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Campus memories
15 years! I just don’t know how I feel about the fact that we’re approaching our 15th reunion. On one hand, it feels like yesterday. When I run into old classmates out and about, I quickly snap back into being the girl I was back then – at least mentally, if not (sadly!) physically. Yet, so much has happened in this seemingly short amount of time. So I guess this reunion will be about building bridges of sorts. Re-introducing ourselves as the women we’ve become that sprang from the girls we were. At least that’s how I see it and perhaps that’s what this blog will be: One person’s view (or several since there are other bloggers) from the Bridge.
Have you been back to Barnard since that rainy commencement day in 1993. (Loved those ponchos – what glamorous grad photos we have, right?!?) Since I still live in the city I’ve been back a bunch of times and you know what sticks out to me the most? This is going to sound so stupid but here goes…
Remember when we were freshmen and Centennial (now Sulzberger) Hall was so brand spankin’ new? It was like a beacon of light to me – our version of the most luxe doorman building. (Okay – so I was a little sheltered – I also showed up to college wearing bicycle shorts with electric blue lightening bolts airbrushed on my talons!!) Today Sulzberger Hall feels so different. Instead of being a shiny new question mark, it’s a lovely lived-in exclamation point. You can feel the energy of all the classes that have lived, learned, and loved in there since us. It’s hard to explain why this shift affected me so viscerally. Perhaps it just gives our class a special memory of a time in Barnard’s history that was unique to us – especially since most of the buildings have been there for so long. Shiny, brand-new Centennial. Ten years ago, when my husband and I got married, we moved into a brand new apartment building on the west side and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that FINALLY felt like she was living in Centennial.
Okay – enough of my Centennial/Sulzberger obsession.
xxx
atoosa
Tags: Centennial, graduation, memories, Sulzberger
Well, I’d love to be able to attend reunion but will probably have to wait until the 20th. I don’t want to ruin this blog with complaints, but I wanted to mention how expensive the reunion events are. I was pretty flabergasted when I received the information in the mail this week. On top of paying for each individual event, staying in the dorm would be $150/night for my husband and I! And then there are airline tickets on top of it. Not all Barnard grads have been able to make big bucks since graduation. I remember Barnard as a down-to-earth place where I had diverse friends from every social and religious background. I hope the institution stays that way and doesn’t become too elitist. But I will miss seeing old friends–Jennifer Bullock, Michelle McCarthy, Sabera Choudhury, Elicia Lisk, to name a few.
–Adrianne (Bender) Hanson, Ph.D. (’93)
It rained on your graduation too? It poured for all of mine–even high school…and I have some lovely poncho pictures too.
I can’t believe this will be my 20th reunion. The mind does, indeed, stay the same, although perhaps a bit more forgetful now, but I chalk that up to lack of sleep from the combination of “having it all”–the marriage, family, career, friends and hobbies. Despite the passage of quite a few years, I’m the same person I was in kindergarten (and, thankfully, in some ways I’m not!)
What intrigues me most, now, is how we adapt as our world changes–and how hard it can be in some ways. Just as I watch my parent’s generation finding some challenge in downloading photos attached to emails or paying bills online, I wonder what will be normal to my son that might be hard for me to grasp. I work on websites, and watching the evolution of technolgies is constantly fascinating. It makes me feel that I’m never far from college, where my job was to learn.
Thanks to Barnard for helping us developing the critical thinking that has become perhaps more valuable than specific knowledge. Now that every fact is available after a boolean logic search, it’s the faculty to discern the best sources that becomes the most important tool.
I can’t believe it’s been ten years since graduation. It seems like just yesterday that I was prancing around the 4th floor of Barnard Hall in babydoll dresses, platform heels and Vamp lipstick (at 9 am!), writing a review of “My So-Called Life” for the Barnard Bulletin, and venturing out on the 1/9 for late night adventures.
I’m still in touch with many Barnard friends. I talk weekly with January Massin (she’s a psychologist now; it’s very convenient to have a therapist for a best friend!). I also lived next door to Alison Garfield, a roommate from Sulzberger, when we were both in grad school in Austin, TX.
