

She sees herself as living at the crossroads of various cultures and, through her art, continually exploring race, geography, the body, and identity. “My mission in all my work is to transform the understanding of humanity through the arts. Often, I do this through personal and historic moments,” she notes, adding that she is a “firm believer in the role the arts and artists can play in advancing our global society.”

FUSING THE PERSONAL WITH ART In the decades that Christa has been creating her multidisciplinary art, using everything from movement to visual images, what has been largely absent from her work is her own story. That is, until Magdalena. “My very simple mission was to open a dialogue about dementia in an intimate way I thought was missing,” she says. “I wanted to hold space for others to just talk about it and help reduce stigma or tension and provide some insight.

Mostly it’s for people to not feel alone.”

The concentration it took to learn the many parts of this one-woman show has acted as an emotional buffer for Christa, except for a particular moment. “There’s this one part [during the performance] where I go behind the screen and read this poem. When I wrote it, I cried. When I have to read it, I almost always break down in tears,” she says about the poem, in which she wonders if her mother will remember her name the next time she visits.

This is one of the most painful experiences conveyed with words in Magdalena. Often the sadness that has accompanied her on this years-long journey is relayed to the audience through movement, because words and even visual images fail. “I would think, ‘I really don’t know how to express that moment. I can’t make a film about it,’ ” Christa says.

Because Christa believes the trauma of her mother’s childhood likely contributed to her dementia, Magdalena travels back to World War II-era Rotterdam. Her mother, the only survivor of a bombing that happened when she was 9 years old, was sent away alone to a foreign country for the remainder of the war. “She had seen so much death, and [I imagine] how incredibly

traumatizing that must have been. One of the things that happens when trauma is not treated is that later on in life it can lead to depression, which is a big cause of dementia,” she notes. From Rotterdam, the story follows Magdalena, whom Christa considers an “adventurer” and “pretty kick-ass” for the fearless way she lived.

FINDING A NEW FOCUS As Christa was writing the show, she drew conclusions about her mother’s illness based on her own observations and intuitions. Now, Christa sits alongside researchers and scientists in lectures and courses as an Atlantic Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute.

The organization, based jointly in San Francisco and Dublin, Ireland, works to reduce the impact, incidence, and stigma of dementia by training and bringing together leaders in brain health. Christa is learning that there is scientific evidence to support many of her theories, such as the association between early childhood trauma and dementia. The fellowship, she says, is “really making me understand dementia from all levels, which is both very interesting and a lot of work.”

As a direct outgrowth of her investigations, Christa has a new direction for the future: “It got me really interested in aging and health and movement.” Next year, the theme of the second Moving Body–Moving Image Festival (a biannual event she launched in 2018 at Barnard) will be aging and mothering. To explore aging, Christa is also making short movement/ dance films about older female dancers.

“The sort of transmedia person I am really likes to combine all of these things,” she says about her various projects.

No matter what form her next projects take — dance, cinema, poetry, or all of the above — Christa will continue to tackle what lies at the heart of Magdalena: the importance of conjuring up the past — her mother’s and others’ — to live more powerfully, both now and tomorrow.

•

Ayana Byrd is the author of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 15

SALON

by Stacie Stukin

ALUMNAE PROFILE

Bridging the Gaps Ariella Salimpour ’17 saw a medical need and developed an app, Thumbroll, to help medical students and professionals master everything from shots to surgery

16

Photo of Ariella Salimpour by Kendrick Brinson; (opposite page) courtesy of Thumbroll

When Farah Musharbash, a medical student at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, was asked to draw blood from a patient, he didn’t feel superconfident. He had learned how to perform the procedure, of course, but several months had passed since that instruction.

Even though a supervisor would be on hand if he had difficulty, Musharbash wanted a refresher. On his way to see the patient, he opened an app on his phone and reviewed a step-by-step, photographic breakdown of the procedure. “It went well, and I think being able to review the exact steps really helped me feel more comfortable and ultimately do a better job,” he says.

The app, Thumbroll, is the creation of Ariella Salimpour ’17, who designed the platform with her sister, Gabriella ’20, when Ariella was an undergraduate. They were surprised that medical trainees were going to YouTube to watch and help learn medical procedures. They asked, “How can you best learn a step-by-step medical procedure? Is there a faster way to learn?” Their answer: create a quick, simple, reliable platform that uses the universal language of images to help medical students, residents, physicians, nurses, and other medical trainees and professionals supplement their current resources. “If we can help medical trainees and professionals learn and master best medical practices, it’s better for everyone.

We are all patients,” Salimpour explains from her co-working office in Los Angeles.

Thumbroll provides visual checklists using stop-motion photography to illustrate medical procedures as simple as tying a surgical knot and as complex as performing open-heart surgery. The app is currently used by trainees in more than 100 medical programs throughout the United States, as well as in more than 90 countries, including India, the United Kingdom, and E.U. member states.

Salimpour launched Thumbroll in January 2017 with funds raised from friends and family while she was an Athena Scholar. As part of Barnard’s Athena Center for Leadership Studies, the Athena Scholars Program nurtures the next generation of women leaders.

Students take courses that connect major

themes regarding the intersections of women, leadership, and power; learn practical skills through leadership labs; and gain professional experience through a practicum requirement. The Athena Scholars Program has graduated more than 300 students since its founding in 2010.

Kathryn Kolbert, the Athena Center’s founding director, mentored Salimpour. “Ariella can go into a room with people of all different backgrounds and skills and be equally poised and comfortable,” Kolbert says. “She can talk to deans of medical schools, medical students, or donors, all with the same poise. That’s a remarkable quality.”

That easy confidence has enabled Salimpour to create content with medical teams at institutions such as the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Keck School of Medicine of USC, in Los Angeles, and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Salimpour also solicits feedback from users like Musharbash. “Thumbroll really covers a gap in medical education,” he observes. “It’s very practical and well suited to the working environment.” After all, he says, “I’m not going to carry my textbook with me when I’m at the hospital.”

Thumbroll, though, is “easy to use. It’s in my pocket. It’s silent. It’s authentic, and it gives me peace of mind, since I know it comes from a source I can trust.”

Salimpour grew up in Los Angeles in a family of doctors — her father, uncle, and aunt all are physicians. She came to Barnard with a love for photography and a strong interest in medicine and science.

“I also wanted to let college take its course and see what I would fall in love with,” she says. When she took social psychology courses taught by adjunct professor Patricia Stokes and Columbia professor E. Tory Higgins, she learned how the brain absorbs information and became enamored with the benefits of visuals in the learning process. “It really resonated with me because I see myself as a visual learner and grew up looking at the world through my camera lens,” she explains.

As Salimpour did more research, she focused on three main ideas that would

become the guiding principles behind Thumbroll: The brain processes visual information faster and more efficiently than it processes text; active engagement helps learners retain information; and the mind doesn’t need every detail to “see” the full picture — it can fill in the gaps, something that allows humans to learn more with less data.

“When I looked at medical resources, I discovered that even though the science of learning is clear, it is not always reflected in what is available to students,” Salimpour says. While enrolled in the Athena Scholars Program, she continued to pursue this idea that had gone from a passion project to a full-fledged business.

“Before I knew it, I had started a company and filed patent and trademark documents. Now we are working with more than 50 medical trainees and professionals, developers, media experts, and others around the world.”

Victoria Gordon, the Athena Center chief of staff, notes that Salimpour was a unique Scholar in that she had already laid the groundwork for a viable business before she entered the program. She had

identified a problem and then took steps to solve it, filling a real need. Says Gordon, “The Athena Scholar Senior Seminar guides students through the process of building an organization or initiative that will generate positive social impact.

During senior seminar, Ariella was able to refine her plan for Thumbroll, putting pen to paper on things like marketing and revenue models, laying an important foundation to help her grow and scale.”

As Salimpour continues to develop and enhance the platform, she also continues to wonder at its rapid ascendancy.

“I never saw myself as someone who would start a company,” she says. “I thought that person was extroverted, outgoing, and charming, or someone wearing a hoodie in Silicon Valley. I didn’t see myself as any of those things.”

Nevertheless, Thumbroll is changing the way medical students and professionals learn. And people around the world who use medical services — that is, almost all of us — will likely be better served for it.

•

Stacie Stukin writes for the Los Angeles Times,W Magazine, and Naturally.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 17

SALON

with reporting by N. Jamiyla Chisholm

Illustration by Melinda Beck

health education in other ways.

Now, she leads a program modeled after Barnard’s Well-Woman at the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y., a prep and boarding school for young women in grades 9-12 that was the first institution of higher education for women in the United States. At Emma Willard, her primary objective is to enable students to become knowledgeable enough about their own health to make thoughtful choices — and to model positive behavior for the benefit of their peers.

She expanded Emma Willard’s health program and opened a Well-Woman-like office called the READY Center, where students can acquire information. Juniors and seniors apply for acceptance into the program and are charged with educating and promoting health and wellness among students and faculty. One thing that is especially important to Delgado is that rather than trying to be beacons of wellness perfection, her students explore and learn together.

Delgado was inspired by her mentor, Jessica Cannon ’03, Well-Woman’s current program director of health promotion and education, who had hired her to be an office assistant.

