Barnard College

Barnard College is a single-sex, all-women educational institution in New York City. It was founded in 1889 and is affiliated with Columbia University, as Barnard students can take classes with Columbia students and officially their degrees are granted by the trustees of Columbia University. Barnard's other major affiliation is as a member of the Seven Sisters. Its campus is located between West 116th to 120th street.

Controversies.

Barnard has been the subject of several controversies, these are more or less all related to Barnard's standing with respect to the Columbia University undergraduate schools, and include:

• Barnard as a single-sex college - Barnard has been accused of being outmoded and even sexist in its attitude towards admissions, it has responded to these allegations by suggesting that a single-sex educational environment is necessary to foster educational equality for women. Barnard is unique amongst its Ivy-coupled peers in terms of its relationship to its parent Ivy. Institutes like Radcliife college, which once occupied a similar possition with respect to Harvard as Barnard does to Columbia today, was formally integrated into Harvard proper. Barnard has traditionally resisted such pressures to do the same since the 1960's. It has been argued that as the Columbia undegraduate division had an all-male admissions policy up until 1980, Barnard served a vital role in granting women access to a Columbia quality education. However since Columbia became co-ed in 1980, it has been subject to repeated accusations of being obsolete.

• Seperate but equal? - As was mentioned in the previous section, Barnard has fiercely defended its individuality in the face of attempts by Columbia to integrate it, however this has lead to tensions between their respective undegraduate student bodies. Barnard college degrees are officially granted by the trustees of Columbia university, despite its status as an affiliate rather than as a fully integrated undergraduate division. It has been suggested that this gives Barnard students the opportunity to claim that they attended Columbia proper and in doing so create unfair competition in the job markets. It has also been suggested that this is unfair given the average disparity between the entry qualifications (SAT I, II, ACT, AP etc) for undegraduates at the respective institutions. Another dimension of this controversy involved giving Barnard students the choice between barnard.edu and columbia.edu cubmail addresses, which in light of certain perceived privileges that could be derived from the use of a columbia.edu e-mail address, still remains the subject of furious debate on both campuses.

• Dormatory access - Another issue that has sparked controversy is the issue of dormatory access via swipe card. Barnard students, who traditionally have been unable to gail access to Columbia University dormatories through card-swipe have been vocal in demanding this right.

Columbia has a policy of not giving swipe access to its dormatories to students who are not housed through the lottery system, students in Barnard housing and in University appartment housing (which includes General Studies and graduate students) fall outside of this system, so are not typically granted swipe-access. The issue is complicated even more by the fact that some dormatories have a mixed student body, so this means that certain Barnard students get swipe-access and others don't. The need for a resolution to this problem that is satisfactory to all parties involved is an oft campaigned upon issue for student government, but the reality seems to be that a compromise is a long way off, as the university is resolute with regards to its swipe-access policy.

Map

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