‘It feels like the entire organization is untethered’: What is going on with the Athena Center?

Impacted by Barnard College’s budget and staff cuts, the Athena Center for Leadership has not continued with many of its usual programs and operations this semester. 

Photo by Gabriela Valentin/The Barnard Bulletin

By Kimberly Wing

November 17, 2025

The Athena Center for Leadership organizes some of Barnard’s most popular student initiatives, including the Laidlaw Research Program and the Athena Film Festival. Founded in 2009 by Kathryn Kolbert and former Barnard President Debora Spar to “prepare Barnard students to lead change today and throughout their lives,” Athena organizes independent programs that offer “transformational learning experiences.”

Earlier in the year, the following programs stated online when their applications were expected to be released: the Athena Fellows and Athena Incubator announced that their applications would open in the summer, and the Williams Program for Women in Politics application would open in the fall. One Community of Practice, ADDA UX, stated that its applications would be available “during the first two weeks of each semester,” including “early Fall 2025.” In late October, the Athena Center’s website was updated to remove the application release dates for these programs.

Since 2018, Athena has hosted alumni through the College’s Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship Program each year, which aims to support fellows through professional development and research projects. Four alumni were chosen for this fellowship during the 2024-2025 academic year, but fellows have not been announced for the 2025-2026 academic year. Additionally, SPARK, a series of events that spotlights “women and non-binary people leading change in a wide range of areas,” has not hosted any events this semester as compared to previous years, which included talks with alumni, creating comics and zines with the Barnard Zine Library, and a walking tour of Harlem.

This semester, the Athena Center has only held events in collaboration with other programs on campus, including Take the Mic, Take Action with Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and Find Your Voice Through Advocacy with the Barnard Speaking Fellows and Access Barnard.

Throughout 2025, the Athena Center saw significant changes, including the resignation of director Umbreen Bhatti (BC ’00), as well as staff layoffs that impacted the program’s infrastructure, causing many Barnard affiliates to express their concerns about Athena’s future in shaping the College community.

A turn toward leadership 

A Barnard professor who wished to remain anonymous explained that the Athena Center was initially “a bit of an outcast on campus,” with the original focus on the Athena Film Festival and entrepreneurial work as “isolated from faculty as a whole.”

“I would go as far to say that there was an adversarial relationship between faculty and Athena,” they explained. “It was seen as this quasi-academic thing that had been introduced for outside corporate reasons.” 

Succeeding Kathryn Kolbert in 2019, Umbreen Bhatti, a Barnard alumna, served as the second Constance Hess Williams ’66 Director of the Athena Center for six years. With over a decade of strengthening organizations through fundraising and community work, Bhatti’s position at Barnard “completely [changed] the ethos of Athena.”

“Faculty members were pretty excited to have somebody taking this position who had a very different vision for what Athena could be,” the professor said. According to the professor, under Bhatti’s leadership, Athena was “doing more engaged projects, interacting with faculty more directly, and did a lot more collaboration.”

“By the last two to four years, faculty had fully embraced Athena. It had become part of campus life, and [Bhatti] had a lot to do with it,” they continued. “When students think about Athena today, what they’re recognizing isn’t Athena as it originally had been formulated. It is the Athena that [Bhatti] built.”

Bhatti received the Millicent Carey McIntosh Award for Feminism during the Barnard Reunion in May. The award honors a member of the Alumnae Association of Barnard College who “[personifies] Barnard’s commitment to the education of women+ and our alums’ influence throughout society.”

“I see students of all racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, religious, and political backgrounds sit together at Athena,” Bhatti said in her acceptance speech. “It has been the greatest joy of my career to witness them, to support them, and to grow with them.”

Bhatti described her feelings about accepting the award as “complicated,” denouncing administrative decisions to issue interim suspensions and evictions from housing, as well as allowing NYPD on campus to discipline student protesters.

“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,” Bhatti continued. “It is to not misrepresent them as people they’re not, for example, as students who are somehow at each other’s throats.”

Bhatti’s resignation

On June 2, Bhatti gave a 3-week notice about her planned transition to Springboard Enterprises. An hour later, while attending a summer class on campus as a guest speaker, Bhatti was unable to log in to gBear to access her lecture materials. Multiple sources confirmed that once the class finished, two Barnard HR employees met Bhatti and escorted her to her office, where she would gather her belongings and then be removed from campus.

“There was somebody [from HR] sitting outside and waiting for her to gather all of her things,” a faculty member who witnessed Bhatti’s removal told The Bulletin. 

