Millicent McIntosh, 1947 - 1962

Millicent C. McIntosh served as Barnard’s fifth dean (the title of Barnard’s chief administrator prior to 1952) beginning in 1947. A graduate and later a professor and acting dean at Bryn Mawr, McIntosh received her Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins and served as the head of the Brearley School for Girls for 17 years. She became Barnard’s first president in 1952, a title shift prompted by the Ford Foundation’s recommendation that Barnard adopt the designation to strengthen its claim to independent institutional status. This change, approved by Columbia, reflected McIntosh’s broader efforts to stabilize and professionalize the College’s administrative and financial infrastructure.

McIntosh’s tenure began in crisis. Upon her appointment, McIntosh discovered that Barnard was operating at a significant deficit and required an immediate infusion of $10 million to remain viable. Neither the trustees nor the broader college community had been fully informed of the extent of the College’s financial instability under outgoing Dean Gildersleeve. In response, McIntosh and key trustees launched “Operation Bootstrap,” a campaign that raised $1.7 million by 1950 from over 1,400 donors. Gifts from John D. Rockefeller Jr., alums, and trustees enabled a wave of construction and renovation, including the Minor Latham Playhouse (1953), Lehman Hall (1960), Reid Hall (1961), and the McIntosh Student Center. Critically, these capital improvements reflected a growing corporatization of women’s higher education and increased reliance on private capital.

McIntosh also played a significant role in shaping the broader landscape of Morningside Heights through her involvement in Morningside Heights, Inc., a consortium formed by Columbia and other local institutions to stabilize and redevelop the neighborhood. As chair of the board of the Morningside Housing Corporation, she oversaw the federally funded slum clearance that led to the demolition of housing and the development of Morningside Gardens, a middle-income housing project that displaced existing communities. This form of institutional urban renewal, though framed as civic improvement, aligned with a broader pattern of midcentury redevelopment that marginalized low-income and predominantly Black residents, entangling Barnard in the racialized geographies of postwar urban planning.

Racial exclusion persisted within Barnard's admissions practices throughout the 1950s. The College maintained informal quotas that limited the number of Black students, a fact underscored by the nickname “the Holy Twelve,” which Black students used to describe their own small and static presence on campus. This stark underrepresentation stood in tension with Barnard’s self-presentation as a liberal and progressive institution, revealing a gap between its espoused values and the realities of its admissions policies.

McIntosh’s presidency was also shaped by austerity, contested reforms, and a shifting student body. Under financial duress, she eliminated or outsourced entire academic departments, including Astronomy, Italian, and Classics, to Columbia. In 1948, she implemented a controversial “up or out” tenure policy, six years before Columbia adopted a similar model, which mandated the promotion or termination of junior faculty within a fixed timeframe. While this reform addressed long-standing gendered inequities in promotion, it also created widespread resentment among senior faculty, who accused McIntosh of weakening Barnard’s intellectual independence and favoring a merger with Columbia, a position she publicly rejected.

McIntosh’s presidency unfolded during the height of McCarthyism, when concerns over surveillance and academic freedom unsettled campuses nationwide. Her 1953 remarks to the Barnard Bulletin on communism were perceived by some faculty as noncommittal, reflecting broader tensions between administrative caution and faculty demands for clarity. In response to the national climate, McIntosh introduced formal protections for faculty under investigation, including the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment without automatic dismissal– a policy the trustees endorsed. While relatively progressive for its time, the episode revealed the administration’s careful calibration between principle and institutional self-preservation.

McIntosh’s final years were marked by a quiet but mounting student resistance. The 1960 “Bermuda shorts rebellion,” in which hundreds of students openly defied a ban on wearing shorts and slacks, was a critical rejection of in loco parentis logics and a demand for recognition of student autonomy. McIntosh initially defended the policy, but when faced with campus-wide protest, she reversed course, permitting shorts on Barnard’s campus while upholding a requirement for skirts in Columbia classrooms: a negotiated compromise that preserved administrative authority while gesturing toward student autonomy. This moment catalyzed a new political vocabulary on campus.

By the time McIntosh stepped down in 1962, she had recast Barnard’s institutional architecture, exemplifying the postwar ethos of liberal stewardship: oriented toward stability, expansion, and legitimacy. Her presidency consolidated the College’s autonomy while deepening its dependence on private capital and formalizing new hierarchies within the faculty. Though many structural exclusions remained intact, particularly around race and academic governance, the tensions that surfaced under her leadership would come to define the terrain of struggle in the decades that followed. McIntosh left behind not a resolved institution, but one increasingly aware of the conditions of its own transformation.