“I knew I needed to be around WellWoman, Jessica, and the other peer-eds to continue my own education, and I wanted to be a part of helping other folks,” Delgado explains. “Jessica has been absolutely invaluable the last couple of years, helping me collect data, giving input on the proposal I had to present to Emma Willard, and with designing the office and the program. Well-Woman has very much been the big sister to the Emma Willard program, and having the Barnard program mentor ours is cool.”

school to college, what they felt prepared for, and what challenges they faced. The group also received an official campus tour (the first-ever college tour for some of the Wellies), offering a window into what their futures in college might look like.

For Cannon, being able to witness the passing of the baton from Delgado to her mentees is deeply fulfilling. Cannon couldn’t stop gushing at the instant connection that formed between the two groups of students: “Seeing our wellness education mission and values extend to another campus, and to younger students under the guidance of an alum, makes me more proud than I can say.”

The Wellies are only a year old, but they’ve already had workshops on body image, sexual violence training, selfdefense, time management, mindfulness, finding purpose, cultivating gratitude, and nutrition. The students have even produced some of their own programs, such as Mindful Monday, during which they hold weekly meditation sessions. Last summer, the group went on a retreat to the Berkshire Mountains, where they practiced yoga; performed dance sessions themed around body positivity; participated in a seminar on how to manage, rather than avoid, stress; and engaged in silent nature walks.

Some students question the need for the program, to which Delgado answers, “This work is not always about the glitz and glam and putting on big fancy events; it’s about the one-on-one conversations you have with someone on your hall that’s going to change their life or yours.”

ALUMNAE PROFILE

The Ripple Effect Barnard’s Well-Woman program continues to flourish through alumnae After entering Barnard as a premed student, Evangeline (“Vangie”) Delgado ’15 landed a much-needed job as an office assistant for Well-Woman, the College’s health promotion program. She remembers how little she knew about health advocacy for women when she first arrived on campus.

“I had never set up my own appointments,” she says. “I didn’t know what happened at the OB-GYN office. And I had not learned about alcohol, drugs, sex, or sexual violence.” During her first month, Delgado joined a conversation some of the program’s peer educators were having about a “slut walk,” an organized march against rape culture and victim blaming, that had taken place in lower Manhattan.

Another afternoon was filled with talk about the shame some students unnecessarily felt about their periods. Excited that no issue seemed off-limits, Delgado applied the following year to become a peer educator herself and held the role through graduation. “I applied because I wasn’t done learning,” she explains.

Through the program, Delgado learned how to ask questions and feel empowered about her body. “That is the thing I take away the most,” she says. She recalls the honor of representing Barnard at the Avon Foundation’s annual Tribute Reception in 2014 and accepting the Ambassador Award on behalf of Well-Woman and Columbia’s Sexual Violence Response, which provides confidential support, advocacy, prevention, and outreach programs, for helping to create safe spaces for students. During her second year, Delgado realized that premed was no longer the right track for her, but she learned she could fulfill her passion for 18

FROM MENTEE TO MENTOR Last winter, Delgado returned to Barnard to visit Well-Woman and Cannon with 17 Emma Willard students — wellness advocates known as “Wellies”— to discover where their program began.

Emma Willard alumnae currently at Barnard and Columbia shared advice with the Wellies about the transition from high

SIGNATURE PROGRAM “Our students are so bright,” says Cannon, who began as a Well-Woman peer educator at Barnard and was later hired as a health educator in 2004, “but so few of us come to college already educated on wellness, our bodies, and how to best take care of ourselves. The idea that Barnard prioritized that kind of education and wellness by having an office where you could just walk in and ask any kind of question blew my mind and made me more confident that I had made the right choice in coming here.

It’s so Barnard that Well-Woman started

because of the passion and commitment of our students.”

What is now known as Well-Woman began in 1986 when Barnard students advocated to start a peer education group called SCOPE (Sexuality, SelfCare, Contraception Options Peer Educators). Three more groups followed — on self-esteem, HIV counseling, and sexual violence. In 1993, Giselle Harrington, associate director of health services, brought these peer education groups together under the Well-Woman umbrella. From the start, the program’s mission has been to promote the health and wellness of students through peer education, educational programming, open office hours, individual healthbehavior consultations, campuswide health campaigns, community outreach, and advocacy. Over the years, the office has hosted events that explore gynecological health, nutrition, sex, and sleep habits, as well as less weighty subjects such as stress relief through yoga and knitting.

Peer educator Aneliza Ruiz ’20 remembers first hearing about Well-Woman during New Student Orientation and then spontaneously showing up at the office for an evening session two weeks later.

“As a first-year, and as someone who was starting to gain a stronger understanding of my feminism, I felt that Well-Woman would be a positive environment for me to learn, grow, and serve,” Ruiz explains.

Now, Well-Woman’s weekly “Healthy Monday” email includes tips for resting, eating, moving, and connecting well. Every Wednesday night, peer educators host a different crafting event.

At Barnard’s Primary Care office, students having IUDs (intrauterine devices) inserted for contraception can request to have a trained peer educator, cheekily called an IUDoula, sit with them during the procedure. And the

Well-Woman office recently launched a new discussion series, called “Well Said,” that addresses topics such as how best to apologize, how to handle false expectations, and how to overcome academic stress.

Recently, Ruiz introduced Cannon’s favorite new event at Well-Woman: a DoOver Prom to compensate for unsatisfying high school prom experiences. “I think it is unique on college campuses to have an office dedicated to the health and wellness of women, trans folks, and other

gender minorities who have historically been marginalized in medical and health communities,” Cannon says.

While the Wellies find their footing a year after beginning their journey, Well-Woman continues to grow, thanks to the efforts of student and alumnae over the past 33 years.

Whether or not the programs’ paths remain parallel, Delgado knows that Cannon is only an email away, and that the Wellies and Well-Woman are forever connected through Barnard.

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 19

Moving in Tandem Shira Gordon ’08 and Qudsiya Naqui ’06 — one sighted, one visually impaired — share a bike and a close friendship Shira Gordon ’08 and Qudsiya Naqui ’06 zoom down Pennsylvania Avenue on a twoseater bicycle in downtown Washington, D.C. — passing Freedom Plaza, the 20

Newseum, and the Capitol Building faster than the red cabs can haul tourists a block.

The pair sails onto a tree-lined path that meanders around Senate office buildings, and intern-age passersby do double takes.

“Ooh, wow!” exclaims a man in a tweed jacket. He stops in his tracks, surprised by the women on wheels, unaware of how much more there is to marvel at besides two friends on one bike. Naqui, who rides in the back seat, is legally blind.

In adulthood, a condition called leber congenital amaurosis shrank her field of vision and ability to see details. She was always active but didn’t bike around town before finding the Metro Washington Association of Blind Athletes (MWABA), which organizes activities for people with visual impairments, including connecting

them with sighted “captains,” who steer tandem bikes from the front seat.

Soon after getting paired up in July 2017, Naqui and Gordon discovered they both went to Barnard College. But the commonalities didn’t end there.

UP FOR THE CHALLENGE While an untold number of tandem bikes collect dust in garages, Naqui and Gordon’s communication works like a well-oiled machine. At the top of a slope, Gordon asks, “Ready?”

“Yep!” pipes Naqui, who grips her handlebars and straightens her legs in the air as the bike splashes through a puddle, sending sparkling waves onto the path.

Both women burst into peals of laughter.

They credit their compatibility to

Shira Gordon (L) and Qudsiya Naqui with their tandem bike. Photo by Lexey Swall.

their “matchmaker”: Karla Gilbride, MWABA’s co-founder and president.

Gilbride matched them based on several factors, including their similar size (they’re both petite). Gilbride also had a feeling they would click.

“Those two quickly became a team because they were ready to take things to the next level,” Gilbride says.

“While other captains may quit after a couple of false starts, Shira was completely dedicated,” Gilbride continues. “She was just like, ‘Let’s try it again,’ and by the end of her first day she got the hang of it.

She’s now one of our strongest captains.”

Gilbride saw similar enthusiasm in Naqui, who quickly outgrew beginner rides. “Qudsiya is always looking for the next adventure. Luckily, Shira was up for the challenge of doing more ambitious distances on various terrains, even offroading in the mud and the rain.”

“I hadn’t really biked at all since I was a kid. I’m more of a runner,” explains Naqui, her black hair pulled in a ponytail under a white helmet. “But I thought tandem riding was a fun idea and a good way to meet people.”

Gordon explains that “stokers” like Naqui provide extra pedaling power from the back, which helps tandem bikes go faster downhill than single bikes.

When Naqui admits Gordon was not her first captain, Gordon gasps in mock shock. They chuckle, and Gordon announces they are coming up to Eastern Market, a bazaar on Capitol Hill.

More tandem riders join Naqui and Gordon, and the group passes blocks of 19th-century rowhouses built around the time tandem bicycles came out.

Tandem popularity surged in the 1970s thanks to the U.K.- and U.S.-based Tandem Club and keen marketing from bicycle companies promising health and romance to couples.

That’s false advertising, according to actual tandem riders.

