Reminiscences of University Life Includes Five Barnard Authors
Annie Nathan Meyer
Virginia Gildersleeve
Margaret Mead
Zora Neale Hurston
Mary Gordon
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A remarkable group of writers, poets, scholars, scientists, and political leaders, including five associated with Barnard -- are represented in a new collection of excerpted memoirs, novels and other writings, My Columbia: Reminiscences of University Life . The wealth of personal recollection forms a portrait of Barnard, Columbia and the city of which they are a vital part.
Edited by Ashbel Green, the book published by Columbia University Press portrays various eras in the history of a great urban university through the eyes of more than 40 writers (and one artist). In one sense or another, many of these authors came of age at Columbia or Barnard.
Among the Barnard writers are alumnae, faculty and others associated with the College, including Annie Nathan Meyer, the author who was instrumental in founding Barnard in 1889; Virginia Gildersleeve, Barnard's dean from 1911 to 1947; Margaret Mead, the most influential anthropologist of her day; Zora Neale Hurston, a writer and Barnard's first African-American student; and Mary Gordon '71, bestselling author, O. Henry Award winner and the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard.
Meyer, writer of plays, fiction and memoirs, enrolled in Columbia's Collegiate Course for Women and became an ardent advocate for women's education.
Meyer set about the creation of a women's college in New York City. She called for the establishment at Columbia of an "affiliated" women's institution, modeled after the Harvard "Annex" (later Radcliffe). On her husband's signature, she leased quarters at Madison Avenue and Forty-fifth Street. In September 1889 Barnard College opened its doors.
Meyer's named the institution after Columbia's recently deceased president, F. A. P. Barnard. Her book Barnard Beginnings (1935), which is excepted in My Columbia , is an engaging chronicle of the college's early years and an important document in the history of American higher education.
She writes: "I confess to a pride in having defended the affiliated college at a time when it was neither popular or understood. To me nothing in the education of women mattered so much as the creation of right standards, and this was effected by the establishment of the affiliated college. My faith was surely justified, for in 1891 I was happy to proclaim (to the Council of Women in Washington) as an established fact: 'Barnard College is Columbia.'"
It was Meyer who was also instrumental in bridging the racial gap in higher education. Meyer's friendship with Zora Neale Hurston led to a scholarship for Hurston at Barnard, where she studied under the great anthropologist Franz Boas and mastered the social arts as practiced during the Harlem Renaissance. Over the course of her life, Hurston would publish several dozen essays, short stories and poems, and seven books. Nine more books--essays, folklore, short stories and a play--would appear in print posthumously, following Alice Walker's "rediscovery" of Hurston in the 1970s.
Hurston's excerpt in My Columbia is her correspondence letters to Meyer taken from the book Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters , collected and edited by Carla Kaplan.
Hurston writes in one letter dated Nov. 10, 1925: "All, everything I owe to you. I strive so much harder now for those things that I want. You see, being at Barnard and measuring arms with others known to be strong increases my self love and stiffens my spine."
Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve began her career as a crusader for global women's rights and human rights at Barnard College, where, as the dean of Barnard for over 30 years, she fought for Barnard students to receive equal access to all areas of Columbia University. Gildersleeve became the only female American delegate to the San Francisco conference that drafted the Charter of the United Nations. Additionally, The Virginia Gildersleeve International Fund, which benefits women in developing countries, is named after her.
Her 1954 memoir, Many a Good Crusade , provides this excerpt from when she was a student a Barnard: "It was already obvious that of all the excellent education I received from Barnard College by far the most valuable part was experience in human relations, the development of an ability to know and understand people of various kinds, to appreciate them and to enjoy helping to organize them."
Mead was arguably the most renowned anthropologist of all time, contributing to the development of the discipline, as well as introducing its insights to thousands of people outside the academy. Her work continues to contribute to the understanding of people around the world today. A prolific writer, she produced 44 books and more than 1,000 articles.
Mead graduated from Barnard and received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1929. While attending Barnard, she developed a keen interest in anthropology. It was there she met Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas, who became intellectual influences on Mead at Columbia. She wrote Coming of Age in Samoa that became an instant best-seller in 1928. Her work addressed problems of child rearing, personality and culture and was notable for including the perspectives of women and children.
Her 1972 memoir, Blackberry Winter , recalls her days at Barnard.
Mead writes: "In the autumn of 1920, I came to Barnard, where I found -- and in some measure created -- the kind of student life that matched my earlier dreams. In the course of those three undergraduate years friendships were founded that have endured a lifetime of change, and by the end of the those years I knew what I could do in life."
For many writers, the places in their past are great storehouses of memory, meaning, and purpose. This is certainly true for Gordon, who ponders some of the significant spaces that have formed and informed the geography of her soul. Gordon's years at Barnard offered her a chance to find her home in the world: New York City. Her autobiographical collection of essays, Seeing Through Places , charts the author's path from difficult childhood to adulthood, success, and self-knowledge by looking back at the places that were central to her development as a woman and a writer.
Gordon writes: "I remember seeing the green roofs of Columbia and feeling a sense of rightness that stayed with me as I crossed the street to Barnard's Milbank Hall, where I climbed the marble staircase to the admission's office. From there I was sent to Barnard Hall, where English classes were. I got off the elevator and looked in the mirror on the fourth floor of Barnard Hall. I said to myself, Yes, I'm here.
"Thirty-two year later (almost the entire life span of Jesus Christ) I stand in front of the same mirror, a teacher now, waiting for the same elevator. And again I say to myself, Yes (but perhaps with more emphasis on the monosyllable, yes, I'm here."
My Columbia (2005) was published by Columbia University Press and includes works from luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Patrick Buchanan, Paul Auster and Herman Wouk.
—Glenn Slavin
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