One highlight of my alumnae-hood was when I took a day-long writing class with my Barnard advisor, Mary Gordon, in San Antonio a few years ago. I was getting my MFA at UT Austin at the time. (If only Barnard had a graduate school! I’d forgotten what a boy’s club the world beyond 116th and Broadway can be.) For one afternoon, I got to sit around a table with Mary Gordon again and listen to her talk about the “center” of a story, the moment when something pivotal changes in a character’s life. Ten years after graduation, I still feel that Barnard has been central to the narrative of my life thus-far.
Despite that controversial commencement speech ten years ago (when Joyce Purnick cautioned us that we “cannot have it all”), one gift from my education at Barnard is that I have the confidence (well, most of the time!) to define what success means to me.
Amy Boutell ‘98
Santa Barbara, CA
Gosh, Amy, your memory of Purnick’s commencement speech (I don’t know her and haven’t heard it) strikes a responsive chord in me. In 1958 when Millicent MacIntosh was our president, what she told us was quite the opposite! She said (sometime that spring before graduation, if I remember correctly): “Girls, I didn’t get married until I was 33 years old, and I had five children. Won’t you PLEASE think about something else?” It hit me like a ton of bricks, then, and definitely changed my course. However, having emerged at the other side of it all, I have to say that it was not, and is not easy! Everyone has to make compromises, all along the way, including the children. And it’s exhausting! But who would have it any other way? We are working on making law firms and investment companies friendlier to women taking off time and easing back in at their own pace.(I am a psychologist, not one of them, but am peripherally involved, and have a daughter who is an attorney with a small baby, so I have a particular interest in this)
What is “having it all”? Like my classmate, Judith Eckman-Jadow, I remember Millicent McIntosh encouraging us not to choose between family and career. In 1958, I welcomed that message — since it supported my intentions: go to graduate school, get a PhD, find a man and have a family.
In many important ways, I was lucky. All of the appealing men I met en route to the PhD were clearly wrong for me or didn’t want me. So I pushed along, mostly on a single track — and with help from a gifted shrink - - until I finished the degree (the summer before I turned 30) and met The Man a few months later.
The second stroke of luck was generally available to my graduate school cohort. We pursued our degrees at a moment of dramatic expansion in higher education. New institutions were opening all over the country and established ones were expanding. In June 1963, I quit my first teaching job, at the University of Vermont, and moved back to New York to look for something else. Within a month I had another appointment (not because I was brilliant, just needed) at Brooklyn College. Within the ensuing six years, I moved on to better jobs — twice at newly established colleges. The mid ’60’s and early ’70’s were a truly fortunate time to emerge as a pedigreed academic.
I was also unbelievably lucky with my husband. First, he provided me with an instant family: an eight year old “son” at home and a nineteen year old “daughter” away at college. Second, as a well-established artist and academic, Eli wasn’t competing with me. I was lucky that he had the generosity and self-confidence to encourage my career. Twice, in dramatic ways back in the ’70’s, he made difficult choices that allowed me to advance professionally.
Of course, I am a player in my life. I’ll take credit for the compromises I made (e.g., not having a child of my own and “settling” into a comfortable career at a third rate college). But I can’t take credit for the opportunities created for me by the expansion of higher education, an unusual husband, and second wave feminism.
Let me say a few words about the last of these “opportunity makers.” In 1970, at the age of 36, I was hired as (an academic) Dean of Students at a newly established women’s college in Upstate New York. Millicent McIntosh had been a founding trustee; Annette Baxter, my teacher and friend, was on the Board of Trustees. The Old Girls network was beginning to work for fortunate women like me who felt strongly about women’s education and even more strongly about innovative (and culturally critical) ways to educate undergraduates. One good break leads to the next. Three years later, I was hired as dean of interdisciplinary studies at a public college in New Jersey that was trying to nudge its curriculum into something like relevance. I was an affirmative action hire who happened, fortunately, to have degrees in American Civilization from Barnard and Yale.
Many of us in the Class of ‘58 were Feminists-in-Waiting. We had ambition and self-confidence. What we didn’t have in college was an analytic frame for understanding the complexity of our choices. Nor did we understand how the classic choices made by men (giving priority to careers) did not let them “have it all,” but rather gave them superior decision-making power (because the labor market rewarded them, and still rewards them, more than us) and the appearance of “having it all.” Today, many of those same men have learned in retirement or as grandfathers what they were missing.