“It’s known to take your relationship where it’s going that much faster,” Gordon says after arriving at a park on the Riverwalk Trail, which runs along the Anacostia River.

by Miriam Berg

SALON ALUMNAE PROFILE

Naqui says she’s heard of couples who “buy a tandem with this spirit of ‘We’re gonna ride this together,’ and then it just totally goes awry, and they want to get rid of it.”

For Naqui and Gordon — who recently completed a 100-mile “century” ride through trails and backroads in D.C. and Virginia — the zest for collaborating on a challenge is strong and springs from their experience at Barnard.

SHARED EXPERIENCES After the tandemists leave Anacostia, they roll through Hyattsville, Maryland, loop back through Eastern Market in D.C., and end their 25-mile ride at Naqui’s cozy apartment in Logan Circle.

Taking a breather on Naqui’s couch, the pair reminisce about discovering that they both went to Barnard. Through conversations on long rides, they learned they both majored in political science and human rights, spent their freshman years in Sulzberger Hall, and studied abroad with the School for International Training. Both also felt that Barnard provided a warm community that embraced them, as well as a motivating force that pushed them outward.

“Barnard felt like its own part of Manhattan since we had our own campus.

But the New York Civic Engagement Program was a way of getting involved in the city,” Gordon says. The program took her throughout Manhattan to volunteer in a variety of ways, including interviewing people on the streets — sometimes late at night — for a point-in-time count of the homelessness population.

“Some things were a little bit outside of my comfort zone, but it was really good to get out and see what different parts of the city were like,” Gordon says.

Engaging in the city was also important to Naqui. Through internships, she provided legal services for domestic abuse survivors and people facing eviction from public housing.

“Working in the community helped me to understand how unjust this world can be for people who are poor, people who are of color, people who are

otherwise marginalized,” Naqui says.

“I found that you can’t understand how to fix problems in the system until you understand the barriers that individuals face in that system.”

The drive to push beyond one’s comfort zone was key for Naqui when her sight deteriorated. By her senior year, her vision became blurry and she needed accommodations like extended time on tests. Barnard’s Office of Disability Services was there for support and encouragement.

“They taught you to become an advocate for yourself. It was on you to communicate to all of your professors and to work out with them what you needed,” Naqui says.

She graduated with a resolve to continue advocating for her needs as her vision continued to change.

COMMUNITY BEYOND BARNARD Naqui’s and Gordon’s paths brought them to law school and then to D.C., where they work as lawyers in the publicinterest field: Naqui as an officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts’ civil legal system modernization project and Gordon as a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Naqui now reads using text-to-speech software and no longer identifies as sighted — a transition that the tandem group helped her get through.

“Coming to identify as someone who has a disability is something this group empowered. It’s made me feel like this is an identity I’m proud of,” Naqui says.

On a tandem bike, Naqui doesn’t feel like she is being taken out for a ride. She and Gordon both actively contribute to the whole experience. As Naqui puts it: “It takes two people to ride that bike!”

What’s more, both women feel like they are part of a community.

“We all just love to bike, and we do it together,” Naqui says, her eyes tearing up. “I wouldn’t have that without people like Shira. I have so many amazing women in my life, and I’m excited to have more of them.”

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Miriam Berg is a Washington, D.C.based writer who focuses on women’s issues.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 21

A Literary Springboard New books by Barnard authors make a splash, offering refreshing takes on things ordinary and rare

SALON

by Asha Meagher ’21

BOOKS

CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT BOOKS Book of Flight: 10 Record-Breaking Animals with Wings

by Gabrielle Balkan ’97; illustrated by Sam Brewster This book for kids ages 5 to 8 features 10 creatures that soar, with fun facts about each and blueprint-style illustrations.

Included are the fastest (the white-throated needletail, a bird) and the best flying acrobat (the Madagascan flying fox).

Dissenter on the Bench: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Life & Work

by Victoria Ortiz ’64 This young adult biography of the Supreme Court justice popularly known as “the Notorious R.B.G.” mixes case histories from Ginsburg’s storied career with narratives about her life.

FICTION Museum of Stones

by Lynn Lurie ’80 The intensity of motherhood, and all of its complications, are explored here through a mother-son relationship. Filled with emotional turns, Museum of Stones culminates [spoiler alert!] with the main characters in a rubber boat fleeing from revolutionaries.

You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories

by Kristen Roupenian ’03 These short stories by the author of “Cat Person,” a breakout piece of fiction The New Yorker published in 2017, explore the complicated, often mordant connections among gender, sex, and power.

The Distance Home

by Paula Saunders ’82 In post–World War II South Dakota, siblings Leon and René, both dancers, navigate very different worlds and levels of success. Over the course of decades, their absentee father further complicates the family dynamics.

The Book of Jeremiah

by Julie Zuckerman ’91 The stubborn yet loving Jeremiah Gerstler moves through 80 years of Jewish life — from grade school, through World War II, to adulthood as a professor — to reveal a 20th-century life brimming with love and loss.

NONFICTION The Jewish Journey Haggadah: Connecting the Generations

by Adena Berkowitz ’81 Designed to attract people of all backgrounds, this book makes having a Passover Seder both fun and educational, interspersing commentary with jokes, parodies, and questions for discussion.

Introduction to U.S. Law, Policy, and Research: An Environmental Perspective

by Peter M. Bower, Professor of Environmental Science, and Dana Neacșu, Lecturer in Law at Columbia University This environmental-law textbook goes beyond simply summarizing current statutes. The authors also carefully examine the process by which environmental laws in the United States have been enacted.

The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery

by Mary Cregan, Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of English In a memoir that weaves together medical research and deeply personal aspects of the author’s own life, Cregan brings the reader to a clearer understanding of depression’s potential causes and cures.

Red Lipstick: An Ode to a Beauty Icon

by Rachel Felder ’89 This captivating book about an iconic cosmetic is full of anecdotes, literary excerpts, and little-known facts, including that the inventor of the first long-lasting lipstick happened to be the largely unsung Barnard alumna Hazel Bishop ’29.

Spending Time: The Most Valuable Resource

by Daniel Hamermesh, Distinguished Scholar Americans work more hours and for more years than do most citizens of other rich countries. To explain why we stress out about time and what we can do to stop, Hamermesh outlines how people in various countries, cultures, and classes spend their days and nights and lays out a simple but important proposal for change.

Reconstructing a Public Sphere

by John Miller, Professor of Professional Practice in Art History In a piece that is both a photographic essay and a critical text, Miller explores the history of New York City’s Battery Park through the lens of his own 9/11 experience.

My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism

by Nancy K. Miller ’61 This biography explores the lives of three scholars, feminists, and literary critics — Carolyn Heilbrun, Diane Middlebrook, and Naomi Schor. Miller, a distinguished professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, examines her friendships in their personal and political contexts.

Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice

by Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, and Brendan O’Flaherty, Professor of Economics at Columbia University What do crime and punishment look like from the perspective of two economists?

Sethi and O’Flaherty believe we can create a more just society by better understanding how stereotypes influence those who commit crimes, as well as those who arrest and punish them.

POETRY We Have Been Lucky in the Midst of Misfortune

by Sarah Stern ’86 This collection, featuring the 2018 Pushcart Prize–nominated poem “The Interview,” tackles the all-important theme of love.

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BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 23

24

by Erin Aubry Kaplan

Photos by Melissa Lyttle

Agent of Change Barnard helped Hollywood notable and Time’s Up co-founder Nina Shaw burnish her dedication to empowerment

Illustrations by Ash Willerton/Goodillustration.com

When I meet Nina Shaw, we’re in a luxurious conference room of her law office at Shaw Moonves Tanaka Finkelstein & Lezcano in Los Angeles’ Century City. Shaw is in the midst of doing a photo shoot for this story and steps out of the lights, shaking my hand without missing a beat. She apologizes sincerely for making me wait. Wiry and elegant with an open face and short, chic hair threaded with gray, she exudes an almost teenage youthfulness, expressing a warm, friendly but pointed curiosity about everyone in the room.

As she dutifully poses for the camera, she chats with the photographer and me, asking questions and sharing stories about her work, including a yarn about meeting music icon Diana Ross.

When we are alone in the same conference room some time later, she talks as if we’re just picking up the thread of a conversation we’ve been having all along. The easy exchange confirms my initial impression of Shaw. A founding partner of a high-profile law firm, she is a mentor and celebrity in her own right who has championed racial and gender diversity in the rarefied ranks of entertainment’s legal and business side for 35 years. Much of her client list reads like a who’s who of rising black talent, from director Ava DuVernay to actors Lupita Nyong’o and Lena Waithe.

Yet all of it rests on her own core talent — a dogged work ethic fused to empathy and a sense of history, an obligation to honor the right of clients to be fully considered and fairly treated.

That’s pretty much the definition of justice, and Shaw has been implementing it in her own way her entire career. Indeed, her latest effort is co-founding Time’s Up, a group of women, including some marquee Hollywood names, who came together in late 2017 to devise concrete ways to confront sexual harassment in workplaces of all kinds — not just in the upper echelon of the entertainment industry and in corporate offices, but also in fast-food restaurants and farmers’ fields.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 25

A CHALLENGE ACCEPTED Shaw’s commitment to justice was catalyzed in a very real way at Barnard.

