Judith R. Shapiro, 1970 - 2008

Judith Shapiro assumed the presidency of Barnard College in 1994, at a time when women’s colleges faced intensifying pressures to prove their relevance within a rapidly consolidating and market-oriented higher education landscape. A Columbia-trained anthropologist and former provost at Bryn Mawr, Shapiro brought with her both scholarly credibility and the administrative fluency increasingly demanded of liberal arts leadership.

Shapiro’s presidency coincided with a national shift in the ethos of liberal education, from oppositional experimentation to technocratic refinement. At Barnard, this was most visibly manifest in her revision of the general education curriculum, now structured around the “Nine Ways of Knowing.” Marketed as a progressive response to epistemological pluralism, the curriculum was in many ways a consolidation of liberal consensus: it affirmed difference without making it disruptive, and emphasized intellectual breadth while largely eliding the political debates that had once animated curricular reform. This shift reflected a broader ideological recalibration in the academy, in which feminist and antiracist critique were increasingly translated into institutional language that could be absorbed without confrontation.

Under Shapiro, Barnard’s institutional profile grew in tandem with its material assets. Admissions became more competitive, the endowment more than doubled, and a major capital campaign underwrote the construction of the Diana Center. These successes were the product of deliberate engagement with philanthropic and civic networks; Shapiro served on prominent municipal boards and cultivated relationships with city leaders, including Mayor Bloomberg. While this positioning secured Barnard’s place in New York’s cultural elite, it also embedded the College more deeply into the funding structures and ideologies of public-private partnership. Expansion was not only architectural, but ideological; the College increasingly spoke in the idiom of metrics, outcomes, and visibility.

By the time she stepped down in 2008, Shapiro had left Barnard stronger, wealthier, and more reputationally secure. But she had also overseen its transformation into a different kind of institution: less oppositional, more integrated into elite academic and civic circuits, and increasingly defined by its ability to perform liberal values without necessarily enacting their radical possibilities. Her legacy is not one of failure or triumph, but of institutional adaptation: a presidency that codified a new grammar for women’s education: strategic, inclusive, and resolutely non-disruptive. The tensions she managed remain unresolved, reframed within the very systems that her generation of scholars once sought to unsettle.

Shapiro’s views on higher education have been widely published in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, and U.S. News and World Report. She was named one of Vanity Fair’s “200 Most Influential Women in America” in 1998. In December 2002, she received the National Institute of Social Sciences’ Gold Medal Award for her contributions as a leader in higher education for women. In July 2013, Judith Shapiro became president of the Teagle Foundation. She is also resident and professor of anthropology emerita of Barnard College and professor of anthropology emerita at Bryn Mawr College.