Barnard’s reckoning with what it means to be “well” this semester.
By Cecilia Zuniga
On the first floor of Barnard Hall, the Francine A. LeFrak Foundation Center for Well-Being has been slowly unveiled over the past year in half-exposed construction zones. Barnard students spent the fall semester peeking behind dusty vinyl curtains, itching to catch a glimpse of the College’s newest promise to us—a “signature space on campus” dedicated to the “body, mind, and soul.”
Since opening its doors on Oct. 30, 2024, the Center has been bustling with students, eager to take advantage of Barnard’s “centralized hub” of physical, financial, and mental wellness. It is home to a 4,000-square-foot fitness center, locker rooms, dance studios, communal meeting rooms, spaces dedicated to financial and mental well-being educational programs, and the Ethel S. LeFrak and Samuel J. LeFrak Theater. With its robust programming and state-of-the-art facilities, the Center intends to send a clear message about the College’s priority of “holistic well-being.”
But “well-being” at Barnard is an elusive word. In the aftermath of last semester, an air of distrust and disillusionment continues to pervade campus. Many students, faculty, and staff are fearful to politically mobilize on a campus which remains locked down and under heightened surveillance. While simultaneously suppressing dissent, the administration has ostensibly utilized a discourse of community wellness and healing. What it means to be “well,” however, remains contested.
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At 4 p.m. on Sept. 23, a lively chatter replaced the typical Monday malaise on Barnard’s campus. I left my two-hour seminar ready to beeline straight home, bag slung over my tired shoulders. But as I rounded the corner of Barnard Hall, I stopped to marvel at the sight of about 30 faculty members who had congregated on the steps.
My fellow students and I found ourselves herded over by the 4 p.m. rush. Our professors, cloaked in their colorful graduation regalia, smiled at the crowd amassing in front of them, brightening with each familiar face they spotted. Friends clumped together, waving enthusiastically at their major advisers and department chairs. Facing a sea of 200 students, the professors unfurled a large black banner: “Barnard Community in Crisis: A Faculty Teach-In.” Its loud white letters demanded to be seen.
The teach-in was a direct rebuke of Barnard’s new Expectations for Community Conduct. Created without student or faculty input, the guidelines were issued in an email from President Laura Rosenbury sent on Sept. 11. The Barnard chapter of the American Association of University Professors subsequently released a statement condemning the guidelines in the “strongest possible terms.” In its statement, the AAUP characterizes the expectations as a “pretext for a dangerous infringement on freedom of expression and academic freedom” which may be weaponized “to discipline community members.”
The guidelines, however, are not formal policy. Rather, they are a set of “examples and explanations of community expectations,” and thus are not regulated by Barnard’s Policy for Development and Revision Process for Barnard College Administrative Policies. In other words, the Expectations for Community Conduct did not require community input to be published.
One original guideline, for example, prohibited professors from posting signs on their office doors that “support a geopolitical view or perspective.” Another violation of the community expectations included: “Messaging from the president of Barnard College or from any division or department of the College supporting a political viewpoint or perspective while denigrating or remaining silent about an opposing political viewpoint or perspective.” These two guidelines have since been removed from the Expectations for Community Conduct after the Sept. 23 teach-in.
Professor of Africana Studies Celia Naylor commenced the event with a stark condemnation: “Our community is in crisis.” In her speech, she expressed urgent concerns about the community expectations, citing their potential to “control, curtail and police academic freedom and freedom of expression at Barnard.” In the face of Barnard’s slow dismantling of collective decision-making processes, Naylor demanded an urgent need for connection. “We are becoming feckless, fractured, and fearful,” she declared, highlighting the need to heal the widening rift between the administration, faculty, and students.
Naylor was joined by seven of her colleagues, all of whom are current Barnard professors—Maria Hinojosa, BC ’84, Frederick Neuhouser, Najam Haider, Gale Kenny, Shayoni Mitra, Taylor Carman, and Elizabeth Bernstein. Expanding upon the AAUP statement, the professors framed the Expectations for Community Conduct as a dangerous pretext for student surveillance and policing. Each speech evoked a new layer of concern. Taylor Carman, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, underscored Barnard’s ongoing violations of the Chicago Statement of Free Expression, arguing “that is not just a limitation of free speech, that is dictating speech. That is dictating content.” Maria Hinojosa, Barnard Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, harkened back to her own time at Barnard as a student protester. She declared powerfully, “Do not force anything on Barnard because we won’t take it sitting down.” Students cheered, her words electrifying the crowd. A common thread, however, remained clear: Barnard’s erosion of administrative oversight has facilitated its increasingly punitive disciplinary policies. Frederick Neuhouser, also a Professor of Philosophy, noted that Barnard’s punishments for the 1968 student protests were “far less vindictive” than those of 2024.
