REMARKS

Allison Stanger
Russell Leng Professor of International Politics and Economics and Director of the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs, Middlebury College

It is an honor to have a few minutes to share some thoughts with you on this most distinguished of occasions and from this most distinguished of pulpits. Riverside Church is part of my family’s story on my father’s side. I have vibrant memories of hearing the late Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr. speak in this very place, booming out things that stuck with you like, “Remember, even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat.”

My first memories of Barnard, however, have nothing to do with Riverside Church or this great city. They instead take me back to my high school years in the Midwest, when I first read Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—in English language translation of course. At the time, I remember wondering what it would be like to read it in the original Russian. My best friend Sara did more than wonder. She went off to Barnard for college and learned Russian. For a teenager whose horizons were then framed by corn fields, Barnard might as well have been the moon, but I knew it had to be a place of quality. People who loved Dostoevsky and thought big went there.

It took me awhile, but I finally got focused on learning Russian at another quality institution of higher learning, where I had the privilege of meeting Debora Spar, who shared similar passions. I entered the Soviet Studies program the same year that Debora began the PhD program in Government, to which I would later migrate. Debora Spar was one of those people you met at Harvard and remembered. Her energy and intellectual exuberance were contagious. She loved discussing the big questions for hours on end and imparted that enthusiasm to her friends and her students alike. While she was publishing prolifically right from the start, she was also the most dedicated of teachers, even though Harvard’s incentive structure and culture did very little to reward it. She clearly was committed to teaching as an activity that mattered, and this was a bond we shared.

Harvard Business School and her scholarly interests temporarily took Debora away from that liberal arts realm where her passions resided. But now, in becoming Barnard’s president, she has truly come home. She has come home to the big questions. She has come home to liberal education. She has come home to her native New York City. It is deeply moving to see her back where she has always belonged, poised to make an enormous difference.

But what does it mean to “come home?” In some sense, the very act of founding Barnard was all about home. As the second sex, women were routinely excluded from the halls of higher learning. Barnard opened its doors, and a home was created for those then renegade spirits. Having a home is important, because home is the place that protects and empowers. In insisting that women had the same rights as men to be educated, Barnard forced society to examine its prejudices. The unreasonable slowly became reasonable, the unthinkable became commonplace. Barnard’s then radical act of imagining a new home played its part in unleashing a veritable revolution in the very way people thought about who deserved what and why. It was no small thing that happened here. So home matters.

Home matters especially for those who have experienced a history of domination.
Having a home and feeling at home are something the privileged and powerful are likely to take for granted and the excluded envy and crave. While there are many examples of that basic human need for, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, a home of one’s own, the ones that first spring to my mind are from Eastern Europe, a part of the world from which some of Debora’s ancestors hail. Take the national anthem of Poland, which expresses the anxiety of having home perpetually reshaped by external forces. It begins with the following line: “Poland has Not Yet Perished.” The Czech people, too, know the significance of home. Dominated by Austrians, Germans, and Russians, the opening lines of the national hymn of the former Czechoslovakia and now the Czech Republic begin with a question: Kde domov muj? Where is my home? And the answer, after several stanzas of rumination. Zeme ceska, domov muj. The Czech lands are my home.

Home is also at the heart of the educational enterprise itself. Students come to Barnard from all corners of the world and adopt this place as home for at least four years. They ponder questions that challenge all their previous conceptions of belonging and meaning. They embark on a journey to new understandings of themselves and the world they inhabit. Education broadens horizons, and in so doing, redefines home in myriad ways. And the transformation that education inspires is indelible, because an education is perhaps the only thing in life that no one can take away from you. Governments can come and go, fortunes can be made and lost, relationships can be forged and dissolved, but that education is yours, irrevocably, for keeps.

In characterizing education as a rethinking of home, I don’t mean that education by definition must involve the rejection of old identities and feelings of belonging, but simply that it will always influence the way these initial attachments are perceived and valued. And that process, while often painful, can in the end lead to a heightened appreciation of what home means. In a world where so many women do not have the privileges American women take for granted, Barnard’s frontier of engagement is likely to change in the years ahead. And as Barnard comes to terms with that global talent pool, ideas of home will no doubt broaden. T.S. Eliot captures this tension in the closing lines of the fourth of his Four Quartets, Little Gidding:
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

To arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Welcome home, Debora. Your life journey has brought you back to New York and to Barnard College. May you know this place well, expand its horizons, and share its values with a world that so desperately needs them.

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REMARKS:
» Provost Boylan, Call to Order
» Anna Quindlen's Remarks
» Lee Bollinger's Remarks
» Allison Stanger
» Kimberly Patton, Benediction
» Frances Sadler's Welcome
» Mary Gordon's Welcome
» Phyllis Ben's Welcome
» Sarah Besnoff's Welcome
» Investiture
» Debora Spar's Keynote Address