Virginia Gildersleeve - Dean of Barnard College

Dean of Barnard College

Throughout her tenure as Dean of Barnard College, Gildersleeve worked to advance women’s rights by championing their access to Columbia’ professional school and to the best professors. This included hiring Charles A. Beard, a young Columbia instructor in 1914 to teach Barnard's first course in American government so that Barnard graduates would be eligible to attend the Columbia School of Journalism. At the beginning of World War I, she hired the head of Columbia's anthropology department, Franz Boas, when he was threatened with being fired because of his objections to World War I. Professor Boas was a German Jewish immigrant and a Socialist. Among the Barnard undergraduates, Boas found several of the century's most outstanding anthropologists, including Margaret Mead.

Barnard had only a few African-American students during Gildersleeve’s tenure. Zora Neale Hurston was a lonely pioneer in 1925, who attended with substantial assistance from her literary mentor Fannie Hurst and Barnard College co-founder Annie Nathan Meyer. In the early 1940s, Dean Gildersleeve paid for the full scholarship of at least one African-American student from Harlem out of her own pocket.

Jews played a central role at Barnard from the beginning. Gildersleeve, disdained religious exclusivity, and refused to categorize her students in any explicit way. In the 1930’s, roughly 20 percent of its students were Jewish, compared to 6 to 10 percent at most other women's colleges. Barnard looks less open, however, when one considers that Jewish enrollment at Columbia College had reached 40 percent before World War I. According to Gildersleeve biographer Rosalind Rosenberg, at that point, both Columbia and Barnard began recruiting students from outside New York City and by evaluating all applicants on the basis of psychological tests, interviews, and letters of recommendation, as well as academic criteria, reducing the number of Jewish applicants accepted. In the two decades before World War II, this process of selective admissions reduced the percentage of Jewish students at both Columbia and Barnard to 20 percent.