30 years ago, admins on both sides of Broadway faced tough decisions

This story is part of a special issue examining the Barnard-Columbia relationship, 30 years after Columbia College decided to go coed and Barnard decided not to merge with Columbia. Check out the rest of the issue here.

Just over 30 years ago, Barnard’s trustees were faced with a decision—to merge Barnard with Columbia, or to let it remain a women’s college.

At the time, Barnard Dean Avis Hinkson, BC ’84, was a student representative to the trustees, charged with bringing the student voice to their discussions. Looking back at the merger discussions now, Hinkson recalled that the trustees did not take the decision lightly.

“They wanted to be sure that whatever decision was made, that it was well thought through from all perspectives, and that it was not simply an emotional response, but that it was a decision that was come to with real preparation and real forethought, and that we were taking everything into consideration—our financial ability to move forward, our academic programming, our facilities, that we were really assessing all of it as we came to our final decision,” she said.

At the same time, then-Columbia University President Michael Sovern, CC ’53, was trying to figure out the best way to turn Columbia College into a coeducational institution. He too was faced with two options—begin admitting women directly, or pursue a merger with Barnard.

But, according to Hinkson, most of Barnard’s student leaders ultimately opposed a merger, as did the trustees. For Sovern, the merger option was never really on the table.

“Barnard was opposed to the merger,” he said. “I didn’t consider it because I knew it couldn’t happen. If Barnard had been interested, I would have prepared a careful analysis of the implications and might well have been in favor of it—but since it was impossible, I didn’t bother with it.”

In January 1982, the University announced that Columbia College would start admitting female students the next year. And as they look back on the decisions they helped make 30 years ago, administrators on both sides of Broadway say that their choices were the right ones.

“The college is one of the most selective in the country now, and Barnard seems to be very attractive to young women,” Sovern said. “So it worked out just as I hoped.”

The merits of coeducation
By 1972, every Ivy League school besides Columbia had either become coeducational or merged with a women’s school. Cornell University was the first—it began admitting female students in 1870—and Harvard University and Dartmouth College were last, with Dartmouth admitting women and Harvard College merging with Radcliffe College in 1972.

By the early 1980s, every school at Columbia besides Columbia College was coeducational, and there was a lot of support among administrators for making CC coed as well. Sovern, who currently teaches at Columbia Law School, said that the desire to go coed stemmed partly from a need to curb gender discrimination.

“A university’s policies should reflect values we hold dear, and one of them is equality of opportunity,” Sovern said. “So the idea of keeping our doors closed to women on principle I found offensive.”
But, Sovern added, coeducation’s “practicality” was another important factor.

“The school would be clearly much better off if women were admitted,” he said. “I believe from my freshman days that the experience would be better if I had coeducation.”

History professor Fritz Stern, who at the time was provost for Arts and Sciences, agreed, adding that Columbia’s decision to accept women “increased and improved the applicants pool.” American studies professor Roger Lehecka, CC ’67 and Columbia’s dean of students from 1979 to 1998, said that both issues—gender equality, and improving Columbia’s student body—were important.

“I expressed those opinions to anyone who would listen,” Lehecka said. “And it was easier at the time to talk about the ways in which being all-male was bad for the students who were here at Columbia than it was to talk about the opportunities we were denying to female students.”

Financial incentives
Columbia had also considered a merger with Barnard for financial reasons.

In her 2004 book, “Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think About Sex and Politics,” Barnard history professor Rosalind Rosenberg wrote that in 1971, Columbia University President William McGill called on then-Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences George Fraenkel to come up with a plan to decrease Columbia’s deficit. Fraenkel proposed increasing class size and freezing hiring, Rosenberg wrote, but he also said that if Columbia absorbed Barnard, it could use Barnard tuition to pay instructional and library costs. He described Barnard as a financial “vehicle for flexibility,” given that Barnard professors were paid less than Columbia professors and were more likely to not be tenured.

According to Rosenberg, this idea met with staunch criticism from both sides of the street.

Some Barnard professors and administrators were worried about the effects of a merger from an academic standpoint. At the time, all tenure decisions for both schools were made by a panel of three Columbia professors and two Barnard professors. On top of that, Rosenberg wrote, feminists at Barnard were concerned about male dominance within Columbia’s Core Curriculum.

To merge or not to merge
Barnard Vice President of College Relations Dorothy Denburg, BC ’70 and a Barnard administrator in the early 1980s, said she was in the “adamantly opposed to merger” faction.

“There were some people who felt very strongly that we should merge, and some people on the faculty who felt as passionately that we shouldn’t,” said Denburg, who also served as Barnard College dean from 1993 to 2010.

Hinkson said that in examining the question of merging with Columbia, Barnard’s trustees looked at what had happened to other women’s colleges that merged with male institutions. She pointed to Radcliffe, which was essentially dissolved by Harvard after the two schools merged, as an example of a women’s college that had not been served well by a merger.

“Although there was a merger, you didn’t really see a partnership and you didn’t really sort of continue the role and the presence of the women’s college,” Hinkson said. “And so I think when we looked at situations like that, we really felt that who Barnard was, and is today, would have been substantially changed if there was a merger.”

Lehecka believes that a Columbia and Barnard merger would have put Barnard in a difficult position—especially concerning the Core Curriculum.

“That would have been a very significant either opportunity or burden, depending on the faculty member you talk to,” he said. “But Barnard faculty would have had to adjust in a much more significant way than Columbia faculty would have to adjust.”

