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AROUND THE QUADS

Barnard Names Spar 11th President

Barnard president-elect Debora L. Spar

PHOTO: Barnard College/Diane Bondareff

Barnard College has named Debora L. Spar, a Harvard Business School professor who has written about reproductive technologies and the evolution of the Internet, as its 11th president. Spar will take office on July 1, succeeding Judith R. Shapiro, who has been president since 1994 and announced her intention to step down as president in April 2007.

Spar said in a statement she looked forward to joining “what I already know to be a warm, vibrant and welcoming community of scholars and students. … Barnard College offers something that is increasingly hard to find in our world, yet increasingly important: an intense and intimate liberal arts environment.”

In announcing Spar’s appointment at a faculty meeting, Anna Quindlen ’74 Barnard, chair of the Barnard Board of Trustees, said, “When I announced this search I told all of you, ‘The 11th leader of the College must be someone with considerable gifts of both mind and heart, a charismatic intellectual deeply committed to the value of single-sex education for women.’ I have no doubt that we have found just such a person in Debora Spar.”

Spar is the Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration and has been a senior associate dean for faculty research and development at HBS, where she teaches courses on the politics of international business, comparative capitalism and economic development. She also has been chair of Harvard’s University Committee on Human Rights and created and led Making Markets Work, an executive education program devoted to developing public and private sector leaders in Africa. Spar won the Student Association Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2000.

Quindlen said Spar’s success in juggling the roles of scholar and administrator at Harvard Business School enhanced her candidacy. “In one role, she epitomizes the teacher-scholar model that is the linchpin of Barnard’s superb faculty. In the other, she has been a stellar administrator who has brought innovative leadership to governance issues. And despite the demands of both, she has also devoted herself to the concerns of social justice, which are so important to our students.”

A native of Rye Brook, N.Y., Spar graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and earned a Ph.D. in government at Harvard. She taught briefly at the University of Toronto before joining the HBS faculty in 1991.

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