Today won’t be Avis Hinkson’s first day at Barnard College. The dean graduated from the college in 1984 and returns on Monday to begin her duties as Barnard’s new dean.
“I’m absolutely delighted to return to two places where I feel at home: Barnard and New York. I look forward to charting a new course in familiar territory and getting to know students, faculty, staff, and the Barnard of today,” Hinkson wrote in a statement to Spectator.
Hinkson is replacing Barnard’s dean of 17 years, Dorothy Denburg after Denburg was asked by President Debora Spar in July to instead take on the position of vice president for college relations.
For the past six years, Hinkson served as the director of the Undergraduate Advising Department at the University of California, Berkeley and was once a work-study student in Barnard’s admissions office.
According to Spar, Hinkson is very interested in devising a way to break students into smaller communities. These groups may function similarly to residential housing, something that Barnard “never will have because we don’t have the physical real estate for it,” Spar said. Hinkson will also be involved in the process of the reconsideration of library space on Barnard’s campus.
But for the most part, Spar said, she thinks Hinkson is “not coming in with a very specific list of priorities.”
“She’s going to come get the lay of the land, meet the student leadership, her students, her staff, get to know the colleagues across the street,” Spar said.
Lauren Harvey, BC ’12, said Hinkson is an unknown to many students.
“I don’t really know that much about the new dean,” Harvey said. “I’m sure she’s going to be great, I’d just like to know more about her and what her plans are for the college.”
Harvey added that she wished that the announcement of Hinkson’s arrival had been more widely publicized to students.
Hinkson will meet with students at a welcoming party scheduled for Monday morning in the Diana Center, and will also speak to faculty at a private reception later in the day.
Spar said she and the faculty are excited about Hinkson’s arrival and described her as a “very direct” leader.
“She is someone who is simultaneously a real people person but she also has a good sense of how to delegate and how to manage things,” Spar said.
Diana Rastegaveya, BC ’11 and a member of Barnard’s Student Government Association, said SGA will meet with Hinkson soon, just as they used to meet with Denburg.
“While no one can ‘replace’ Dean Denburg, the search committee for the new dean (which SGA president Lara Avsar sat on) clearly did a fabulous job, and we look forward to having an excellent working relationship with Dean Hinkson,” Rastegaveya wrote in an email.
Leah Messing, BC ’13, said she hopes Hinkson will bring experiences from both her time at Berkeley and as a student at Barnard in the ’80s.
“I know that she worked at Berkeley and was very well received by everyone there,” Messing said. “I hope that she fosters a larger sense of community at Barnard and creates more Barnard traditions.”
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