‘An antidote to despair’: Barnard faculty find solidarity and community in the AAUP

An inside look into how last year’s executive committee marked the Barnard AAUP’s inaugural year with collaboration and community — and found solidarity during a turbulent year on campus.

Photo by Haley Scull/The Barnard Bulletin

By Sophie Meritt

August 28, 2025

College faculty tend to work alone — on their own research and in their own classes and departments. But when a group of professors united to reactivate Barnard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), that began to change.

The AAUP — a national organization that advocates for shared governance, academic freedom, and the rights of faculty — took shape at Barnard in a profound way, especially for those on its inaugural executive committee. Faculty from diverse disciplines, many of whom had barely interacted before, suddenly found themselves in nearly constant contact. 

“I’ve never been in a collective that’s worked this well,” said Elizabeth Bernstein, professor of women’s studies and sociology at Barnard and a member of the Barnard AAUP executive committee. Not only has being part of the group been professionally fulfilling, Bernstein added, “it has been joyous.”

Barnard faculty reactivated the AAUP chapter in the spring of 2024 in response to “the evisceration of shared governance,” Bernstein said, as well as concerns about the treatment of students and what many saw as a widening rift between the College’s administration and the rest of the campus community.

As Vice President of the chapter and classics professor Nancy Worman put it, “Our activism is based on core values that are not just academic values in general but that are Barnard values — or at least what we thought we understood about this institution.”

“We believe in the [AAUP’s] mission, and we believe in the faculty and the students and what Barnard is,” echoed Randa Serhan, another member of the executive committee and a professor of sociology at Barnard. “There’s that deep love for the institution and the mission.” 

From public letters and votes of no confidence to protests and teach-ins on academic freedom, the AAUP took a visible and active stand on key issues at Barnard during its first year. But what began as an organizational response to institutional concerns became something bigger for the faculty in the group.

“I was feeling increasingly alienated about where the College was going,” said history professor and executive committee member Nara Milanich, “and I was hearing colleagues increasingly frustrated, and I was feeling the same. But what are we going to do with this energy?”

The answer was to organize — and, as the faculty came to find, to build community.

“It’s funny because I feel, on the one hand, more alienated from Barnard College than I’ve ever felt,” said Milanich, who has taught at Barnard for 20 years. “But I also simultaneously feel more connected to people.”

Other members described a similar shift — not just a political awakening but also a social one. “The executive committee almost naturally fell into very smoothly functioning relationships of cooperation,” said philosophy professor Frederick Neuhouser, the president of the chapter when it formed. “I’m surprised at how quickly and long-lasting the relations of trust have been.”

The faculty’s motivations, they emphasized, weren’t just urgency or anger. “We do it because we want to, because it feels good,” Bernstein explained. “It’s not because we don’t have boundaries, or because we’re doing it at gunpoint, or because the situation is so dire. No, it’s because we’re drawn to this political work with one another, precisely because of the spirit of joy and good feeling.”

The group’s synergy is “a testament to how well people work together here when there is a sense of collaboration, community, and democracy,” said Professor Vrinda Condillac, who is also on the executive committee. “It felt like a space where we could bring our full selves to the table,” Condillac added. “That is something that feels very particular to Barnard.”

Having such a space reshaped what it meant to be part of the Barnard faculty: “You sit around a table after a stressful meeting and go out for drinks somewhere,” said Milanich, “and you look around the table, and there’s representatives of literally half a dozen or more different departments around Barnard, people that have been at the College for five or 10 or 15 years or more, and who you’ve never really had any interaction with, and here you are all working on a common project together.” 

Frequent contact and gathering became a defining feature of the committee’s work. “Some of our colleagues almost tease us about this,” Bernstein explained. “We’re always meeting and we’re always talking because we have this consensus model, and we talk it through until we can get to an agreement.”

The faculty’s constant collaboration fostered more than their professional relationships together —  “it’s really like family,” Serhan said. “Now, I really know who my colleagues are, and I respect them even more.”

