Meeting the Moment

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Americans will head to the polls just days after this issue of Barnard Magazine lands in your mailboxes and inboxes. The election will be a historic and consequential moment for our country, for higher education, and for women.

In recent years, we have witnessed our universities and democratic institutions undermined by misinformation, distrust, and binary thinking. Yet higher education — and Barnard in particular — is in a unique position to stand strong against this current of fear and division by doing what we do best: teaching and learning, asking questions and listening to each other’s answers, and bridging differences by embracing our shared experiences.

The Barnard community has long engaged in complex analysis, even when we disagree, and Barnard remains committed to healthy, productive conflict. At this year’s Convocation, I emphasized that we achieve our mission of engaging in intellectual risk-taking and discovery by welcoming and supporting students, faculty, and staff from different backgrounds and with different points of view. Diversity is integral to our success, as it helps us to dig deeper, to look at the world in new ways, and to be more nuanced and creative in our approaches to society’s opportunities and challenges. These are the core principles of a healthy democracy as well, and Barnard will continue to lead the way.

This election is also significant for reasons that go beyond the fraught politics of the moment. In August, Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, shattering glass ceilings as the nation’s second woman, first Black woman, and first South Asian person to do so. A number of pathbreaking women across the political spectrum have run before Harris, of course, including Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, who, in 1964, became the first woman to have her name placed into nomination for president by a major party, and Democratic Rep. Shirley Chisholm, who broke ground in 1972 as the first African American woman to seek a major party’s nomination for U.S. president. These women and many others blazed the trail for Vice President Harris.

In spite of this progress, female leaders are still subject to gendered and racialized rhetoric and interactions, as we’ve seen with Vice President Harris. According to a 2018 study by Stav Atir of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Melissa J. Ferguson of Yale University, both men and women are twice as likely to refer to male politicians and scientists by their surnames, and we’ve certainly seen this play out in today’s news cycle. Our very own political science expert Professor Michael G. Miller also published research in 2022 showing that female legislators in Congress are 10% more likely than their male peers to be interrupted and more than twice as likely to be interrupted when discussing women’s issues. And women of color often are not afforded presumptions of competence and are interrupted and demeaned more frequently than white women.

While our nation continues to grapple with this history of discrimination and injustice, Barnard is doing the essential work to uplift women’s voices and nurture the next generation of leaders. I am proud to be at a place where women’s leadership doesn’t need to be qualified. We are leaders — period.