Born and raised in New York (her family is originally from Harlem), she says she always wanted to attend a women’s college, where she imagined “women were in charge of everything.” She arrived on campus in the early ’70s, when black students at the College were scarce. But it was a time of great political upheaval at colleges and universities, notably at nearby Columbia, and the lingering energy of the civil rights movement helped shore up her confidence and her sense of herself as a black woman.

Barnard played a formative role in that, despite the College’s lack of diversity.

“There was a lot of activism at Barnard, a lot of stuff going on — they weren’t exactly stuck in a time warp,” she recalls.

She cites many influential professors from her undergraduate days, including Quandra Prettyman, an African American literature specialist who gave her a list of must-read books (“I went to the library and went through the list, one by one”), and Inez Smith Reid, who taught political science and was a touchstone for Shaw and other women of color. Shaw felt empowered long before the term came into vogue. At a time when voices like hers were even more easily dismissed than they are now, “nobody at Barnard ever said, ‘What you say doesn’t matter,’ ” she notes. “Everywhere I went after that, I thought I should at least be listened to.”

That attitude served her well at Columbia Law School, which Shaw attended from 1976 to 1979; there were only a handful of female students at the time, and even fewer black people.

That hardly daunted her. She recalls her clear indignation at not being chosen to answer a question in class, an answer she called out instead.

“The first time I raised my hand in class at Columbia, the professor called on a guy who said the same thing I’d said. I immediately clapped my hands and stomped the floor and said, ‘What I said was right, and I said it first!’ ” she recalls, laughing. “Other students, women 26

and men, agreed with me. The professor apologized and said, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Shaw, I didn’t hear you.’ ” She shakes her head. “He didn’t hear me because he didn’t expect the right answer to come out of my mouth. I responded like that because I’d been in classrooms

“The first time I raised my hand in class at Columbia, the professor called on a guy who said the same thing I’d said.

I immediately clapped my hands and stomped the floor and said, ‘What I said was right, and I said it first!’”

where everything I said mattered.”

Though she challenged the institution, Shaw accepted the fact that she was one of very few black students there to do the challenging; being the only person, or one of very few people, of color in the room, was familiar. Too familiar. It “seemed

very normal to me,” Shaw says. “But I look back now and am kind of mad at myself for thinking that was normal.”

“RACE PEOPLE” Fighting against the normalcy of oppression ran in her family. Her greatgrandparents were from Charlottesville, Virginia, and were very active in church and in the civil rights causes of their time — “race people,” Shaw says admiringly.

Her great-grandmother Mary Catlett Hardy, especially, was a striver who didn’t let Jim Crow laws stop her, not completely.

She fervently wanted to pursue education, even though Charlottesville didn’t even have high schools for black people — they were closed after Reconstruction.

“So after you learned everything you could, you just graduated,” Shaw says.

Her great-grandmother “graduated” in 1910 and later went to Oberlin College, though she didn’t finish. In 1998, to honor her legacy of courage, Shaw started a scholarship at Barnard in her name.

Shaw’s curiosity and capacity for empathy come in part from her mother.

An employee of the post office and the Department of Motor Vehicles, she was an avid news reader who never shielded her daughter from the difficult realities of the world, starting with Harlem and the hard-drinking man in their neighborhood who presented an opportunity to talk about the real problems of alcoholism.

Shaw vividly recalls after the 1963 bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young girls, her mother asking her grandmother: “Can you imagine that they would hate us so much they’d kill our children — in a church?”

Seeing up close the individual hurt and pain wrought by violence rooted in systemic inequality stuck with Shaw.

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE As a student, Shaw always knew what her proclivities were, even if she wasn’t entirely clear what her career path would be. “I’m not quite a planner” is how she puts it. “I wasn’t interested in math and science. I was always interested in history and politics and social science.

It was a process of elimination.”

A political science major, she knew she wanted to be a lawyer but not a litigator. She loved the arts and music, especially jazz, a result of her frequenting museums and cultural events growing up in New York. Toward the end of law school she thought about going into the music business but decided it was “too exploitative.”

So she settled on movies and television.

That proved to be a fortuitous move when Shaw landed her first job in the entertainment division of a major law firm. One of its many famous clients was the legendary television producer Norman Lear, who had many culturally groundbreaking sitcoms, including All in the Family and the spinoff Maude. “I was lucky — he was doing so many great shows at the time,” she says. “I cut my teeth with him. I had some great experiences.”

In the entertainment industry, her efforts are trailblazing, though she doesn’t make much of that. “I tend to have a closer and kind of advisory relationship with clients because I have more experience in the dynamics of the industry,” she says. “I am often seen as someone who envelops a client and makes them feel comfortable, like they have an insider.”

Part of Shaw’s vision from early in her practice has been to deepen the content of black projects and those of other historically marginalized groups.

African American characters in film and television are often recycled, damaging stereotypes or avoid subtlety and specificity. Shaw seeks to break that pattern by advocating for her clientele of color, as working people and as artists.

She agrees with the notion that the relatively few people of color in her position have a special role. “We know that there’s duality to the work we do,” she says. “I can’t just focus on nuts and bolts of deals. I had to look at it in more holistic way. I had to be someone moving the industry forward.”

Clients’ praise of Shaw speaks to that; she’s seen not merely as an ace lawyer and deal broker but as a mentor, adviser,

Nina Shaw in her Los Angeles law office

and often a friend. Ava DuVernay has called her a “consigliere.” Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem more recently described her as a curator, because “ ‘curator’ comes from the Latin ‘curare,’ which means ‘to care for.’ ” Shaw appears gratified by the comments but responds with typical evenhandedness: “I don’t think of myself that way.

Just as the best lawyer possible.”

AN IMPERATIVE Time’s Up officially got its start in January 2018, though it had been meeting some months before that. The sexual harassment and abuse revelations that began with film mogul Harvey Weinstein and cascaded from there made a collective response from women feel imperative. (It doesn’t feel like an accident that the group’s name, “Time’s Up,” is itself an imperative.)

Though she seems tailor-made for the organization, Shaw got involved

somewhat by accident. In February 2016, she delivered a brief but memorable acceptance speech when receiving Essence magazine’s annual Lincoln Power Award. In the speech, she exhorted actors and other creative talent to raise their voices and demand diversity in the agents, managers, and others who represented them. The message: The oppressed have power — and a responsibility to use it. It was a flipthe-script moment that reverberated throughout Hollywood and the media and made her a natural recruit for the empowerment mission of Time’s Up. The timing couldn’t have been better for Shaw, who confessed that when she made that Essence speech she was at a low point. “I had just gotten really, really tired,” she says. “All these years, all this work, and it didn’t look like things were going to substantially change. I came to realize it continued on page 73 BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 27

By Alina Tugend

Understanding the Present through the Past

Hoping to make sense of heartbreaking current events, more students are turning to the History Department’s innovative, real-world classrooms

28

by Alina Tugend

L

ast year, Madison Ailts ’19 had an experience through the Barnard History Department that changed

her life.

One of eight students who took part in Mississippi Semester, a spring course taught by Professor Premilla Nadasen, Ailts learned about the history of welfare, poverty, and the black freedom movement, and then helped create an index measuring women’s economic security in Mississippi for a community organization there. Over spring break, she and her classmates then traveled to Biloxi to work with the group.

“When I saw the course listing — it was something completely new — I knew I had to take it,” Ailts says.

Mississippi Semester is one of the History Department’s more unusual offerings. But it is emblematic of the direction the department is taking — employing creative, hands-on experiences and using new tools and technologies to help students understand not just the past but the present, too. These new pedagogies and technologies are an attempt to attract more students to the discipline, which has been losing students in droves at colleges across the nation over the past decade.

They are also a reaction to the current political climate, which has left many students searching for explanations.

“The most pressing problems that we face today, such as discourses about immigration, are not ones that either economics or political science are really equipped to explain,” says Professor Nara Milanich. “Where are these xenophobic discourses coming from? How have people received migrants in the past? Is what we’re doing unprecedented, or have we always behaved this way?” History can help answer these questions. And that, she and her students agree, “makes history look more relevant to students than it might have been” just a few years ago.

After being released from a South Texas detention center to the RAICES House, Karla, 28, phones her mother for the first time since leaving El Salvador with her daughter. (Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

WHITHER THE PAST? Between the Great Recession (20082009) and 2017, the number of Barnard seniors majoring in history dropped from 49 to 28, following a national trend. In a recent, well-publicized analysis of the field nationwide, Northeastern University history professor Benjamin Schmidt observed, “Of all the major disciplines, history has seen the deepest declines in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded.”

But in the past two years, Barnard has become something of an anomaly.

In 2018, the number of Barnard history majors almost doubled, to 55. The Class of 2019 included 60 majors, says Professor Dorothy Ko, who heads the department, which was recently named one of the country’s 10 best by College Magazine.

One reason for the change is that the department better understands the needs of its students. Many history majors no longer want to go to graduate school to study history, Ko says, “and that is fine with us.” A number of students in the department are double majors.