Nobody easily has it all. Some of us, through accidents or determination or some combination of the two, suffer less with our choices. Or perhaps, at this age, with the hardest choices long past, I’m forgetting the way issues of gender and identity made me crazy on a regular basis and made me the feminist I am. Without the edge provided by those issues, without the anger, the marches, the consciousness-raising and the feminist conferences, I would not be returning to Barnard for my 50th reunion. Without matters of real importance to discuss with classmates and other Barnard women, I’d stay home or visit friends or see a few good movies.
I love Barnard and I am looking forward to reunion. Whenever I visit the campus I feel empowered and realize once again that I can have it all and do anything I put my mind to. Thank you Barnard!!!!
Well everyone, after years of working as a telecommuter on a variety of national and international commissions ranging from the cosmic: recommending the procedures for dismantling and decommissioning nuclear weapons (US Dept of Energy 1997) and reproductive health at work (Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Moscow 1998) to the mundane: (New Jersey Council on Developmental Disabilites, Women With Disabilities statewide committee seeking wheelchair accessible mammograms) and testifying about classroom implementation of laws governing special education to while raising a beautiful, smart daughter and a smart handsome but learning disabled son, at last I have been given something very rare indeed. My second chance.
What second chance, you may ask, if you were born to the privilege to which Barnard raised you, so that you had both the hard work of rearing children alone, the house in the National Register of Historic Places and the short time of five years as non tenured faculty in Columbia law–I hear you cry– writing five or six books over the years and recently, and participating in the writing of two winner US Supreme Court briefs in 2007– haven’t you done enough (or caused enough trouble already?) Shouldn’t you be sitting home resting on your ahem laurels knitting while watching tv and getting up only to change the DVD or VCR?
Now my dream of Returning to Geneva Switzerland and working in the International Labour Organization (as I did when I was just a puppy in law School decades ago) has come true. I am now living in Geneva Switzerland and I love every minute of the work.
I treasure the view from my office and I adore the the jet d’eau in the center of town. Even though it is water it somehow exemplifies for me the triumph of human potential.. human forces taming and controlling nature to make something beautiful. Barnard education has made all of this possible, I have no doubt.
Barnard let me study here before law school, had an alum introduce me to the UN library in person in the days when one needed to be shown around the library by a very knowledgeable librarian, made my written discussion of international laws and regulations governing occupational health as a human right part of my Senior Scholars Honors thesis (hopefully still gathering dust on a bookshelf in the Barnard Library). Believe it or not, Prof Juviler’s faith in me was not at all misplaced, my thesis he so skilfully advised is the blueprint for my own professional work almost a generation later.
Some things do take time, but we don’t move mountains here, as my mentor in the NORMES part of ILO, the very remarkable lawyer, K.T.Samson said looking out these very same Genevoise office windows musing about the future of human rights law (which was not even an official course in law school at the time), “We don’t move mountains here but we push, we push, and that takes time”.
I would be delighted to write or present about my work, because one of my tasks is to recruit Ten Thousand Experts for the network that will create the new web-based edition of the ILO Encyclopaedia. The best way to give you a glimpse is to send along this press release about a project from our office where I had a very miniscule role, but remain thrilled to be part of the team, (reprinted below). Let the facts speak for themselves. Thank you Barnard.
For more information, contact communication@ilo.org
For further information about participating in the Encyclopaedia, contact:
I.L. Feitshans JD and ScM, Coordinator Encyclopaedia
ilise@prodigy.net –OR— ENCYCLOPAEDIA@ilo.org
ILO and US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
agree to cooperate on expand ing safety and health at work
WASHINGTON (ILO News) ÿ The Programme on Safety and Health at Work and the Environment (SafeWork) of the International Labour Office (ILO) and the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) today signed an agreement aimed at expanding safety and health in the workplace.
The agreement foresees closer cooperation between the ILO SafeWork programme and NIOSH, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the area of occupational safety and health (OSH). The agreement was signed by Dr. Sameera Al-Tuwaijri, Director of the ILO SafeWork programme and Dr. John Howard, Director of NIOSH.
