Keeping us Renaissance women

Dear President Spar,

We are writing to express our great disappointment at the choice of Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, as speaker at the 2011 Barnard College Commencement. Her appointment as the keynote speaker and recipient of the Barnard Medal of Distinction undermines the very values that our liberal arts education has taught us to cherish.

As two graduating seniors who are currently reconsidering whether we will attend our own commencement ceremony, we affirm that Barnard, as a liberal arts college, and not a business school, has inspired us by the wide range of forms that women’s leadership can assume. We have learned from and alongside women leaders: professors, scientists, writers, anthropologists, historians, artists, and politicians, to name a few. We ourselves occupy multiple leadership roles on campus: both of us are Writing Fellows, who guide Barnard students in the discovery and assertion of their own voice; one of us is a resident assistant, who builds community and serves as mentor and role model.

The selection of a commencement speaker from the high sector of the business world emphasizes a form of leadership to which we neither subscribe nor aspire. In your announcement of Sandberg as speaker, you celebrate Facebook as a company that “has reimagined human interaction and entirely changed the way we think about the world.” This romanticization of Facebook is misleading. Facebook is a business whose goal is not to foster human connections, but to make money. Furthermore, while we appreciate Sandberg’s commitment to women’s rights and equality in the workplace, her message does not resonate with us, for her advocacy focuses on a limited form of leadership in the high-salary sector of the business world. The college that we are graduating from is not the college that we entered four years ago. The fact that Sandberg will be rewarded for her work as a business executive with the Barnard Medal of Distinction speaks to a fundamental change that we see happening on our campus. The administration now advocates a narrow definition of women’s education, careers, and leadership—that to be a successful woman leader is to be a high-powered businesswoman.

The first sentence of the Barnard mission statement speaks to the values that we see deteriorating: “Barnard College aims to provide the highest quality liberal arts education to promising and high-achieving young women.” We are students who take this to heart. As English and comparative literature majors, our liberal arts education in the humanities means more to us than becoming businesswomen to make money­—we believe that leadership need not correlate with high salaries. The Bachelor of Arts degrees that we will be receiving in May represent the critical thinking and learning we have developed through our interdisciplinary education at Barnard. We are disappointed with the prospect of hearing from a commencement speaker who does not inspire and embody these liberal arts values.

We urge you, President Spar, to reconsider your choice of Sandberg, as well as your approach to leadership at Barnard. We urge you to look to the humanities and to the sciences, to the disciplines that comprise the heart of Barnard’s liberal arts education—professors and classmates in these disciplines are the ones who truly “changed the way we think about the world.”

Sincerely,
Penelope Meyers ’11 and Olga Fostiy ’11

Penelope Meyers is a Barnard College senior majoring in comparative literature. Olga Fostiy is a Barnard College senior majoring in English.