“These students told us, ‘I want to be a mathematician’ or ‘a scientist’ or ‘a doctor,’ ” Ko explains. “They say, ‘I want to be fully developed in the humanities, and history is the best training.’ ” The department saw this as an opportunity, Ko says. “We thought, ‘How can we get more of these types of students?’ ” To do so, the department began broadening the types of projects — capstone and otherwise — that students can submit to meet course and major requirements. Capstone projects in particular integrate and synthesize much of what Barnard students learn in their major courses over four years of study.

Traditionally, history students have had one capstone option: a written senior thesis based on primary sources.

But beginning this fall, as part of a pilot program, seniors can complete an oral history project instead; rather than relying solely on artifacts and written documents, they can interview sources — using audio recordings, video, or both — and use those interviews for their final project.

Nadasen, who will be teaching the oral history capstone seminar, will be working with the Columbia Center for Oral History to train students in conducting oral histories. This approach is not new.

The Columbia Center got its start in 1948 and was the first of its kind at a major university. But recent advances in technology have made it easier to both conduct and disseminate these interviews.

The methodology can help students and scholars alike “understand contemporary political issues from the perspective of ordinary people.... It is one important tool that enables us to develop a different lens around politics,” Nadasen explains.

The department is also talking about other capstone options, including digital history, which can involve geographic information systems (GIS) — computerized systems for analyzing and presenting spatial or geographic information — as well as videos, blogs, and other forms of exposition. The College’s Empirical Reasoning Center (which teaches students how to use a variety of software programs to help them utilize data) and Barnard’s Instructional Media and Technology Services have collaborated with history professors to teach relevant skills. “This is an experiment,” says Associate Professor Abosede George, “and it’s possible now because Barnard has so many units that we can pull from, and some students already trained in this.”

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING For Nadasen and other professors, the goal of courses such as Mississippi Semester is not only to offer students new learning opportunities but also to provide a service to the organizations they work with. Her class grew out of a long-standing relationship she has had with the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative (MLICCI).

Nadasen wanted Mississippi Semester to be a two-way street, in which students learn but also assist the organization.

Nadasen’s students, using spreadsheet software to examine data on economic security and GIS software to visualize the results, created an index that BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 29

became a learning tool for them and a lobbying tool that MLICCI has used to advance its public policy efforts. “It was a very eye-opening experience for the students and myself,” Nadasen says.

For Ailts, the experience was so profound that she changed her career plans. Though she still intends to go to law school, her original plan to specialize in corporate law has fallen by the wayside.

Instead, after returning from Biloxi, she applied for an internship with the American Civil Liberties Union and now wants to practice civil rights law.

“The media focuses on the South being racist and on really negative views of poverty and welfare,” she says. During the visit she noted a more complex picture, one that included many community-organizing efforts. “I saw how effective community organizing can be intertwined with academic research — we helped them and they helped us.”

Nadasen stresses that on-site, experiential learning can be essential in creating a more complete understanding of her class’s subjects. For example, the indicators of economic security that the class initially included in its index — such as median earnings, education, health care, and unemployment — failed to take transportation into account.

“We didn’t factor it in as important,” she says. “But we went to the Mississippi Delta and spoke to people who had to travel three hours by bus each way in order to get to work, and that severely impacted their economic well-being.”

In addition, the index couldn’t just be quantified in a map or numbers.

“We needed ethnographic information — we needed people’s stories,” Nadasen says. “That brought a human dimension to the ways poverty has been experienced in Mississippi.”

Nadasen hopes to continue to offer the class year after year, depending on MLICCI’s needs. The executive director told her that “after a year of real assaults on people of color and poor people in this country, it was really amazing to see the work that we do through the eyes of Barnard students.”

30

NEW SOURCES, NEW VOICES This spring, Milanich taught a new course, Seeking Asylum, which included another experiential component: a trip to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Dilley, Texas. Students worked with the Dilley Pro Bono Project, a group that provides legal services to mothers and children being held at the country’s largest detention center for migrant families.

Milanich, too, has a relationship with the community she studies. “I had been to Dilley and was flabbergasted at the gross human rights violations,” she says.

Ten days before the 2016 presidential election, she presented a panel at Barnard on the detention of migrant families; the panel included lawyers, advocates, and women who had been detained. The students who attended the panel were as amazed as she had been during her visit, and she realized, “I brought Dilley to Barnard, but I needed to bring Barnard to Dilley.”

She had long wanted to teach a course like Seeking Asylum. And “after the election, a lot of students were asking ‘How do I get involved? How do you explain this?’ ” she recounts.

“We were dissatisfied with simply sending them the name of a local social justice organization — it seemed like a missed pedagogical opportunity.”

Once Seeking Asylum was in the course catalog, 50 students applied for admission, but Milanich capped the class at 10 juniors and seniors because of funding limitations. Had she offered it three years ago, she estimates, she would have had fewer than half the number of applicants.

The first part of the class looked at Central American history and how U.S. involvement in the region over time “helped produce the political and economic situation we find ourselves in today,” Milanich says. The second part studied the politics and history of asylum. The third focused on mass incarceration of immigrants and how it relates to mass incarceration in general.

While in Dilley, the class conducted audio interviews with former detainees.

“We are interested in elevating their voices and helping people better understand,” Milanich says, “perhaps through a podcast or website.”

Milanich, who likes everything planned down to the last crossed “t” and dotted “i,” found this class, with its many moving parts, particularly exciting and challenging. “I learned to let go. It was really about the students helping to design the class as we moved along. I thought I would say, ‘This will be our project, and you carry it out.’ But we came up

with the project together. It was a very different pedagogical experience.”

Milanich and Nadasen aren’t the only professors using these new approaches.

This fall, George, who is also affiliated with Barnard’s Africana Studies program, will teach a new class called Mapping the Ekopolitan Project: A Spatial Approach to Pan-African Circulations, examining 19th-century migrant communities in what is now the Nigerian city of Lagos.

These communities were composed of people who came from other towns in

West Africa, as well as from towns in the Caribbean and South America. (The word “Ekopolitan,” George explains, is a play on the words “cosmopolitan” and “Eko,” another of Lagos’ names.)

With the help of the Empirical Reasoning Center and a dedicated librarian, the course will expand on traditional history pedagogy by training students to tell stories in digital and visual formats, by creating dynamic historical maps, and by compiling the class’s findings continued on page 73

Clockwise L-R: Prof. Milanich (fifth from L) and spring ’19 Seeking Asylum students in Dilley, Texas; Jackson, Miss., mural; Prof. Nadasen (far R) with spring ’18 class at Moore Community House in Biloxi, Miss.; photo in assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers’ restored home shows the bullet hole in the kitchen, taken after the shooting, including missing tile above the toaster; photo from Mississippi Civil Rights Museum’s segregation and black business districts exhibit; job training participants at Moore told students about their most difficult issues (transportation, debt, and mental and physical health). (All Miss. photos: Aubri Juhasz ’18)

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 31

by Deb Schwartz

Illustrations by Augustrats

LIONS & TITLES & BEARS Barnard has a long history of studentathletes who bring their “A� games while learning to compete for the next stage 32

I

n 2008, 4.7 billion viewers tuned in to watch the Summer Olympics in Beijing, including a young Anne Cebula ’20, who was most intrigued by the bird’s-nest-shaped stadium and a highlight reel of a fencing match. “I was captivated by how entirely different it looked in comparison to other sports, and the overwhelming emotion involved every time someone scored a point in an intense bout: Masks were being ripped off with either complete elation or ferocity, accompanied by corresponding yells or roars,” she remembers. Eleven years of practice and competitions later, a highlight reel now shows Cebula, roaring in complete elation (and ferocity) after becoming Barnard’s first student-athlete to win an NCAA Championship title.

“I’m honored to be a part of history,” the Brooklyn native and neuroscience major says of her March 24, 2019, win for the Columbia Lions’ fencing team (epee squad), “but I’m more excited at the thought of the future — not just my own, but of what will grow out of the unique relationship that defines the Columbia-Barnard Athletic Consortium.” Barnard is the only women’s college — and one of only a few liberal arts colleges in the country — to offer NCAA Division I athletics, an elite level of competition made possible through the Consortium. Established in 1983, this unique agreement created the opportunity for Barnard students to compete alongside Columbia’s in NCAA Division I and the Ivy League.

Cebula made history in a long line of Barnard student-athletes that stretches back to 1896, seven years after the College was founded, when students created a bicycle club. Intercollegiate competition began in 1902, but was replaced by intramural sports (internal competition) in 1926. In addition to track and field, archery, volleyball, and tennikoit (a tennislike game played with a rubber ring instead of a ball), intramurals included weeklong Greek Games featuring a wide range of activities, from poetry and dance to chariot racing (with students playing the part of horses).

It wasn’t until the 1970s that intercollegiate competition resurfaced, thanks to the passage of Title IX and its prohibition of sex discrimination in any educational program or activity receiving federal financial aid. A surge of interest in sports followed, with ongoing negotiations between Columbia and Barnard over merging, and Barnard students voting to appropriate $10,000 of their student activity fees to sponsor three intercollegiate teams: swimming, basketball, and volleyball. These teams — known collectively as the Barnard Bears — and others that followed between 1975 and 1983 were hampered by a lack of funding. (The basketball and volleyball teams even shared uniforms.)

