A tale of two colleges

I am a strong, beautiful ... Columbia woman. I am proof that the notion of Barnard as a backup school is at least somewhat well-founded. To high school senior me, the existence of Barnard was the promise of the potential to be a part of the exalted institution that was Columbia University—even if my early admission application to Columbia College were to be cruelly rejected.

It wasn’t. I was CC ’15 by December of 2010, and by the time I stepped onto my campus on the east side of Broadway as a newly minted first-year, Barnard had fully transformed in my mind into the chief roadblock to my desire to date a hot Columbia boy. I had earned my Ivy League education, damn it, and Barnard students thought they could poach men off of my campus?

Maybe it’s because I now have a SEAS boy of my very own, but at this point in my first year I understand that the Barnard-Columbia relationship is a bit more complicated than the issue of boy-poaching. First off, Barnard is far from the separate entity I envisioned as a first semester CC student. Barnard women make up a significant portion of most of the clubs in which I participate. Despite the stereotypes, I can’t tell Barnard women apart from Columbia women. Recently I found myself grabbing dinner in John Jay with a young woman I was introduced to at a party, and amid conversation about Model UN and preferred dining halls, I realized she attended Barnard. The only effect this had on our conversation was that I finally learned what the Nine Ways of Knowing entailed.

Barnard women may have the Nine Ways of Knowing in place of the Core, but despite their inability to undergo the intellectually transforming experience of sitting through a semester of Frontiers lectures, they take many of the same classes as CC, SEAS, and GS students. This, along with the fact that many Barnard women tend to claim that they go to Columbia University on Facebook (technically true, perhaps, but in my opinion misleading), seems to suggest that Barnard is an institution inexorably connected with, but also striving to be, Columbia. The idea that Barnard functions only as a backup school for female wannabe-Columbians can be easily disproven by the existence of the Barnard early decision application. Many women want to go to Barnard—perhaps because they are attracted to the school and the first-rate education it provides. I discussed this very fact with another member of the equestrian club, who applied and was accepted early decision to Barnard. I can understand her motives, because she felt about Barnard precisely the way I did about Columbia when I applied.

The thing is, Barnard is a separate entity from Columbia and a superb college in its own right, ranked number 33 this year among liberal arts colleges by U.S. News. In fact, once upon a time Barnard women were the only kind of women around Columbia University, which turned coed in 1983. Before women were allowed into the College, Barnard students could take classes at Columbia and Columbia students could take classes at Barnard—much as they do today. Still, has Barnard been obsolete for the past 29 years? Obviously not. Barnard is valuable because of what it was and what it still is—a place for women to get an Ivy League-quality education when they weren’t always welcomed at other institutions.

They do make for some added competition in the already confusing dating scene that is college, but Barnard was on the west side of Broadway before women were even accepted at Columbia, so I’d say Barnard as an institution deserves to be here—in Morningside Heights, with its students walking between Broadway and Amsterdam—as much as Columbia.

The author is a Columbia college first-year. She is a writer for The Fed.