August 28, 2017

Office of the President

109 Milbank Hall
Barnard College
New York, NY 10027

Dear Sian Beilock,

Welcome to Barnard.

We are Barnard College members of the Barnard Columbia Solidarity Network (BCSN), a coalition of
student groups mobilized in a common struggle for liberation. The BCSN opposes Barnard and
Columbias inequitable distribution of wealth and resources, the consolidation of power in the hands of a
few, and lack of transparency in decision-making. We start from the recognition that these institutions are
built on stolen Lenape land, that their wealth has grown due to institutional white supremacy, and that
Columbia continues to prosper at the direct expense of communities of color in Manhattanville.

In recent years student organizing by BCSN members and many others has secured a number of victories,
including:

Barnard divesting from companies that deny climate science and Columbia divesting from the coal
industry.
Student workers at both Barnard and Columbia winning a $15 minimum wage for campus jobs. And,
past and present, students standing with workers on campus during organizing drives, contract
negotiations, and other labor disputes.
Across the street, No Red Tape securing the right to record Gender-based Misconduct processes
without punishment.
CU Prison Divest making Columbia the first Ivy League institution to divest from private prisons.

These are just a few recent examples within a long, rich history of resistance in Morningside Heights.
Highlights of this ongoing fight include labor struggles in 1932; community and student resistance to
Columbias expansion into Morningside Park and connections to the U.S. military in the 1960s; the anti-
apartheid divestment campaign in the 1980s; and the hunger strike for ethnic studies at Columbia and the
six-month strike of Barnard office and dormitory workers in 1996.

We are looking forward to meeting you, though we wish it were under different circumstances. As you
may know, the Barnard community was effectively locked out of the presidential search process. Student
and faculty representatives were appointed by the administration rather than democratically elected to
reflect community priorities. Likewise, only two listening sessions for students were scheduled, at
times most of us have classes or work, and the concerns and ideas of students who were able to attend
were largely trivialized.
You are replacing Debora Spar, who had by the end of her tenure shredded the credibility of your office.
Strikingly, she worried publicly that students from public high schools wouldnt be ready for Barnard;
assured students that Barnards adjuncts did not need health care because many have husbands on Wall
Street; selectively suppressed student speech; wrote one of the weakest responses to the Muslim ban; and
failed to meaningfully address the urgent needs of low-income students, undocumented students, students
of color, queer and trans students, and other marginalized communities. Instead of providing leadership
on any of these issues, Spar used her national platform to opine on topics like botox, a performance that
was rightly found appalling and dismaying by members of the Barnard alumnae community.

We need to acknowledge that aspects of your own previous role as Executive Vice Provost at the
University of Chicago raise significant concerns for us. We have been in contact with students at the
University of Chicago and are informed that you took a leading role in the administrations assault on
graduate student workers right to unionize. You endorsed a boilerplate anti-union FAQ, uncritically toed
the official administration anti-union line in public fora, and refused to engage productively with
members of the Graduate Students United union. This undemocratic obstructionism has been condemned
by both the UChicago branch of the American Association of University Professors and the national
AAUP. We are all too familiar with such behavior from the Spar administration. You should know that
Barnard students, staff, and alumnae rejected it in overwhelming numbers, and we are ready to do so
again.

Likewise, your joint statement, with Provost Linda Bell, on the events in Charlottesville is troubling. You
fail to honestly name, address, and condemn the white supremacist ideology that led to the murder of one
individual and the injuring of 19 others. You fail to explicitly defend the right of students of color to
study and live free of all forms of racism. You fail to state what you will do, in the face of our ongoing
political crisis, to stand for racial justice. Indeed, your choice to provide a value-neutral defense of free
expression and open debate gives more comfort to white supremacists than it does to the most
vulnerable students under your care. A liberal arts college is not a bastion for abstract free expression; it
is an institution committed to nurturing and communicating historically and empirically grounded
analyses. As our faculty allies in the Barnard Contingent Faculty union wrote, No one who has studied
or endured the racism in American society could have written that statement that you wrote.

All that said, we acknowledge that you are now in a new position at the beginning of a new
administration, and you have an opportunity to reset the Barnard administration on a new path. In that
spirit, we hope to work with you to make Barnard a more just and more equitable institution. The
following are community demands that define our chief priorities and concerns:

1. Barnard Colleges selective censorship of student speech has been condemned by the Center for
Constitutional Rights. Likewise, the subsequent changes to the banner policy are deeply unfair
and hinder the ability of student groups to organize. The banner policy must be revised so that
student organizations can display their banners on Barnard Hall.
2. Barnard must provide assistance (in all forms--financial, legal, health-wise, academic, etc.) to
undocumented students at Barnard. Barnard must guarantee housing during breaks and
other increased in-house resources to support undocumented students. The only statement
from a Columbia official expressing support for undocumented students is by Columbia Provost
Coatsworth, who does not hold Provost duties for Barnard College. Therefore, Barnard officials
have not explicitly expressed support for undocumented students, beyond Spars weak statement,
and we believe it is time for them to do so.
3. Barnard must stop retaliating against contingent faculty for union activism. Sian Beilock
should publicly address the concerns raised in this letter from the Barnard Contingent
Faculty union. Likewise, both Barnard and Columbia have an extensive and unacceptable record
 of not paying student workers on time and inadvertently excluding low-income students from
important opportunities by relying on volunteer labor at campus-based direct service
organizations. We demand that all student workers are paid within two weeks, the
elimination of the student contribution, and $15 per hour for volunteer positions at direct
service organizations such as Well Woman, SVR, CUEMS, Nightline, and Community
Impact. In addition, we must ensure that Barnard apparel is produced in safe, fair working
conditions. Barnard College must become affiliated with the Worker Rights Consortium, an
independent labor rights organization that investigates factories where collegiate apparel is
produced.
4. Establish systems of support that center the disproportionate violence targeting women, queer,
trans*, and gender nonconforming people of color. We demand a rape crisis center that is
physically open 24 hours/day including all days during which students are housed on the
University campus, an increase in queer and trans* staff of color at SVR, and a hotline
staffed by trained professionals who are equipped to address the experiences of trauma in
marginalized communities and can provide immediate accompaniment to services off
campus. These systems of support must include a radical re-structuring of CPS, Furman, SVR, &
ODS for Barnard & Columbia, with a critical lens that benefits people of marginalized identities.
5. Barnard agreed to divest from companies that deny climate science after a bold student campaign
led by Divest Barnard. Barnard must continue to work with students to democratically
determine reinvestment priorities.

History tells us that the achievement of these goals will require the determination and effort of students,
not the charitable dispensations of benevolent administrators. Still, we hope the fight can be productive
and that your administration will engage it in a more respectful manner. With that, again we say, welcome
to Barnard, a community of artists, scholars, and activists for social and economic justice.

Yours in struggle,

Divest Barnard for a Just Transition

Student-Worker Solidarity
Undocumented Students Initiative
Columbia University Apartheid Divest
International Socialist Organization
No Red Tape