But the determination and passion of the Barnard Bears made them a natural springboard from which to begin Columbia’s women’s program after Columbia College went co-ed in 1983. That year, under the leadership of Barnard President Ellen Futter, the two schools signed an agreement for Barnard students to play on Columbia’s Division I teams, and athletic equity was reached.

The struggle to compete and succeed — and to even have the right to do so — requires bravery, teamwork, sacrifice, and commitment. We celebrate the many student-athletes who have performed under these blue banners with a look at five whose contributions both on and off the field help define what being an athlete at Barnard means, while inspiring the next generation of competitors ready to make history.

This page: Anne Cebula ’20 celebrates her national title win in women’s epee at the NCAA Championships in March (courtesy of Camille Simmons Photography).

Opposite page: courtesy of the Barnard College Archives

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 33

Trudi Patrick races butterfly (courtesy of Finn Mundinger/Columbia Daily Spectator)

Trudi Patrick The highlight reel of Trudi Patrick ’17’s college swimming career begins with her first year on the Columbia team, when she broke the school record in the 200-meter butterfly and was part of the first team in swimming program history to go undefeated in the dual meet season.

(In dual meets, two schools compete.) She was one of a select group to attend the Ivy League swimming championships each of her four years on the team, competed at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and the 2015 Pan Am Games, and served as team captain during her senior year. “It was really a great time in my life,” she says.

Her personal highlights include sharing meals with fellow exhausted swimmers, when they discussed details of the latest practice, older students shared academic advice, and everyone consumed enormous quantities of food.

Patrick recalls with a mix of glee and embarrassment how she would take a dish from each of the multiple food stations at Hewitt “and just sit down and go at it.”

The classroom offered her sustenance of a different sort: “Barnard opened my eyes and pushed me to think critically about the society in which we live.” Through 34

the Athena Scholars Program in her senior year, Patrick launched City Kids Swim, a social impact initiative designed to bring swimming to underserved communities. Patrick ran a swim clinic for children ages 4 through 15, which drew an overwhelmingly positive response from parents and children; Patrick continues to provide lessons one-on-one.

Today, she works at Adobe as an account manager and has been working with the Columbia-Barnard Athletic Consortium to plan a women-in-sports event aimed at helping women student-athletes at Columbia and Barnard pivot from school to the working world. She still swims — though only in the summer, at the beach with family or friends. Her three-hour pool practices have been replaced by Zumba.

Juliet Macur An award-winning journalist currently working as a “Sports of the Times” columnist at The New York Times, Juliet Macur ’92 is the author of an acclaimed book on Lance Armstrong and recently made news by exposing the exploitation and harassment of NFL cheerleaders. In pursuit of stories that often bring together politics, culture,

and athletics, she has traveled the world and flourished in a sphere where, as she puts it, “Some old-school people still feel women shouldn’t be covering sports.”

At her first newspaper job, Macur was covering the Jacksonville Jaguars for The Orlando Sentinel when a male reporter shouted at her from across a crowded press room, “What do you know about football? You’ve never played the game!”

At that moment and others like it, the grueling experience of rowing crew, which she took up as a sophomore and continued until the birth of her first child in 2010, stood her in good stead. “Because I learned this high degree of toughness from rowing, there has never been an assignment that’s been too hard,” she says.

Known for the extreme demands it makes on the entire body, rowing is, as Macur puts it, “pretty much torture” on the best of days. But she recalls with fondness the camaraderie she shared with her teammates and the many early mornings she ran across the darkened campus, dodging startled rats en route to picking up the van she used, as team captain, to drive her teammates to the boathouse.

One practice in particular stands out in her memory: On a very cold morning in the fall, the coach kept the team on the river during a driving rainstorm.

The women in the eight-oared boat

were exhausted and soaking wet, their hands numb. Yet the practice kept going, the boat racing back and forth between the Henry Hudson Bridge and the Broadway Bridge, at the northern tip of Manhattan, again and again. Macur recalls, “I remember thinking if I could do that and not die, I could probably do anything.” And, indeed, she has.

Philippa Portnoy Like a handful of other Barnard alumnae, Manhattan native Philippa Feldman Portnoy ’86, ’90BUS, experienced the transition from Bear to Lion firsthand.

She began her first year at the College as a Division III athlete on the tennis team. By graduation, she’d made the switch to Division I, all while staying put on the west side of Broadway. When she arrived on campus in 1982, Columbia was not yet co-ed, and the Consortium was still one year away, so she began her undergraduate tennis journey as a Barnard Bear, competing exclusively against other Seven Sisters athletes. When the team first began Ivy League play in 1984,

they were beaten badly by Cornell. By the time Portnoy was a senior, the team was playing a full Ivy League schedule, beating Cornell in 1986 — proof positive of the team’s transformation. “We knew we had come a long way,” Portnoy says.

Being a member of the tennis team was “the most important part of my experience as an undergrad,” says Portnoy. During early-morning van rides to a practice facility in Fort Lee, New Jersey, she and her teammates shared details of their academic and personal lives, building friendships that continue today. Portnoy learned the power of hard work and dedication and, as team captain, leadership skills she later deployed as head of the Latin American Aviation Finance Group at Citigroup.

“At Citigroup, I worked in a fairly maledominated industry, traveling the world, and I wasn’t intimidated by any of that.”

Today, Portnoy is a member of Barnard’s Board of Trustees and remains deeply invested in supporting the institution that helped shape her. A founding member of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies, she’s also a co-founder of the Women’s Leadership Council for Athletics, which has raised approximately $4 million for athletics over the past 10 years. Though she

says she’s focused on raising her 17-yearold triplets, Portnoy is as busy as any athlete in training season. She is a member of Columbia’s Alumnae Engagement Committee and helped to plan the first University-wide women’s conference, held last year. Portnoy also serves on numerous Columbia and Barnard committees, was a 2014 Columbia Alumni Association medalist, and was named one of the 25 most influential athletes of the ColumbiaBarnard Athletics Consortium. “Being on the team, and being team captain, gave me confidence in my voice.”

Robin Wagner In 1976, Robin Wagner ’80 embarked on a schedule of training and academics at Barnard that only a nationally ranked 19-year-old figure skater could have mapped out. To maintain the relationship with her longtime coach and enjoy the support of her family, she lived at home on Long Island, where six days a week she rose at 4 a.m. and practiced for four hours. Weekdays, she then took the train to Barnard where she maintained a full course load, and next headed to

I remember thinking if I could do that and not die, I could probably do anything.” ­—Juliet Macur

Juliet Macur (top row, second from left) and teammates on the 1992 Barnard-Columbia varsity women’s rowing squad BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 35

ballet lessons or to a rink in the city for additional practice before commuting home. In high school, such a balancing act had worked. But Barnard presented new challenges, and both her schoolwork and skating suffered. Determined to test herself as an athlete, she took a semester off, setting her sights on competing at senior nationals, where U.S. champions are crowned. But the goal eluded her, and with a heavy heart, she said goodbye to the sport that had defined her life for years.

Wagner re-enrolled at Barnard and found in her classmates a level of intellectual curiosity that inspired her and shaped the coach she would later become. “There was a culture of not being satisfied with traditional answers,” she says. When she began coaching a young skater, that experience “kept me going, kept me asking questions, and allowed me the confidence in myself and my skater when other people had doubts.” The young skater Wagner coached, Sarah Hughes, won the gold medal for the U.S. at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Wagner went on to coach two more women who competed in the Olympics.

Now she is “a retired old woman enjoying life” in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, where her biggest athletic challenge is learning to play golf. “After having spent so many years in a refrigerator as a competitor and a coach,” she says, “I’m ready for some warm weather.”

Gloria Callen Jones When Gloria Callen entered Barnard as a first-year in 1942, she had already set 35 American swimming records and one world record, won 13 national titles, and been voted Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. She also had been selected for the Olympic team that would have represented the United States at the 1940 Games that were canceled due to the outbreak of World War II. In addition to her athletic feats, “Glorious Gloria” was celebrated for her looks and glamour: Featured on the cover 36

Gloria Callen Jones (William C. Shrout, The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

of Cosmopolitan magazine and profiled in Life, she was voted one of the country’s best-dressed women. But when she arrived at Barnard, she did not join the swim team — there wasn’t one to join — and she never competed in swimming again.

Instead, she participated in aquatic novelty events, including one called “Aqua-Ducks.” Performed with classmate Anne Ross ’45, a nationally ranked diver who was also selected for the 1940 U.S. Olympic team, AquaDucks featured water ballet, tandem swimming, and a nightshirt race.

Described by her eldest daughter, Christine Huber, as “very vivacious, fun-loving and effervescent,” Callen, who died in 2016, was also active in dance committees. At a dance in 1943, she met Herbert Jones, Jr., a young midshipman training on a Navy Reserves ship docked in the Hudson who had, along with other midshipmen, been ordered to attend. A

year later, the two were married in St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia. Huber says Jones “really loved college,” but once her husband returned to the U.S. after serving in the Pacific, there “wasn’t a thought” that they would stay apart; Jones left Barnard to join him in San Francisco.

