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.
When Columbia College began admitting women, it was clear that student life would change dramatically, and immediately. But the move to coeducation also brought slower, more gradual changes to another facet of Columbia: academic life.
“All of a sudden, academically, curricularly, things were happening,” Columbia College Dean of Academic Affairs Kathryn Yatrakis, GSAS ’81, said. “There was more attention paid within the Core Curriculum to include the Virginia Woolfs in literature.”
In addition to the inclusion of more female authors in course syllabuses, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender was eventually established, and academic departments gradually started to become more aware of how women could provide insights to research projects. But Yatrakis—who was a political science professor at Barnard in 1982, when Columbia College made the decision to become coeducational—said that these curriculum changes were deliberately implemented slowly.
“While it didn’t happen immediately, you did have, soon after, people thinking about women’s studies,” she said. “It wasn’t something that was immediately integrated into the curriculum. But, over the years, it has really changed tremendously.”
History professor Alice Kessler-Harris said that while it took five years for Columbia to establish the Institute for Research on Women and Gender after the coeducation decision, women’s studies is a growing discipline at Columbia.
“I’ve had a good deal of input and contact with both the curricular and research sides,” Kessler-Harris, a professor at the institute, said. “Mainly, the institute has been a teaching institute and in recent years it had developed a research arm.”
Provost Emeritus William Theodore de Bary, CC ’41, MA ’48, and Ph.D. ’53, an East Asian studies professor who has taught at Columbia since 1949, said that Columbia’s decision to open its gates to women reflected a “general trend in American college.”
De Bary said that while the Core did change slightly after women began enrolling in the college, he maintained his same teaching style. He was already used to teaching female students because of cross-registration with Barnard, the School of General Studies, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
“In other words, we had a university committee that sponsored Barnard, GS, Engineering, as well as the College,” he said. “So we were already getting female students.”
Both de Bary and Yatrakis believe that Columbia’s curriculum changed for the better because of coeducation. Yatrakis said that even if the changes were slow, it was only because “the academic world is, in a sense, a slow and diligent one, and it’s that way for a purpose.”
“It has to be deliberate and it has to be careful because you’re setting the stage for future knowledge,” she said.
Likewise, Kessler-Harris said the slow growth of women’s studies at Columbia does not reflect student and faculty indifference. Many of the institute’s activities are extracurricular, she added.
“I think that the relatively slow rate of the growth of the curriculum doesn’t suggest much about the importance of the institute itself,” she said. “There are a bunch of things that go on that are not in the formal bounds of the curriculum.”
The institute and Barnard’s women’s studies department also collaborate on some projects, working to ensure that the discipline has a strong presence on campus.
“There’s no doubt that the curriculum on both sides became stronger and much more flexible,” Yatrakis said. “I think Barnard has been strengthened by this decision as well.”
jeremy.budd@columbiaspectator.com
Check out the rest of the coeducation special issue here.
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