“It’s a girl!”
So read the first line of the announcement Barnard sent to students describing the name of the school’s new student center, slated to open at the beginning of the spring 2010 semester. On the sunny Monday afternoon of Barnard’s Spirit Day, in the shadow of the not-yet-complete structure, Barnard President Debora Spar announced the building’s new, and supposedly final, name—The Diana.
The building, originally known as the Nexus, acquired the nickname “The Vag” at last year’s Topping Out ceremony—also held on Spirit Day—when, amid a show of fireworks, Barnard announced that the chief donors to the project were P. Roy Vagelos and his wife, Diana Vagelos, a Barnard trustee.
Even comedian Chevy Chase of Saturday Night Live and Caddyshack fame poked fun at the building’s name—which many students found amusingly apropos for the student center at a women’s college—at the Barnard Scholarship Gala and Auction he emceed last summer.
The center—which will feature a curtain wall, black-box theater, architecture and art classrooms, dining facilities, and meeting rooms—will honor Diana T. Vagelos, BC ’55, who, along with her husband, donated $15 million to the Nexus. The name will also pay homage to Barnard’s spirit as a women’s college.
“Diana was, among other things, a goddess of female power,” Spar said. “Given the power of this gift to the College, the power of the women who study and graduate from Barnard, and given Diana’s generosity and dedicated service, it seemed the perfect name.”
The Diana will join the recently announced Athena Center, the growth of the Barnard Leadership Initiative.
“It’s definitely really exciting that we have a name now, and it’s a very appropriate name given that it happens to be, coincidentally, the name of Diana Vagelos and also ... the goddess and an example of female power,” said Shalini Agrawal, BC ’09 and the Student Government Association representative for university programming. “I think it works really well for our school.”
Barnard Board of Trustees Chair Anna Quindlen, BC ’74, added, “We are now goddess central, although given our spectacular students you could argue we always have been.”
Agrawal noted that the announcement was planned on the fly. It was decided only on Saturday that the building’s formal naming would coincide with Spirit Day, which also featured “I <3 BC” T-shirts, the Barnard Fan contest, Krispy Kreme donuts, and a barbeque.
“We had to put it together really quickly,” Agrawal said. “I thought it was very special that President Spar was able to make the announcement, and we had a good crowd there.”
Despite the familiarity with the deities at Barnard, student reactions to the names were mixed.
“I think buildings don’t have first names for a reason, and ‘The Diana’ does not sound good,” Nikhita Mahtani, BC ’11, said.
“There’s a good portion of the student body that wanted it to be named The Diana or some other name other than the Vagelos Center, and there was a good portion that wanted it to be called the Vagelos Center, so I think there was a pretty even divide,” Amreen Vora, BC ’09 and SGA vice president of student government, said. “People will still call it whatever they would like to even after the formal naming.”
“People are still going to call it the Vag,” Mahtani said. Or “they’ll ignore the ‘the,’ so it’ll be like, ‘I’m in Diana.’”
Ultimately, “What’s more important is appreciating the huge gift that Barnard got,” Vora said. “I’m really just excited that we got that money to build a new student center ... to build a new community on campus. I won’t be able to use it myself as a student, but I’m really glad that we have it for future students.”
Appended: An earlier version of this article called Roy Vagelos a Barnard trustee. He is not a trustee, but his wife, Diana, is.
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