Callen was a strong believer in women’s rights who encouraged all three of her daughters to become feminists. She lived for many years in Charleston, West Virginia, where she was an active volunteer in many local organizations, held multiple leadership positions at the Garden Club of America, and was a member of Barnard’s Board of Trustees from 1986 to 1991. Callen maintained many strong friendships from her college days, says Huber. “She took great pride in having gone to Barnard.”

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Deb Schwartz is a writer, editor, and marketer living in New York.

Photo by Sam Stuart Hollenstead

by Violet Baron

SOURCES DONORS

Paying College Forward The Helen Revellese Esposito ’38 scholarship fund supports Westchester County students Education is ultimately an act of connection: teacher to student, student to world. Often, that original connection is so profound that the student longs to maintain it after the formal part has ended — to give back by offering the experience to a new generation of students.

Helen Revellese Esposito ’38 was someone who valued that type of connection. Until she died in May of last year at age 101, she was devoted both to Barnard and to giving back, as a public-school teacher in Yonkers, New York, and as an adult-education volunteer. She took pride in giving to Barnard every year, from the leaner years when she was building her career, all the way to the end of her life. That spirit is kept alive through the Barnard scholarship fund that bears her name.

Born and raised in Yonkers, Esposito was one of 14 children of immigrant parents and the first in her family to attend college. After Barnard, she earned a master’s degree in education from Teachers College and then returned to her hometown to begin a career in education. That career spanned decades, as did her volunteer work.

Esposito’s love of teaching and her love for Barnard were infectious. In 2001, her daughters, Phylis Esposito and Marigrace Lalli, decided to conjoin those two loves by establishing the Helen Revellese Esposito ’38 Scholarship Fund with a $50,000 gift. The fund’s interest

Helen Esposito (front, right) with Keren Dillard (center) and daughters Marigrace Lalli (front, left) and Phylis Esposito (back, right)

underwrites an individual scholarship for a student who needs financial aid. The family asked that the fund support young women who, like Esposito, grew up in Yonkers or in Greater Westchester County, with a further preference for students also planning a career in education.

The fund became a source of pride for Esposito; she asked family and friends to donate to it in lieu of birthday and holiday gifts. This helped the fund grow to its current value of more than $524,000. As the fund continues to increase in value, it creates new opportunities for students who might not otherwise be able to afford Barnard, and enhances the College as well, by enabling a more economically diverse class. Indeed, the scholarship has already helped several young women to realize the power of a Barnard education.

Before Esposito died, she met each of her scholarship’s recipients at the scholarship celebration dinners the College holds each spring to bring together students with many of the people who sponsor them. With Esposito’s

encouragement, two of her scholarship’s recipients became dedicated teachers.

Dana Kim ’09, who became close with Esposito during her time at Barnard and invited her as a special guest to her wedding, followed Esposito’s path.

Angelica Cusma ’14, another recipient, also went on to teach and has kept up her relationship with the Esposito family.

Yonkers resident Keren Dillard ’19 is the scholarship’s most recent awardee.

An architecture major, Dillard was “very excited” in her first year when she learned that she would receive the Esposito scholarship. Not only did it enable her to meet her tuition costs, it also allowed her to find a balance between her work, her studies, and her extracurricular activities.

It offered a connection to people from her hometown who had passed through Barnard’s halls. “The scholarship afforded me time that I would have otherwise had to spend working,” Dillard says.

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Violet Baron is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and radio producer.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 37

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

Illustrations by Claire Rollet

The Barnard journey extends far beyond Commencement — in fact, that bold, brilliant spirit is something Barnard women carry forever. And just as each alumna’s path is uniquely her own, she can stay connected with the College and her classmates in her own way.

There’s no shortage of programs and engagement opportunities to suit each lifestyle, from Alumnae Association of Barnard College (AABC)–hosted programming, to Beyond Barnard opportunities, to supporting the Barnard Annual Fund, and more.

Characters and events depicted here are fictional and meant to inspire engagement with Barnard. Any resemblance to actual persons or circumstances is purely coincidental.

While unpacking boxes, Valeria, Class of 1976, watched a livestream of a lecture and conversation hosted on campus by the AABC Project Continuum Committee. She, her partner, and their dog recently moved to a new house in Racine, Wisconsin — an ordeal that she recapped in her most recent class note in Barnard Magazine. While visiting family in New York, she stopped by campus to speak on a panel about her experience as a woman in STEM.

Yael, Class of 2016, lives in Brooklyn, New York, with two friends from Barnard. As a member of her class Reunion committee, she attended Leadership Assembly (the annual AABC gathering of volunteer leaders) on campus in the fall, where she took over the @BarnardAlumnae Instagram to share a behind-thescenes look at the event. She and her first-year roommate plan to attend a fitness class hosted by the AABC Young Alumnae Committee.

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Beatriz, Class of 2005, lives in São Paulo, Brazil, where she mentors high school students looking to apply to Barnard and interviews prospective students as a Barnard Alumnae Admissions Representative. Last October, she donated on Giving Day to support financial aid and boost her class’s Barnard Annual Fund participation. Her upcoming art exhibit was featured on the Alumnae in the News section of our.barnard.edu.

Upon retiring to Tucson, Arizona, Marion, Class of 1969, decided to make reconnecting with the College a priority. She became a member of the Athena Society by including the College in her estate plans, and Brought It Back to Barnard for her 50-year milestone Reunion. Energized by the weekend, she began hosting impromptu brunches with her alumnae neighbors and joined the Barnard Club of Tucson.

Jia, Class of 1990, prides herself on her AABC election voting streak — four years and counting!

Although she travels a lot for her career, she recently participated in a virtual book club hosted by the AABC Alma Maters Committee. She also attended a reception in her home city, Beijing, where she learned more about President Beilock’s vision for Barnard.

Solace, Class of 1998, was delighted to attend a student send-off hosted by the Barnard Club of Northern California last summer. Her two toddlers were in tow, and she hopes they gleaned some Barnard boldness through osmosis. She recently had a phone meeting with a Beyond Barnard representative for advice on transitioning her career and used the online alumnae directory to reconnect with a classmate with whom she’d lost touch.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 39

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

Inspired to Action

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

It’s been wonderful to see so many alumnae back on campus since spring, and I enjoyed seeing even more of you at Reunion 2019. I hope those of you outside the New York metro area have been able to attend a Barnard regional event or connect with fellow alumnae online at our.barnard.edu. Thank you so much to everyone who voted in this year’s AABC Elections — your Barnard pride is inspiring! I invite you to deepen your support by making a donation to the Barnard Annual Fund. High Annual Fund participation is a strong indicator of alumnae commitment to Barnard’s mission and desire to remain connected to the College.

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

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Merri Rosenberg ’78 TREASURER

Ellyn R. Artis ’98 ALUMNAE TRUSTEE

Leila Rafizadeh Bassi ’94 ALUMNAE TRUSTEE

Daphne Fodor Philipson ’69 ALUMNAE TRUSTEE

Philippa Feldman Portnoy ’86 ALMA MATERS COMMITTEE CHAIR

Amy Veltman ’89 ANNUAL GIVING COMMITTEE CHAIR

Wendy Kreinen Modlin ’95 AWARDS COMMITTEE CHAIR

Erin Fredrick ’01 BYLAWS CHAIR

Rachel Pauley ’95 DIRECTOR-AT-LARGE

Janet F. Alperstein ’92 DIRECTOR-AT-LARGE

Lauren Perrine Cecil ’12 DIRECTOR-AT-LARGE

Eunice E. Hong ’96 LEADERSHIP ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE CHAIR

Hilary Dayton Busch ’89 NOMINATING COMMITTEE CHAIR

Tracy Rodrigues ’11 PROFESSIONAL & LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE CHAIR

Julie Malyn Melwani ’09 PROJECT CONTINUUM COMMITTEE CHAIR

Provost and Dean of the Faculty Linda Bell and Miami-area alumnae gathered for a conversation on advancing and supporting the careers of women on Thursday, February 21.

Connect with alumnae in your area at our.barnard.edu/regionalclubs

Young alumnae in the New York metro area gathered over the first weekend in April for the Young Alumnae Committee’s Sweat into Spring fitness event.

Connect with fellow young alumnae at our.barnard.edu

Ilene Rubin Fish ’67 REGIONAL NETWORKS CHAIR

PJ Douglas Sands ’98 REUNION COMMITTEE CHAIR

Rona Wilk ’91 YOUNG ALUMNAE COMMITTEE CHAIR

Alyss Vavricka ’12 SGA PRESIDENT

Kim Samala ’20

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

Karen Sendler SENIOR ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF ALUMNAE ENGAGEMENT

Kelly De Felice ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF REGIONAL & INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT

Lacey Beck ’14 ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF YOUNG ALUMNAE & STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Greta Boorn

Barnard Alma Maters, an AABC committee dedicated to fostering open, thoughtful discussion and programs about motherhood at all life stages, hosted its first virtual book group.

Learn more about Alma Maters at our.barnard.edu

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Stay in touch by updating your contact information and email preferences on the Our Barnard alumnae website and follow our social media @BarnardAlumnae!

