Strong or beautiful or something-or-other

Last week, the Huffington Post ran an op-ed by Tom Matlack titled “Are Women’s Colleges Outdated?” The essay explored the benefits of colleges like Barnard, which was the main subject of the piece. I wanted badly to love the article, but I found that difficult. Built on platitudes and statistics that were themselves outdated, it didn’t make a compelling or effective case for Barnard’s existence. But I didn’t think these faults were Matlack’s specifically. Rather, I heard in his article echoes of empty, self-protecting alibis that Barnard has told itself for as long as I’ve been here about all the possibilities that come with being a not-quite-women’s-college and not-quite-our-own, and I’ve begun to doubt the legitimacy of this kind of ambivalent public identity.

If there’s still a place for a women’s institution, why is it that we spend so much time defining ourselves relative to the all-encompassing, name-recognized monster University across the street? Whether this should be the case is another question, but in the recently released Barnard College Self-Study, we conceded that we spend a lot more time talking about Columbia than vice versa. Columbia could exist without us, but we couldn’t exist without Columbia. Not only does Columbia hold our degree-conferral power, but our library and gym hours are so unreasonably limited as to almost take it for granted that we’ll fall back on Butler and Dodge. And yet we claim we could exist alone because we’re supposed to be a bastion of women’s support, even though I know few people who have been to a BCRW lecture, looked at one of our Riot Grrrl zines, or taken advantage of any of the other features that distinguish Barnard. And as we almost boast, for the majority of Barnard regular-decision applicants, Barnard is the only women’s college on their list.

There are other contradictions: strong and beautiful. Isn’t strength just inner beauty? Why do we need to single out “beautiful,” anyway? We claim that these strange juxtapositions or even outright contradictions allow us the “best of both/all worlds.” Our school is rife with these kinds of incongruities that at first seem full of promise in their deliberate vagueness but quickly and often show themselves to be hollow in that vagueness. And I wouldn’t bring these things up if there were evidence that our formula were still working, but it’s not entirely clear that there is. In strangely optimistically couched terms, the Self-Study glorifies the challenge for students “to find their own definition of the Barnard experience.” We stand for everything at once. But I have a hard time seeing how that makes us stand for anything at all, and I don’t think I’m the only one. I can’t imagine that any other school would prompt the same feeling of immense alienation or lost-ness that I’ve heard echoing from the mouths of nearly every Barnard student I’ve met, and I wonder if anyone would be surprised to discover that this is related to that “challenge.”

I want so badly to love Barnard, but I feel like there’s something disingenuous in insisting on being so many things at once. Matlack teases that “perhaps women’s colleges don’t exist solely for the benefit of their male guests,” but I have to wonder who we’re really existing for after all, or if we’re existing just to defend our right to existence. We need to recognize the hypocrisy of our all-encompassingness and stop couching it in false, deceptively promising idealism. Until then I’ll have a hard time believing that our college, like Matlack’s article, is anything more than a convenient collection of empty platitudes.

The author is a Barnard College sophomore majoring in history.