page_title: Virginia Gildersleeve
section_title: Dean of Barnard College
hierarchical_section_title: Virginia Gildersleeve / Dean of Barnard College
caption_attribution_description: Milbank@Banard_College
context_page_description: Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve was an American academic, the long-time Dean of Barnard College, co-founder of the International Federation of University Women, and the sole female United States delegate to the April 1945 San Francisco United Nations Conference on International Organization, which negotiated the UN Charter and created the United Nations.
context_section_description: Throughout her tenure as Dean of Barnard College, Gildersleeve worked to advance women's rights by championing their access to Columbia' professional school and to the best professors.  This included hiring Charles A. Beard, a young Columbia instructor in 1914 to teach Barnard's first course in American government so that Barnard graduates would be eligible to attend the Columbia School of Journalism.  At the beginning of World War I, she hired the head of Columbia's anthropology department, Franz Boas, when he was threatened with being fired because of his objections to World War I. Professor Boas was a German Jewish immigrant and a Socialist. Among the Barnard undergraduates, Boas found several of the century's most outstanding anthropologists, including Margaret Mead.
  Barnard had only a few African-American students during Gildersleeve's tenure. Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneer in 1925, who attended Barnard with assistance from her literary mentor Fannie Hurst and Barnard College co-founder Annie Nathan Meyer. In the early 1940s, Dean Gildersleeve paid for the full scholarship of at least one African-American student from Harlem out of her own pocket.
  Gildersleeve opposed religious exclusivity and refused to openly categorize her students, but took steps to reduce the number of Jewish students.  In the 1930s, roughly 20 percent of Barnard students were Jewish, compared to 6 to 10 percent at most other women's colleges, although Jewish enrollment at Columbia College had reached 40 percent before World War I. According to Gildersleeve's biographer Rosalind Rosenberg,  both Columbia and Barnard began recruiting students from outside New York City, evaluating applicants on the basis of psychological tests, interviews, and letters of recommendation, as well as academic criteria, thereby lowering the number of Jewish applicants accepted. In the two decades before World War II, this process of selective admissions reduced the percentage of Jewish students at both Columbia and Barnard to 20 percent.
caption: Barnard College
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