Rosemary Park, 1960 - 1967

Rosemary Park became president of Barnard College in 1962, following a fifteen-year presidency at Connecticut College. A scholar of German literature, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Cologne in 1934 after completing undergraduate and master’s degrees at Radcliffe. At Connecticut, a women’s college at the time, she held multiple administrative roles before becoming president in 1947. Her tenure there was marked by curricular overhaul, capital expansion, and the establishment of Connecticut College for Men, through which she admitted male graduate students, an early move toward limited coeducation.

At Barnard, Park prioritized academic rigor and institutional distinction, with a particular emphasis on the sciences. She argued forcefully for a dedicated science facility at Barnard, pushing back against Columbia’s insistence that its own laboratories were sufficient. For Park, the absence of a Barnard-specific lab was not simply logistical but ideological: it signaled a failure to take women’s scientific education seriously. Her advocacy resulted in the planning and development of a new science building, which she saw as essential to the college’s academic credibility. She also encouraged students to pursue advanced study in mathematics, science, and languages, aligning the curriculum with what she identified as both national needs and intellectual imperatives. Park’s own philosophy on women’s education, while pragmatic, often avoided deeper reckonings with systemic gender inequality. She encouraged higher education as a route to self sufficiency and personal development, articulating a more utilitarian case for women’s education while resisting gender-based rhetoric.

In 1965, President Park permitted Malcolm X to speak at Barnard just three days before his assassination, despite his having received death threats and her learning only after the fact that the invitation had been extended by students without administrative approval. Her decision not to cancel the event, especially in the volatile context of Malcolm X’s growing prominence, his ideological evolution and public controversy, was a rare moment of permissiveness within an otherwise disciplinarian presidency. The event, attended by over 1,500 students and faculty now figures as one of the most significant moments in Barnard’s history and reflected the growing disjuncture between Park’s formal authority and the student-led political shifts beginning to take root across campus.

By the mid-1960s, Barnard was facing infrastructural strain alongside cultural and demographic shifts. In 1966, fewer than half of students lived in Barnard-owned dormitories; many commuted from home or secured off-campus housing. In response, Park oversaw the purchase of new residential buildings and proposed a dormitory on the tennis courts between Claremont and Broadway, seeking to accommodate the college’s expanding enrollment. These changes coincided with broader reevaluations of institutional authority. In her 1962–64 report to the Board of Trustees, Park observed students’ “desire to dissociate” from administrative oversight, advocating that the college exercise only the most limited jurisdiction over student behavior outside the classroom. Addressing the reality that “student expectations have changed” and the college’s policy on parietals, Park advocated that the College retract from intervening in the personal lives of students: “It follows that the college from a student point of view should exercise only the most limited jurisdiction over its dormitory property, and student behavior, except in the classroom.”

Park’s administrative style was exacting, and her commitment to structure and discipline shaped her approach to governance. Though she remained relatively removed from emerging student movements, her presidency advanced a model of women’s education rooted in intellectual seriousness and institutional self-definition. She resigned in 1967 upon her marriage to Milton Vasil Anastos, professor of Byzantine Greek at UCLA. Park’s tenure, though brief, marked a shift toward asserting Barnard’s academic autonomy, particularly in the sciences, within a university context that often assumed its marginality. While she ushered in structural improvements and academic seriousness, she avoided direct confrontation with the deeper social inequities, of gender, race, and governance, that would come to define the next era of student and faculty dissent.