That, in itself, is kind of strange.
I see. 
Those little nuances were reflected in an unintended comical moment during president Bollinger’s opening speach at last year’s graduation, when the over-enthusiastical response to him attempting a shout-out to the various schools and colleges got no further than
"Barnard – ", and then having to leave it at “and the rest of Columbia.”
It’s not strange- in fact it was quite common until the 1970’s when most colleges with affiliate relationships merged.
Harvard did not speak for Radcliffe (until they merged). Brown did not speak for Pembroke (ditto). We’re just used to the post-merger era.
We might get chastized for the topic drift soon - but, yes, those were also the years when the cash-strapped university exerted substantial pressure on Barnard, in hopes to get to their coffers - but Barnard’s trustees (also seeing the writing on the wall) were visionaries enough to insist on maintaining organizational independence, while agreeing on faculty integration and settling on inter-corporate agreements for cost sharing.
Time, and the success and growth of Barnard (specially compared to her former sisters) has proven them right many-times over.
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But are they Columbia students? I don’t recall Cliffies ever referring to themselves as Harvard students.
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Yes, Columbia University students, with the same Columbia diplomas (which additionally also bear the signature of the Barnard president).
It only get confusing because most high school students/parents use “Columbia” generically when they are really referring to Columbia College (and possibly SEAS).
At Columbia, just different houses at Hogwarts - with mutual pride for the castle to the outside, but internally also pride in their respective house.
I was gonna let it go until the following morsel appeared:
Let’s move on from Barnard’s relationship with Columbia, please.
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Of course.
Like the School of General Studies.
You’re working too hard here. I chose my language deliberately, and there was no attempt to imply anything. My post explicitly asserts what I wanted to assert: that Columbia’s decision is strategic. You are, of course, free to assume benevolent intent. I’ll play the cynic and assume an obvious strategy by an institution so moved and influenced by perceptions that they were found to be cheating. Not a hard call from where I sit.
Columbia itself tells us who they are: the college, GS and SEAS. It’s easy to say that they matched “like with like” in the college and SEAS, but it would be just as easy to distinguish them, starting with the idea that SEAS takes but 1/2 of the college’s vaunted Core, which is so fundamental to its identity. We don’t know what they’d do if SEAS had admission statistics similar to those of GS because that is not the case. I have my own hunch that they’d break them out and could easily justify it on other grounds.
Look, this is for some of us an interesting issue and it’s full of nuance. Arts & Science students at Cornell don’t like to be lumped in with the various state colleges that form part of the university, even though they (the state colleges) are excellent at what they do. And we know why: Arts and Sciences is harder to get into. OTOH, even though everyone at the Univ. of Washington knows that admission to their celebrated CS department is another order of magnitude more difficult than admission to the university generally, you don’t typically hear people grousing about any potential confusion. People in CS assert they attend UW, and might point out that they are CS, but it’s not out of some concern that they might be viewed as being part of some other, less competitive, population. Seems like it plays out differently at different places for different reasons. People don’t view departments at UW as distinct entities that exist outside the greater collection of schools and colleges that are collectively referred to as “the university.” At other places, there seems to be more of a rub.
I think that’s partly a remnant of the order in which the divisions were chartered and came to represent the sum of the whole. Until late in the nineteenth century, Ivies were little more than all-male LACs, the biggest of which were known as much for inventing intercollegiate athletics as we now know it than for just about anything else. Cornell was a huge exception in the sense that it was built during the land grant era, in one fell swoop, by a wealthy benefactor and was already referring to itself by name as a “university” by the time graduate and professional schools began getting tacked on to its counterparts. But the only Cornell College I’m aware of is somewhere in Iowa.
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Just adding another article about Columbia’s decision:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/columbia-u-withdraws-from-u-s-news-undergraduate-rankings
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Lol, Columbia is pretty desperate for money as well.
They’re always complaining about their small endowment.
It doesn’t look too good as an institution when your own leader complains about the small endowment.
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Although that’s the one person who can do something about it.
University presidents are primarily fundraising figureheads - it’s their job to bemoan their (university’s) endowment, which circles back to their own status. The university is “lead” by the next management level.
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They’re not wrong. Columbia 's endowment is small per capita.
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Furthering this - I had to chuckle when I just saw today’s Alumni newsletter:
Receptions will be held Fri 7/14 (Hamptons) and Sat 7/15 (Martha’s Vineyard) to introduce Barnard President Laura Rosenbury to the Barnard community.
Things you have to do to find “the community”.
Hopefully she and the new university president Nemat Shafik ride-share.
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