Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The 4-acre (1.6 ha) campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City. It is adjacent to Columbia's campus and near several other academic institutions and has been used by Barnard since 1898.
Barnard College of Columbia University was founded to provide an education for women comparable to that of Columbia and other Ivy League schools, most of which admitted only men for undergraduate study into the 1960s. The college was named after Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, an American educator and mathematician, who served as the president of the then-Columbia College from 1864 to 1889. Frederick Barnard advocated equal educational privileges for men and women, preferably in a coeducational setting. The school's founding, however, is largely due to the efforts of Annie Nathan Meyer, a student and writer who was not satisfied with Columbia's effort to educate women.
Sheryl Kara Sandberg (born August 28, 1969) is an American businesswoman. She has served as the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008. Prior to Facebook, Sandberg was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. She also was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Prior to Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for the United States Department of the Treasury. In 2012, she was named in Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by Time.
Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg and the oldest of three siblings. Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida when she was two years old. She attended public school, where she was "always at the top of her class." Sandberg taught aerobics in the 1980s while in high school.
In 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College and in 1991, graduated with a B.A. in Economics and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. While at Harvard, Sandberg met then professor Larry Summers who became her mentor and thesis adviser. Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank, where she worked on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness.
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television, and film. She is widely regarded as one of the most talented actors of all time.
Streep made her professional stage debut in The Playboy of Seville (1971), before her screen debut in the television movie Deadliest Season (1977). In that same year, she made her film debut with Julia (1977). Both critical and commercial success came quickly with roles in The Deer Hunter (1978) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), the former giving Streep her first Academy Award nomination and the latter her first win. She later won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in Sophie's Choice (1982) and The Iron Lady (2011).
Streep has received 17 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and 26 Golden Globe nominations, winning eight, more nominations than any other actor in the history of either award. Her work has also earned her two Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Cannes Film Festival award, five New York Film Critics Circle Awards, two BAFTA awards, an Australian Film Institute Award, five Grammy Award nominations, and a Tony Award nomination, amongst others. She was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2004 and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2009 for her contribution to American culture through performing arts, the youngest actress in each award's history.
Cecile Richards (born 1958) is[update] a Democratic Party activist and has been the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America since early 2006. In 2010, Richards was elected to the Ford Foundation board of trustees.
Richards previously founded and served as president of America Votes, a coalition of national Democratic Party-affiliated organizations. Before that, she was deputy chief of staff to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives. She has also worked at the Turner Foundation.
In 1996, she founded the Texas Freedom Network, a Texas organization formed to counter the Christian Right.
Richards is the daughter of former Texas governor Ann Richards. She graduated from Brown University in 1980, is married to Kirk Adams, a labor organizer with the Service Employees International Union, and has three children. She currently[update] lives in New York City.
Debora L. Spar is the current President of Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women affiliated with Columbia University. As President of Barnard, she is also an academic dean within the university. Spar and was appointed Barnard's 11th president in July 2008 and replaced Judith Shapiro, Barnard's 10th president after a teaching career at Harvard Business School where she was Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development. After graduating magna cum laude in 1984 from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and earning her doctorate from Harvard in government, she went on to write 6 books and many articles.
During her inaugural address on October 23, 2008, Spar cited a number of goals for her term as President of Barnard College. Paramount were her desire to make Barnard a more internationally-recognized institution for women, as well as expand and improve the current Barnard Leadership Initiative (BLI). She followed up on this goal by converting BLI into Barnard's Athena Center for Leadership Studies