And Barnard goes its own way as a college for women
Barnard College was founded in 1889 because Columbia would not accept women students. In the half-century that followed, Barnard became one of the top schools in the country, with a tough liberal arts curriculum, fiercely proud of its role in educating women. In the 1970s wave of mergers and alliances that saw other Ivy League institutions go coed, Columbia College held out as a school for men only. But last week Columbia finally broke with its tradition. The college announced that it will begin accepting female students by the fall of 1983. Barnard, meanwhile, declared that it will remain a college for women, but with a special relation to Columbia.
The announcements ended more than a decade of merger talk. In 1973 the two made an agreement for something called "integration without assimilation," which meant that students could share libraries and many courses. Columbia, in need of women students to increase its pool of applicants, was soon describing single-sex education as "an anachronism" and urgently proposing marriage.
Barnard kept replying that it wanted to maintain its independence, but it yielded some of its autonomy in return for the privilege of cross-registering for a number of courses. This agreement placed Barnard tenure decisions in the hands of a faculty committee in which Barnard was outnumbered by Columbia 3 to 2. Last fall when Ellen Futter, 32, became president of Barnard, she referred to the "strange and wonderful" relationship with Columbia. Strained was more like it. Hardly had she been chosen when Columbia University President Michael Sovern, 50, who had taught Futter at Columbia's law school, threatened that if Banard would not merge completely, Columbia would go coed by itself, thus competing directly for Barnard's students.
In the bargaining that followed, Futter gradually agreed to sharing classes, dormitories and dining halls. But having observed how coordinates turned into conglomerates (Brown and Pembroke, Harvard and Radcliffe, Tulane and Sophie Newcomb), she held out for control over faculty tenure appointments and most of Barnard's undergraduate degree requirements. On these issues the negotiations collapsed.