Fliers circulated throughout the crowd, among them a fact sheet on student discipline. “All interim/suspended students have lost access to campus housing, meal plans, student health insurance, and Furman counseling,” it asserted. It also highlighted the fact that the suspended students are all “queer, non-binary, Muslim, first generation low-income, or students of color.” Barnard’s suspended students infamously were given only 15 minutes—timed exactly by CARES responders—to gather their personal belongings upon eviction and escort from their dorms. It was Shayoni Mitra, a senior lecturer in the Barnard Department of Theatre, who best articulated Barnard’s harsh measures: “There is no rational reason for a policy implementation like that, except for a deliberate sort of callousness towards student wellness.”
Mitra is not alone in her concern. This past April, an unnamed CARES responder resigned due to the University’s “insanely racially violent” decision to allow the NYPD to arrest students at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. In a since-publicized email to Barnard administrators, the CARES responder was specifically horrified by the College’s mass eviction of students on interim suspension—a uniquely punitive measure taken by Barnard’s administration and not Columbia’s.
Regarding the 15-minute policy, the responder pleaded with the administration to reconsider its “ridiculous and rude timeframe,” while also demanding “concrete information” about how the College planned to support its evicted students. “This is my last day working at Barnard,” the responder signed off the email. “It is absolutely shameful that this school refuses to learn from its own history and decides to treat its most vulnerable students in such a blatantly risky and discriminatory manner.”
The Sept. 23 teach-in took place less than two weeks after 85% of the Barnard faculty voted to restore all privileges to students on interim suspension. Mitra has tirelessly assisted students in drafting suspension appeals and attending proceedings. She shared specific details about the disciplinary process at the teach-in. Characterizing Barnard’s role in the hearings as a combined “prosecutor, judge and appellate court,” Mitra noted that the College has deliberately diverged from more transparent or equitable disciplinary practices. “This is not a consultative, collaborative process,” she explained to me later on, “but rather, it’s a very top down one, opaque by design.”
Although not explicitly articulated at the teach-in, “wellness” stood at the forefront of the conversation. Distinguished alumna Cynthia Nixon, BC ’88, read a testimonial from an anonymous student, who shared the brutal nature of their arrest, suspension, and eviction from Barnard housing last spring. “The only reason that I’m okay right now,” the student had written, “is because I’ve been able to fully rely on my community when the institution has not only failed me, but is actively trying to harm me.”
The crowd grew especially quiet. I look up towards the glass doors leading into Barnard Hall, at the plastic vinyl curtains and the plush lounge chairs inside. Facing an imagined wellness mecca, I feel a profound sense of dissonance as Nixon continues to her final line of the student’s testimony. “Everyone needs to wake the fuck up and realize that the institution will never love you back.”
Illustration by Kathleen Halley-Segal
“Love you back!” Mitra repeated to me in disbelief, weeks after the teach-in. She let the words hang in the air as she tightened the scarf draped around her shoulders. “That’s what is so heart wrenching about it. It’s not love you, it’s the love you back.” Mitra confessed that she holds a rather pessimistic view of the administration and continued, “When you are unhousing students, when you are pushing them into food precarity, I cannot believe it comes from a position of care.”
“Care” also frequents the lexicon of the Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Elizabeth Bernstein, who chairs WGSS at Barnard, spoke on behalf of the Barnard AAUP at the teach-in. There, she demanded that we must “fight collectively for the right to keep talking.” Bernstein later expanded on her sentiments regarding the Barnard administration’s infringement on political speech: “They are stifling our collective political imagination about how the world could be. To articulate that, you need to be able to speak freely.” Envisioning well-being cannot occur in a vacuum, nor can it be disentangled from political and global context. If language—including political language—is the medium in which we define collective well-being, the ability to speak to each other is a prerequisite. “How do you aspire to wellness when we can be disciplined at any time, at any moment—when students are living amongst a culture of fear?”
Like Mitra, Bernstein seemed skeptical about institutionalized definitions of care. The self-care industry, she told me, has transformed wellness into a “vehicle for neoliberal self-maximization.” To her, it’s been co-opted, depoliticized, and commodified. But against a backdrop of global militarization, policing, and surveillance, Bernstein argues that no “constellation of individualized consumer choices” can heal us. Holistic well-being will not take root as long as there is a stubborn, yet deliberate, focus on the self rather than the collective.
Bernstein’s words take on a new meaning in the context of last spring’s unprecedented surveillance measures, most of which remain in place today. The University has only ramped up its security efforts this semester with limited campus access, increased cameras, and the looming threat of private investigators. Yet as the institution continues to propagate a culture of fear, many students have overwhelmingly looked inwards, seeking refuge in mutual aid, peer-to-peer care networks, and a “we keep us safe” mentality.