The Athena Center announced Bhatti’s departure on June 18. Bhatti did not respond to The Bulletin’s request for a statement. 

On November 11, the College listed a job posting for the Constance Hess Williams ‘66 Director, who would also be referred to as the Assistant Vice President of the Athena Center. According to the posting, the third director will report to the Vice President for Campus Life and Student Experience and Dean of the College to “creatively build upon the Center’s existing programming while also ensuring that the Center is fully integrated into the College’s mission of empowering women.”

Delay of student worker wages

Inica Kotasthane (BC ’26) recalled many staff and students’ “general feelings of resentment towards the administration for how they handled [Bhatti’s resignation].”

This summer, Kotasthane participated in the Athena Advocacy Institute (AAI), a program that supports students interning at nonprofit organizations. AAI participants were expected to be paid every two weeks, but they were later informed that their compensation was affected by “structural reorganizing” within the College that impacted staff and student worker payrolls. 

“My first stipend got skipped, and for the rest of them, I had to reach out every time to make sure my payment was going to be received because, one, that was my only income for the summer; two, clearly there was something slipping between the cracks in Athena’s communication with the payroll office, to the point where students weren’t getting paid on time,” Kotasthane said.

Kotasthane noted that she has been a student worker since her first year at Barnard and had no previous issues with the direct deposit system.

Layoffs amid summer “structural reorganizing”

Following Barnard’s “College-wide Staff Restructuring” on July 31, President Rosenbury announced that 77 full-time staff members were laid off to “better align [Barnard’s] financial resources with… the College’s long-term goals.” 

“[Administrators are] always citing some organizational restructuring, but it’s really unclear how the diverted funds are going to benefit students in any way,” Kotasthane told The Bulletin.

Chriss Sneed, Athena’s Director of Applied Learning, was among the 77 staff who were laid off.

“Chriss emailed us towards the end of our program that they were going to be packing up their office and leaving that day, which was pretty shocking. This was maybe in the last week [of AAI],” Kotasthane explained. “We, as students, didn’t get any kind of notification that that was happening ahead of time. From what I observed, it didn’t seem like the staff members got that much advanced notice either.”

Sneed and other Athena staff arranged housing, stipends, and professional development workshops for students, while also providing one-on-one feedback and advice on nonprofit work for AAI participants.

“Losing someone [like Sneed] who was so integral to the functioning and presentation of the Athena Center is abhorrent,” Kotasthane said. “You’re gutting the organization and removing the people who have made it such an attractive and exciting place to be as a student.”

She continued, “I think it’s going to take a lot of time and resources to rebuild those relationships with students and that trust with the student community because that’s what [Sneed] did, and now, they’re no longer here. It feels like the entire organization is untethered.” 

Sneed declined to provide a statement to The Bulletin.

Despite seeing the departure of Bhatti, Sneed, and others, the Athena Center still employs many of the staff for film-related initiatives, including the Athena Film Festival and the Artemis Rising Foundation Filmmaker Fellowship Program.

Athena now

The Athena Center has continued some of its usual operations and events: its 2025-2026 Student Advisory Board was announced in late October, and the 16th annual Athena Film Festival will be held from March 5 to March 8, 2026. However, as funding and staff cuts impact Athena programming, students and faculty expressed concerns about future opportunities for students. 

“Athena is invisible now. It’s just not present on campus. I don’t even know how they’re going to do their film festival. All of their connections have been severed; all of their funding is gone,” said the anonymous Barnard professor. “[Administration] will at least diminish it to the point where it will have a very minimal presence on campus. At the extreme, I can imagine them just getting rid of it altogether.”

“Everything is being torn down, and all the money that is being invested in this institution is being invested in things like AI, which is taking away something as meaningful for both students and the campus as Athena,” they continued.

“[Administration] seems perfectly content with getting rid of workers who have had a really important and positive impact on students’ lives and have made this College capable of producing such amazing student leaders during and after graduation,” Kotasthane said.

On November 11, The Bulletin received the following statement from a Barnard spokesperson regarding the Athena Center:

“From Find Your Voice Through Advocacy and the Athena Student Advisory Board to the Barnard Summer Internship Program and the Athena Film Festival, the Athena Center for Leadership empowers students to turn ideas into action and lead. Through opportunities in entrepreneurship, advocacy, film, and research, Athena continues to support the next generation of changemakers.”

The College did not respond to The Bulletin’s request for comment on Bhatti’s removal or community concerns about Athena’s funding and staff layoffs.