UBFAQ

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To stand here, receiving the Millicent Carey McIntosh Award for Feminism from Barnard College — this institution that entered my life at a critical point, and shaped me — to accept this honor while holding so much grief and disappointment… it feels complicated.

Six years ago, I came back to Barnard to build an Athena rooted in abundance – not scarcity, the kind that says “there’s only room for one,” that fixates on the firsts and the onlys, the obstacles and the wounds. The kind that says you must survive the impossible to prove your worth.

But abundance. Because abundance is what I’ve known in the spaces that women have made for one another. It’s what I’ve known to be true here at Barnard: the best women’s college in the country, part of an incredible research university, in the most electric, most alive city in the world. With the most brilliant, passionate, politically awake student body.

I came back to build something in the spirit of Grace Lee Boggs, Class of 1935—one of our most radical and visionary alums, whose words I pass by, outside of Milstein, every single day — “the only way to survive is to take care of one another” – who reminded us that we are the leaders we’ve been waiting for, and that we don’t choose the times we live in but we do choose who we want to be and how we want to think.” Who proved, through her life’s work, that leadership is not a title; it’s a practice. A commitment to transformation. And a reimagining of what is possible.

Today, Athena is a place to practice feminist leadership, not just produce women leaders – and there is a difference. 

Feminist leadership, to me, is about leading in ways that challenge domination, that center care and justice, that build power with others — not over them.

It’s not just about who leads, but how and why we lead.

It’s about refusing the idea that leadership must be lonely, extractive, or authoritarian.

And perhaps most importantly, in my view, it’s about freedom. 

Not just freedom from oppression, but freedom to live fully, with dignity, safety, joy — and interdependence.

Not an individual escape but a collective condition — something we bring to life through relationships, institutions, and everyday practices that reflect our shared humanity.

And let me tell you, freedom is not our collective condition right now. 

I’ve worked with hundreds, even thousands of students at this point – all building the world they want to live in—imperfectly, urgently, bravely. Fostering actual communities of care with such intentionality, it takes your breath away. Asking hard questions about power. Grappling with complexity, “majoring in unafraid” – all exactly as we taught them.

I’ve seen – I SEE – students of all racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, religious, and political backgrounds sit together at Athena, do this work of building, as entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, aspiring policymakers, activists, artists, and more. A thing that would be unremarkable but for a narrative that forces me to remark upon it here. 

It has been the greatest joy of my career to witness them, to support them, and to grow with them.

What keeps me up at night, though, is what WE are doing, 

We, the institution that has the honor — the privilege — of holding these students during some of the most formative years of their lives. 

What are we doing when we strip students of housing, with just 15 minutes to collect their belongings? Of their academics – in terms far harsher than our friends across the street? Of present and even future opportunities – before a thorough review of the evidence? 

What even is an “interim suspension,” the framework by which we’ve been doing all of this, other than, “you’re guilty until you’re proven innocent,” and “oh, by the way, you should do all the work to prove that you’re innocent even though you’re in the middle of finals right now,” and “oops! You’re right, you were just studying, or working, or even a student journalist.” In a process that drags on for months. 

Do we see what we are doing when we call for community and dialogue and speak of inclusion — but lock down campus, move through it with our bodyguards, issue shelter-in-place orders across campus when they gather in one part of it, when we call the police – knowing full well what will happen? 

When our own communications, sent to you after the fact but clearly before the facts, reinforce the notion that our own students – the ones we admitted, the academic stars here – are somehow a physical danger to us? 

What are we doing when we talk about disruptions, endlessly, leaving out the myriad ways in which members of this community have attempted to engage in the ordinary learning that happens on a campus, the book displays, the talks, the film screenings, that are shut down? Leaving out our role in provoking those disruptions and in extending their life?

What are we doing when we celebrate the hundred year anniversary of Zora Neale Hurston’s arrival on this campus, as our first Black student, but I see with my own eyes what Black students experience here? 

Truly, what on earth are we doing here? 

Who are we here for?

To support our students, to defend them, to work with them, does not require us to agree with every word they speak or every tactic they choose. It IS to not misrepresent them, as people they’re not – for example, as students who are somehow at each other’s throats. It IS to not inflame every situation, trying to create a student versus student story. It IS to take seriously their efforts in the work I’ve described, the work of building the world they want to inhabit, to engage them as partners and peers, as educators and participants in this amazing, maybe soon-to-end thing we call a university. 

I believe we can choose differently.

We can lead differently.

We can live up to what we say we are. I hope we will.

To the students, who I wish I could name but I won’t, for their own safety, to every single Barnard student of today, this award is for you. Thank you.