According to Rosenberg, Columbia College Dean Carl Hovde decided that women should be admitted to Columbia in 1969, but this plan was opposed by McGill, who became Columbia’s president a year later. In 1975, Columbia College Dean Peter Pouncey— Hovde’s successor—announced a faculty vote on whether to admit women, but McGill forbade the vote, arguing that it would harm Barnard.

According to Rosenberg, Columbia tried throughout the 1970s to increase cross-registration between the two schools and to open up housing and dining exchanges. But by decade’s end, Barnard students were still taking only 20 percent of their classes at Columbia, largely due to their distinct degree and major requirements.
Ultimately, opponents of a merger prevailed.

“There was real belief at the time that Barnard had the foundation and the wherewithal financially, and with our faculty and our academic programs and our alums, and all of that, that we could maintain our independence and be successful at it,” Hinkson said. “And Columbia, obviously, could go coed and be successful at it.”

Coeducation gains ground
In 1977, Arnold Collery succeeded Pouncey as Columbia College dean and appointed a committee to examine the effects coeducation would have on Columbia. The committee, which was chaired by chemistry professor Ronald Breslow, concluded in April 1981 that Columbia should maintain its class size and consider male and female applicants equally.

English professor Michael Rosenthal, an associate dean of Columbia College from 1972 to 1989, said that Breslow’s committee paid particular attention to the argument that Columbia becoming coeducational would harm Barnard.

“The issue was always the protection of Barnard,” Rosenthal said. “And with the Breslow report making clear that [with] colleges that had been formally single sex ... there had been no terrible damage done to the sister school, that argument was destroyed.”

The only committee member not to endorse its conclusions—and the committee’s only female member—was then-religion professor Gillian Lindt. In her dissenting report, Lindt—who would go on to be dean of both the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of General Studies—cited a lack of sufficient evidence that Barnard would not be harmed, and argued that Columbia needed more time to make the transition to coeducation.

Lindt said she was bothered by the sexist attitude of her colleagues on the committee. One man, she said, argued that every Columbia College man should have a bed and a women to go with it, and another suggested that women should make up no more than a third of Columbia students.

“It was never that I was opposed to it,” Lindt said. “It’s just the timing and the education that I thought was important.”

The coed choice
According to biology professor Robert Pollack—Columbia College’s dean from 1982 to 1989, and a key player in the implementation of coeducation at Columbia—it was the Columbia College faculty that officially proposed that Columbia go coed.

“The faculty of Columbia College saw admissions applications were falling, were smaller than Syracuse University, [and] that though we were a member of the Ivy League, we were not competitive,” Pollack said. “And the faculty of Columbia College proposed that this was so because no woman could come to Columbia College and not many men wanted to go to an all-male school.”

And by October 1981, the Barnard and Columbia trustees had reached a tentative agreement: Barnard and Columbia students would share housing and dining facilities, Barnard students would be required to go through Columbia’s Core Curriculum, and cross-registration between the two schools would continue.

But according to Rosenberg, the agreement was panned by both Columbia and Barnard faculty.

Ultimately, Sovern—who had taken over as Columbia’s president in 1980—agreed with Barnard’s new president, Ellen Futter, that Barnard would maintain control over its own curriculum, according to Rosenberg. The trustees also revised the agreement further—Barnard would maintain control over its faculty search process, Columbia would give up its majority voting power on tenure review committees, and Barnard athletes would be able to join Columbia’s women’s sports teams.

Columbia announced in January 1982 that Columbia College would become coeducational, and the college admitted its first women for the fall of 1983.

The effects were immediate. Sovern emphasized that before the merger, Columbia was “suffering badly in the competition for applicants,” and in 1983, 90 percent of women admitted to both Barnard and Columbia chose to attend Columbia, Rosenberg wrote.

Denburg called the decision to go coed “a reflection of Columbia’s problems.” She was relieved that the schools didn’t merge.

“It was a decision made out of duress. They were the last of the Ivies and their applicant pool was hurting, and frankly, to me, it was like a question of might makes right,” Denburg said. “I mean, just because they have problems, they’re going to swallow us up? No.”

Looking back
Thirty years since Columbia decided to go coed, faculty and administrators say that the decision has further strengthened the two schools. In retrospect, Denburg said, Columbia’s decision to go coed did not significantly affect Barnard.

“I think the actual arrival of women on campus turned out to be less of a big deal than we anticipated,” she said.

Hinkson said that among Barnard students at the time, Columbia’s decision to go coed was “fairly expected.” Whatever happened, she said, it was clear that there would be female students at Columbia College.

“I don’t know if anybody had the expectation that if we didn’t merge, that Columbia would not admit women,” she said.

For Barnard history professor Robert McCaughey—the author of “Stand, Columbia”—one of the biggest consequences of coeducation was that it “left Barnard in a bit of a pickle” when it came to recruitment.

“It had certainly gotten used to recruiting students as an institution that was meant to be seen as quite separate from Columbia,” said McCaughey, who has been at Barnard since 1969. “And it certainly had never been in the business of competing with Columbia for students.” But by the early 1990s, he said, Barnard had learned how to recruit students as a college uniquely tied to, but still distinct from, Columbia.

Pollack believes that Barnard is “much stronger” now than it was before coeducation.

“This was not an either-or outcome,” he said. “This was a net good thing for both places.”

Jessica Stallone contributed reporting.

madina.toure@columbiaspectator.com

Check out the rest of the coeducation special issue here.