Visit our.barnard.edu/myprofile

MANAGER OF ALUMNAE ENGAGEMENT

Ann Goldberg ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT

Nancy Huemer ’10

CORE OF ECONOMICS continued from page 11 affairs at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs — will launch the CORE Academy to oversee the development of a separate, U.S. edition of CORE’s textbook The Economy: Economics for a Changing World and to continue other initiatives.

Published for free online (with a hard copy available for purchase), CORE seeks to make curricula relevant to actual economies and students, especially women students, who are significantly underrepresented in the discipline, and to make economics accessible, both intellectually and financially (econ textbooks can sell for upwards of $400).

Anyone can use the CORE materials simply by registering at core-econ.org.

Sethi was one of 23 economists from around the world who participated in the creation of The Economy. Unlike traditional textbooks, it doesn’t begin with abstract concepts or notions of idealized, rational markets. Instead, it delves into the complexity of issues: humans aren’t always rational actors; markets often fail to distribute goods and services efficiently; inequality is rampant.

And, as Zarghamee explains, “The Economy teaches the economic toolkit within a simultaneously historical and current context.” Now taught at more than 230 schools around the world, the curriculum’s innovative approach won acclaim in publications such as The New Yorker, The Economist, and the Financial Times.

Even though women comprise more than half of all undergraduate students, only about one-third of economics majors in the U.S. are women; however, CORE may help address that gender gap with its real-world focus. Kimberly Li ’22 engaged with CORE’s textbook and online resources in a class with Zarghamee. “It shifted economics from something I was looking at from the outside in into something more tangible that I could use to understand my world and situation better,” she says.

Now, when discussing the problems that economists should address, more students can turn to CORE for real-world answers.

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NINA SHAW continued from page 27 would only be different when we [women and people of color] forced the issue.”

Besides Shaw, the initial 40 women who came together included high-profile actors such as America Ferrera and Reese Witherspoon. Great inspiration came from women with zero visibility: an alliance of Latina farmworkers who sent a letter of solidarity to the many women and men in Hollywood battling a kind of oppression the farmworkers had experienced and had always organized around. The gap in life experience between these two groups of working women may seem considerable, almost surreal. But Shaw says that’s missing the point.

“At the end of the day, you can’t be safe in your work environment, whether that’s a soundstage or an office or a field,” she says. “And the people who abuse you don’t see any difference between us and them. They don’t say, ‘We won’t abuse you because you’re an actor or a writer.’ There’s no profession that women go into that makes them immune from harassment or abuse of power.”

Shaw says it’s time to let the wariness go when it comes to joining a cause with white women to push for change. If not, “we’ll be sitting outside the solution.

Yes, black women have always been less safe than other women. But don’t we all want to get to the same place, which is totally safe? I want us all to get to the mountaintop together.”

She is sincere about that. The good news is that the mountaintop is more in view now than it was two years ago; women raising their voices and getting their grievances seriously addressed may not yet be the norm, but it’s getting there.

“People are starting to understand a new reality,” says Shaw. “And that is, no one is too small to be heard, or too big to be held accountable.” Two truths Shaw learned well, and first, at Barnard.

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Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist and teacher based in Los Angeles and the author of I Heart Obama.

HISTORY continued from page 31 into a digital storytelling format that can be housed on the Ekopolitan Project blog (www.ekopolitanproject.org).

George is more intent than ever on making the connection between what’s happening in the classroom and what’s happening in the world outside of Barnard. The new textbook she is using in her survey course on African history is part of that effort. It asks more critical questions about the meaning of justice and equality and explores historical debates about the legitimacy of power.

She is using more primary sources that were previously unavailable in English translations, such as a recent translation of a 17th-century biography of Walatta Petros, a nun from Ethiopia. “I am also making a point of inserting more feminist perspectives into the history,” George says.

CHANGING WITH THE TIMES The History Department is shifting, moving with its students’ and faculty’s interests and bucking a national trend that has devalued the study of the past.

“For a long time, there’s been a sense of complacency among students that somehow the world is getting better and we’re moving in the right direction,” Nadasen says, explaining the drop in the number of history majors nationwide.

At Barnard, at least, that feeling is changing as students confront new political, societal, and environmental realities. Studying history using new tools and new educational approaches enables Barnard’s students and historians not just to better understand the past but also to make sense of its relevance now. “One of the things we learn from history is that people have agency, and you make choices and decisions,” Nadasen says. That knowledge can inform “the responsibility students have in shaping their own lives and what this world looks like.”

History, Nadasen says, isn’t just for the history books. It’s also for now.

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Alina Tugend writes frequently for The New York Times.

BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 73

LAST WORD

by Tracy L. Brobyn ’90

The Gift of a Best Friend Barnard gave Tracy Brobyn ’90 so much more than a quality education It was Barnard Freshman Orientation 1986 and I was terrified. Would I make friends?

Would I be smart enough? What right did I think I had to be at this school? On my first day, I found myself blindly following a group of girls led by an upper classperson during one of our freshman orientation events, and I was lagging behind.

This was typical for me at the time, due to an irrepressible shyness.

There was another straggler with me, but it was clear that her issue was more to do with being short and somewhat pigeon-toed. Every so often she would trip over her own feet, which I found amusing enough to make me forget my own social discomfort. We started up a conversation and within a few minutes were debating some some horrifically taboo point regarding freedom of choice. It was then that I knew that this girl would be my friend forever. We didn’t agree on anything, but we became inseparable anyway. A year later, after a mutual friend of ours fixed me up on a disastrous blind date, Claudia sensed there was a need for me to break out of my comfort zone. It was she who rummaged through my book bag to find Mr. Disaster’s number and dialed him before shoving the phone in my face.

Five years later, she stood next to me as I 74

married that man. Three years after that, she stood by me to serve as godmother to my first child when he was baptized, and my second child three years after that. And on and on it goes.

Claudia always had health problems.

She was born with a genetic disorder that almost led to her death at the age of 8.

Instead of killing her, it left her with one lung and the inability to bear children.

That didn’t stop her from devoting her life to children anyway (my children and everyone else’s). She chose a career as a pediatric psychiatric nurse practitioner, treating some of the most difficult-to-reach people walking the planet — adolescents with mental illness.

She didn’t value the things so many of us hold in high esteem, such as wealth or physical strength or beauty. It was all I could do to get her to take a walk, let alone get to the gym. At the end of the day what mattered to her was a bag of chips, a good crime drama, and spending time with her dogs. She also had a thing for Star Trek. And that was one thing we had in common. In our youth, it was not entirely uncommon to find us at a Trek convention.

Now that I am 50, with her help, I’m not afraid to proclaim my love of all things science fiction, Star Trek especially.

After the birth of my fourth child, things for me began to get really messy. My ability to juggle home, four kids under age 10, and my career as a physician began to unravel. I was running on that hamster wheel so fast that I lost touch with most of my family and all of my friends, including Claudia. She was also going through some soul-searching of her own at that time, which led to the breakup of one of two long-term relationships that she ever had.

At the time, I would have said I was too busy to keep in touch. But that was just an excuse. The truth was, I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t have the ability to be there for anyone else. Once I got my act together a few years later, I was too ashamed to reconnect with the friends I thought I had lost. Barnard came to my rescue once again and gave me an excuse to get in touch with Claudia. I called her after getting my email invitation to our

25th Reunion. She was ecstatic to hear from me, and we picked up right where we left off. At that point, my kids were a little older, so I was able to spend the occasional weekend in the city to see a show or go to dinner with her, and she was able to drive out to see me and spend time with my kids.

In January 2017, Claudia began to develop problems with her speech. In June of that year, she was diagnosed with bulbar ALS (a form of Lou Gehrig’s disease), and she lost her fight to this terrible illness on January 8 of this year. I was fortunate to be able to stand by her in her final years of suffering as she had once stood by me. I only hope I can face God with the same courage that I witnessed in her once she understood and accepted her fate.

I am writing this to all you Barnard folks out there so that you might recognize the miracle that is friendship, that the gift our school has bestowed on us has been so much more than just a quality education.

So, go call (or text or email) that friend you haven’t seen in a while, and don’t be afraid that the kids might not get their homework done or that the house is a mess or that the office has left three voicemails for you.

Einstein may have said there are only two ways to look at the world: that nothing is a miracle or that everything is a miracle.

Claudia was a miracle, my best friend, and a fierce Barnard woman.

She was the Ethel to my Lucy, the Louise to my Thelma, my Dr. Watson, my Mr. Spock.

I hope you’ve been lucky enough to have one, too.

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Opposite page: best friends Tracy Brobyn (L) and Claudia Melendez during their days at Barnard BARNARD MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 75

LAST IMAGE

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by Sara Eichler ’93

THE DIFFERENCE

“For me, being a Barnard woman means being part of a vital and lasting community — one that taught and nurtured me as a student and continues to do so six decades later.

I have seen firsthand the value of the Barnard educational experience, and I know that contributions from alumnae are essential.

Every gift, of any size, counts.

Join me, and make a gift to the Barnard Annual Fund today.” ­­— Sheila Gordon ’63

barnard.edu/give

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