Barnard College

Barnard College is a single-sex, all-women educational institution in New York City. It was founded in 1889 and is affiliated with Columbia University, as Barnard students can take classes with Columbia students and officially their degrees are granted by the trustees of Columbia University. Barnard's other major affiliation is as a member of the Seven Sisters. Its campus is located between West 116th to 120th street.

Controversies.

Barnard has been the subject of several controversies, these are more or less all related to Barnard's standing with respect to the Columbia University undergraduate schools, and include:

• Barnard as a single-sex college - Barnard has been accused of being outmoded and even sexist in its attitude towards admissions, it has responded to these allegations by suggesting that a single-sex educational environment is necessary to foster educational equality for women. Barnard is unique amongst its Ivy-coupled peers in terms of its relationship to its parent Ivy. Institutes like Radcliife college, which once occupied a similar possition with respect to Harvard as Barnard does to Columbia today, was formally integrated into Harvard proper. Barnard has traditionally resisted such pressures to do the same since the 1960's. It has been argued that as the Columbia undegraduate division had an all-male admissions policy up until 1980, Barnard served a vital role in granting women access to a Columbia quality education. However since Columbia became co-ed in 1980, it has been subject to repeated accusations of being obsolete.

• Seperate but equal? - As was mentioned in the previous section, Barnard has fiercely defended its individuality in the face of attempts by Columbia to integrate it, however this has lead to tensions between their respective undegraduate student bodies.

Barnard college degrees are officially granted by the trustees of Columbia university, despite its status as an affiliate rather than as a fully integrated undergraduate division. It has been suggested that this gives Barnard students the opportunity to claim that they attended Columbia proper and in doing so create unfair competition in the job markets. It has also been suggested that this is unfair given the average disparity between the entry qualifications (SAT I, II, ACT, AP etc) for undegraduates at the respective institutions. Another dimension of this controversy involved giving Barnard students the choice between barnard.edu and columbia.edu cubmail addresses, which in light of certain percieved advantages that could be derived from the use of a columbia.edu e-mail address, still remains the subject of furious debate on both campuses.