Chris Baswell Remarks
Chris Baswell, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English; Acting Director, Film Studies
February 2, 2024
Trustees, colleagues, honored guests, and President Laura Rosenbury, I bear you greetings and welcome from the over 280 faculty at Barnard College. My own association with Barnard now stretches back 40 years, across five presidents, and nearly a third of Barnard’s entire history.
Today, in grateful acknowledgement of my predecessors, I wear the doctoral robes of the late Remington Patterson, who taught among us beginning in 1955 and was a professor of English and the Dean [of Faculty] of this College. I hope, then, that I can also speak in welcome from colleagues across those 40 years and, in turn, from a collective memory that reaches back across the thousands of faculty who have served Barnard since we began our collective task in 1889.
Just among our current cohort, we bring you a stellar faculty. We number winners of the Pulitzer Prize, two of us. Fellows of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Carnegie Endowment, the National Humanities Center. We pursue research funded by the NSF, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the Mellon Foundation. We have received career awards from the National Science Foundation and the Wellcome Institute, and we hold yet other honors too numerous and glittering to mention. I am breathless at my peers’ accomplishments.
Together, since 1889, your faculty has educated more than 50,000 remarkable women, helping them prepare to be distinguished novelists, social workers, performers, scientists, jurists, educators, filmmakers, physicians, breakers of glass ceilings, activists, protesters, who endlessly open new doors for the Barnard students who will succeed them.
Madam President, in the spring of 1945, your predecessor and our first dean, Virginia Gildersleeve, was depressed. She had spent months in San Francisco at a conference to draft the Charter of the United Nations, the sole female representative on the U.S. delegation. Among a panoply of nations sharing many common concerns and hopes for the U.N., she had encountered seemingly endless meetings and squabbles over concepts, procedures, and language. She found herself alone on a long elevator ride with the Soviet ambassador, Andrei Gromyko — at that time, a friendly face. She later wrote, “In a mood of some discouragement, I said, ‘Well, Mr. Ambassador, words, words, words.’ And Mr. Gromyko replied, ‘Well, words, words, words, but behind words is meaning, and behind meaning is life.’”
That last sentence remains a pretty good summary of what your faculty tries to teach every day. How to move from words or data to meaning, and from meaning to life. Endless meetings and squabbles notwithstanding, the San Francisco Conference did create a template for the United Nations — out of high emotions, even anger, common cause emerged. Your predecessor did sign the Charter of the United Nations.
Moving now through our own terribly difficult time, we bring you a faculty not unlike that conference — equally dedicated to finding our common cause within and by means of our bedrock commitment to open debate, freedom of speech, and due process in faculty governance, which also stretches back to 1889. From a cohort that began under the deanship of Virginia Gildersleeve and arrives in this room, and this day, we welcome you as the newest and my fifth president of Barnard College.