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I turned my attention to another space dedicated to student “well-being”: the Wellness Spot. I entered the Wellness Spot on a Tuesday evening around 7 p.m., greeted by a familiar face and the insistence that I take a snack. Tucked away in the first floor of the Barnard Quad, you can find condoms, dark chocolate, and a listening ear all in the same cozy, low-lit room. Barnard students, such as Isis Contreras Pérez, BC ’26, staff the Wellness Spot as peer wellness educators. Contreras Pérez has frequented the Wellness Spot since her freshman year, becoming well-acquainted with the space before joining the staff as a junior: “If I can have an opportunity where I can just be in the space and be able to help someone out, why not do it?”
Her role as a peer educator is to “guide students towards resources on campus,” which entails anything from accessing birth control to settling roommate disagreements. This year, though, the Wellness Spot looks different, with chairs stacked and boxes strewn across the window ledge. The warm-toned lamps have been packed up and traded temporarily for overhead fluorescents. “It doesn't usually look like this,” Contreras Pérez explains. “We’re moving.” The Wellness Spot will find a new home in the LeFrak Center for Wellbeing.
Alongside the physical move, Contreras Pérez explained that there has been a significant amount of staff turnover at the Wellness Spot. There have been three different directors of the Wellness Spot in the past year, alongside a new “LeFrak team,” as Contreras Pérez put it, that the Spot now reports to. “There’s more bureaucracy now than there used to be,” Contreras Pérez told me. “It feels more corporate.”
The LeFrak Center for Well-Being, however, is not going for “corporate.” I spoke to Dr. Marina Catallozzi, Barnard’s Vice President of Health and Wellness, who is also tasked with “envisioning,” as she put it, the construction of the Center. The project’s interior design has been largely inspired by the natural beauty of Barnard’s lush campus, featuring “lots of wood, blues, and greens” in its color palette. Beyond aesthetics, Catallozzi explained that the Center intends to create places for students to be in community. “One of the things I noticed when I first got to Barnard [was that] lots of people were just sitting on the floor in hallways, and students didn’t have places to gather.” Through the addition of the fitness center, conference rooms, and open student lounges, the Center for Well-Being focuses on the creation of shared spaces to solidify a sense of community. Catallozzi said that she hopes that the Center’s design will reflect that “people want space to be able to be.”
Contreras Pérez also described the importance of simply having a place to “be.” Despite her skepticism of an emerging bureaucracy, she seems hopeful. “I mean, for sure, wellness is a commodity,” Contreras Pérez said nonchalantly. But for every student stumbling into the Wellness Spot, wellness gets redefined on their own terms. As a peer educator, Contreras Pérez’s aim is not necessarily to decommodify wellness, but rather to make it “an open space, a place that anyone can approach and it will be okay.”
It seems that beauty of the Wellness Spot lies in its critical self-awareness, knowing its limitations within an institution that may never love you back. It is a space where students greet students, and whether in need of an informational pamphlet or a hug, a community is there to catch them.
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Nearly a week after the Barnard Hall teach-in, I refreshed my inbox and braced myself as Rosenbury’s “Taking Time to Reflect” appeared in the subject line. The email begins with an acknowledgment of “how challenging the past year has been for our community,” alongside a brief list of support services, including Furman Counseling Center, Primary Care Health Services, and the Wellness Spot. “Now, more than ever,” she closes the email, “we must demonstrate care and compassion towards each other and play our part to help heal our fractured world.”
It’s the first email of the school year in which Rosenbury has used the word “heal,” and I can’t help but wonder who is included in her invocation.
Perhaps the Francine A. LeFrak Foundation Center for Well-Being is a start to institutional healing. The opening celebration on Oct. 30 was a joyous occasion, with green smoothies flowing and giddy students touring the Center. For many, the space symbolizes a remarkable step forward for Barnard’s community and commitment to “holistic well-being.” Yet for some—especially those whom last semester’s police militarization, eviction, and suspension remains a palpable reality—the very notion of “community” at Barnard feels tenuous.
As Naylor closed her speech on Sept. 23, she slowed down and looked out over the crowd tenderly, “This is our community. Remember we are in this together.” Students erupted into proud applause, as her fellow professors nodded in agreement. She was not begging to be loved back, but instead proposing a definition of collective well-being that does not forget the most vulnerable among us. It was a refusal to allow administrative hostility to fade quietly into oblivion. Naylor’s words will linger on the steps, echoing in the halls of the LeFrak Center for Well-Being. And they will demand to be heard.
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