Barnard College history

Hurston was born on January 15th, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama.

Brinckerhoff had offered $100,000 in 1892, on the condition that the Barnard acquire land within 1,000 feet of the Columbia campus within the next four years.

In May 1893, Barnard College graduated its first class of eight seniors with appropriate fanfare.

The Barnard trustees purchased land between 119th-120th Streets after receiving funds for that purpose in 1895.

Her family wanted her to become a debutante, but Elsie Clews Parsons from the Class of 1896 chose to go to Barnard and later became the first woman elected president of the American Anthropological Association.

The first classes at the new campus were held in 1897.

As the college grew it needed additional space, and in 1903 it received the three blocks south of 119th Street from Anderson who had purchased a former portion of the Bloomingdale Asylum site from the New York Hospital.

Students' Hall, now known as Barnard Hall, was built in 1916 to a design by Arnold Brunner.

Margaret Mead transferred to Barnard as a sophomore English major to join the Class of 1923.

The Barnard College Committee on Transfers in 1925 recorded that Hurston would be transferring into the Barnard College with two remaining years to complete her degree and one elective credit for general science and that she earned while at Howard.

Megumi Yamaguchi Shinoda, Barnard Class of 1928, was the first Asian American woman to graduate from Columbia Medical School

One particularly jarring example of Hurston’s experience and the sentiment of the time towards black women is expressed in a letter from the Dean of Bryn Mawr College to Dean Gildersleeve from 1930, just two years after Hurston’s graduation.

Zora Neale Hurston Documents, Barnard Archival Library, 1934 Scholar and Feminist Online.

Meyer served as a trustee of Barnard College from its founding until her death in July of 1950.

Ronald Reagan and the first American woman to serve as ambassador to the United Nations (1981–85).

Though Columbia began admitting women in 1983 and wanted to incorporate the women’s college into its student body, Barnard maintained its commitment to single-sex education.

At the 1984 Republican National Convention, she made headlines after giving a speech in which she called Democrats the “blame America first” party.

In 1985 Kirkpatrick resigned from her position and officially joined the Republican Party.

The announcement in April 1993 of Ellen Futter’s planned resignation after thirteen years as president of Barnard to accept the presidency of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) surprised some senior administrators and most faculty members, but apparently not the trustees.

After the publication of her critically-acclaimed novel Ask Again, Yes in 2019, Mary Beth Keane ’99 found herself in an unlikely place: in front of the millions of live viewers of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.