Neuhauser similarly expressed the impact of being part of the committee, saying, “It certainly made me feel much more a part of a real community than I had ever felt at Barnard.”

For many of the faculty, this deepened sense of connection proved to be more than just a happy byproduct of their organizing and advocacy — it became a lifeline. At a moment when faculty described feeling disillusioned, exhausted, and unsure how to enact change at Barnard, the relationships they forged through the AAUP offered something rare on campus: a shared “antidote to despair,” as Neuhouser phrased it.

“We’re up against so much,” explained Milanich, “and so that can feel a little bit daunting, a little depressing, but you know, then you go to Le Monde and you have drinks, and then you’re like, okay, at least we have each other, we have solidarity, and we will live to fight another day.”

Neuhouser found being part of the AAUP to be a “way to alleviate your depression and feelings of powerlessness,” explaining that “even when you’re not really succeeding in the way that you’d like to be succeeding, it gives you a kind of energy and a kind of self-confidence. Without that, I think I would just be depressed all the time,” he added. “There are very personal reasons for doing this kind of stuff, which is to keep yourself mentally healthy.”

Other faculty attested to the AAUP serving as a rare source of hope and energy. “It’s hard not to feel despair,” said Worman. “It’s hard to feel like there’s anything to do that’s productive and positive. This feels like that, and that’s huge.” 

Bernstein described the experience as “a silver lining” to the fraught times at Barnard, contrasting her AAUP work with the hopelessness she has seen in some colleagues not as active in the AAUP: “They wake up every morning and they’re depressed[…] and they’re just stewing in despair. And we’re not stewing in despair. In some sense, the work has felt life-saving.”

Milanich added, “The AAUP gives all of us something really important that we can do to try to have an impact on this moment. And that’s because, unfortunately, they have made universities — and in particular, Barnard and Columbia — one of the ground zeroes for the authoritarian takeover of this country.”

Milanich’s point speaks to a broader theme among the committee — that this work not only provided a concrete way to respond to a difficult moment, but also expanded their sense of collective possibility. 

Sociology professor Debbie Becher, who is also involved in the AAUP, described it as “not just inspiring — it feels necessary. It feels like something I need personally.” Becher, who has taught at Barnard for 15 years, said, “I have always been really saddened by how isolated I have felt faculty are from each other,” which is why it has been so “emotionally satisfying to be in this moment with other people, to experience it together. Just to be in their physical presence is helpful in surviving a really difficult time.”

Personal grounding was inseparable from the work itself, faculty emphasized. 

“Relationships are the core of organizing,” Becher explained. “We don’t come up with a goal, come up with a campaign, and then call people up and they show up. You have to have ongoing relationships between people in the organization so that people will show up[…] nurturing the relationships between the people in your organization is actually one of the most crucial things that you can do to actually have a successful organization.”

Becher’s point — that relationships aren’t just scaffolding for collective work, but rather a critical part of the work itself — echoed in many forms across the year. The faculty spoke not only of strategy and outcomes, but also of the rare experience of building something democratic, communal, and human together.

“It comes, I think, out of a women’s college,” reflected Serhan, “how much we work together and how much we really make it a process.” She described that process as more than just efficient — it was “an excellent exercise in democracy, negotiation, debate, and deliberation.” 

“I think it’s also a great way to understand the institution that you’re in and know where people fit in and who you can protect and how,” Serhan added. “I think it’s beautiful.”

Bernstein captured the personal and professional significance of the work: “It feels meaningful to work together, to be engaged in a collective project, to put all of our time, energy, spirit, into something that is not about building a CV. It’s not about individual accomplishment. It’s about a sense bigger than any of that.” 

“For many of us, and certainly for myself, this has been one of the most meaningful things that we’ve done during our time at Barnard,” Bernstein reflected. “And it’s ironic because we’ve been brought together by very adverse circumstances[…] but conditions of adversity sometimes bring strange surprises. So solidarity, for us, it’s not just a word — it’s what has made the political work that we do together possible.”