“Faced with the intolerable human burden of fatalities and global economic costs of work-related accidents and diseases, agreements like this one are significant steps towards improving OSH worldwide”, says Dr. Sameera Al-Tuwaijri, Director of the ILO’s SafeWork department.
“NIOSH is pleased to reaffirm our close working relationship with the International Labour Office by signing today’s agreement,” said NIOSH Director John Howard, M.D. “In today’s global marketplace, partnerships such as this are key for safer and healthier workplaces here in the U.S. and around the world.”
The agreement said that ILO SafeWork and the NIOSH “agree on the critical importance of the world of work in defining sound occupational safety and health (OSH) prevention policies and interventions in the workplace, and implementing strategies which expand protection to workers and their communities”.
“In this regard, it is noted that closer cooperation between SafeWork and NIOSH is desirable, subject to the strategic priorities and budgetary resources of each. SafeWork and NIOSH hereby agree to pursue finalizing a partnership agreement through their parent organizations, which will facilitate working toward common goals,” it said.
Under the agreement, NIOSH will support the ILO Encyclopedia of Occupational Safety and Health, including the identification of experts, writing, editing, reviewing and updating articles, and suggesting new topics and approaches to information and dissemination.
The ILO has adopted many international OSH standards, which cover a wide range of sectors and generic hazards. Prevention is at the heart of these standards and is embedded in the Promotional Framework for Occupational Safety and Health Convention, 2006 (No. 187) and its accompanying Recommendation (No. 197), which seek to promote a preventative safety and health culture and a management systems approach to occupational safety and health through national policies, systems and programmes developed in a tripartite context.
I can’t believe that I am about to attend our 40th reunion!! Forty years - where has the time gone?
As a member of the Class of ‘68, I started Barnard during the Civil Rights era and graduated at the height of the Viet Nam War and campus unrest. I took my final comprehensive exams in Milbank while police guarded the building. I got married just before graduation, the weekend the Dean of Columbia was locked in his office! Our plans and dreams were at the mercy of Steve’s local draft board.
Barnard was not my first choice of college. I grew up in Brooklyn, in a narrow Jewish world that I was anxious to flee. I had to commute during my freshman year and hated it. My father was a physician and was determined that I follow in his footsteps. He was constantly telling me that I wasn’t studying hard enough. I had no social life at all. When I complained, he warned me my only other option was to go to Brooklyn College. At least I was “escaping” across the East River on my daily commute, and was meeting new friends who weren’t from my limited home environment.
My world opened up when I managed to get into the dorms half-way through my freshman year, and I began to appreciate all that Barnard offered. By my sophomore year, I was able to get an off-campus apartment and really start to spread my wings. I continued to study biology, but two summers of research convinced me I’d prefer to go to graduate school rather than medical school. I met Steve Zimmerman (Columbia ‘67) at the beginning of my junior year, and we encouraged each other to study and to integrate our new-found knowledge into our lives. Steve was finishing his first year at BU Law School when we married. I spent my senior year, the year of my engagement, as a lab assistant. I spent my paychecks commuting to Boston on weekends.
I made several close friendships at Barnard. Grace Druan Rosman and I are still close and we see each other from time to time. I also occasionally see Sheila Belman Wilensky and Judy Kolatch Sonn when I visit Israel. Sadly, one of my dearest friends passed away last year. I met Ellen Pressman during freshman orientation, and maintained the friendship over the years despite the very different paths our lives took. She was single, an EdD school superintendant and charter school consultant, and lived in New Jersey. I was married, a mother and grandmother, a PhD biomedical research scientist and medical communicator, and lived in Denver, Colorado. And yet we found enough common bonds to stay closely in touch. She visited me in Denver, and attended my children’s weddings in Arizona and Florida. I visited her in New Jersey, most recently several months before she died. I miss her, and will really feel her absence at our reunion.
I have no regrets that I attended Barnard. The school gave me necessary tools to think critically, and problem-solving tools that I use to this day. I feel I grew with the school, and am thrilled with how it “matured” with the times. I am more attracted to it today than I was when I applied in 1963. I encouraged my daughter to apply (she didn’t)and enjoy talking about the school to prospective and current students and alums. I look forward to seeing old classmates, and comparing notes on what really happened to the Class of ‘68.