JEAN HOWARD

George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities
IRWGS Director, 1997-99

Q: How did you relate to Barnard?

Howard: Just fine. There was some tension, largely at the very, very early years of the institute, when we were very dependent on Barnard for courses, and it wasn’t clear how the relationship was going to work out. There were, at various times, competition and rivalry between Barnard and the institute. I’d say in the last ten to fifteen years, those have almost totally disappeared as we have learned how to each do certain courses, how to team-teach the introductory course that’s always done by a Barnard person one year and then a Columbia person the next. Gradually, we no longer see ourselves as rivals or fighting for students. It took a while to work that out. They had an evolved program, we had nothing.