Barnard robber barons

Barnard is a soulless corporation that turns its profit from impersonating an anti-corporate, ultra-humane social institution. In the 2 1/2 years since I started attending, this much has become clear to me. While the school waxes lyrical online and in visits across the country about its unique women’s college sensibility and flexibility and support for its students, the school as a matter of habit takes students’ money in the most underhanded of ways without justifying its expenditures. Such is the Barnard deception, and it will not change as long as there are prospective families to positively reinforce the gimmick with the power of their purses.

If you go to Barnard, you are required to be on a meal plan ranging anywhere from $300-$1800 a semester, depending on where you have the good (or bad) fortune to live. This is accessible information, viewable online to prospective students and listed plainly in tuition bills. But that was not the case upon its inception. Rather than gauge students’ feelings and then grandfather them out, or not, accordingly, Barnard introduced the policy abruptly and proceeded to calmly assuage objections with a wealth of reassuring and grandiose claims: “A points-based campus convenience store”; “quality food” (i.e. not ubiquitously B-rated dining choices); “medical accommodation” (i.e., exemptions for students with expansive food allergies or eating disorders). The meal plan in practice did not include any of these provisions, which were unsustainable from the onset, and allergic students across the campus shrugged their arms in a collective “what the [frick]” gesture, while Dean Denburg confirmed that no real convenience store was ever to come to pass.

This year, as many know, Barnard decided it would cancel the existing part-time graduated tuition option for last-semester students, under which they could earn their last few credits while paying part-time rates. Barnard knew in the policy crackdown there would unavoidably be current students with no choice but to stay the semester, under the unexpected financial burden of full-time tuition. Strangely, Barnard defended itself with the claim that there would be exceptions at the case level, and yet the burden of these exceptions was shifted onto the academic departments. The school ignored criticism in a resolute abuse of its student-derived sovereignty: Not only was there no grandfathering-in, there was also no exception for juniors, who were too far along to transfer and would just have to make it work. Let’s take a look at how you, a junior, might make it work, after semesters of careful planning toward the old destination. You could presumably take credits you were never planning in order to simulate legitimacy. Or you could stack your schedule with creative fun classes: writing workshops in different genres, visual arts, dance, voice, acting. But then you couldn’t arrive at the designated full-time credits schedule in the first place: There are workshops-per-semester caps by department, and most arts workshops aren’t worth any credit anyway. At bottom, there is very little you can do to make that extra money not a waste when it is, ipso facto, a waste.

Make no mistake, world. Despite being a not-for-profit institution in the tradition of all great American colleges and universities, Barnard is in the business of making money. And once it’s convinced you to pledge your increasingly irrevocable financial allegiance, it will extract as much money as it thinks it can before you catch on and start asking questions. Recently, a group finally did start asking questions. They were the Occupiers, known for migrating from school to school to make a range of economic complaints. In preparation for the movement’s imminent arrival on campus, Barnard dispatched the NYPD and locked down Barnard Hall to patrol the whole school, monitoring the suspiciously surreptitious activity taking place in a Barnard building. Student activists—albeit some who had spoken out at many schools—enumerated and called Barnard out on its instances of financial exploitation in a student-run assembly. Rather than come in and join the dialogue, which was open and democratic in keeping with Occupy official procedure, administrators (including the dean) and public safety hovered right next door to “listen in” like the mature and pragmatic adults that they are.

In the meantime, at the safe and cuddly college-in-conjunction-with-university for which we pay $21,392 per semester, every semester, a robber attempted to mug a student in plain sight on a campus street.

The author is a Barnard College junior majoring in history.