These alumnae got out and stayed out

SGA is back – complete with short meetings, free Pinkberry, and discussions that our Barnard Bearoness Dassi Karp will concisely cover, so that you don’t need to make your way to the Diana dining room on Monday nights yourself.

After a long summer of waiting, Barnard’s Student Government Association is back! Except… your Bold Beautiful Bureaucrats didn’t get straight to business as usual. Instead of, you know, governing, the Rep Council welcomed three Barnard alumnae to sit on a panel and discuss their college experiences and the time they spent working in student government.

The guests – Binta Brown, BC’95; Lara Avsar, BC’11; and Jyoti Menon BC’01 –  came with impressive resumes and true Barnard pride. They each served on the SGA as students. Brown now sits on the Board of Trustees, Menon is the President of the Alumnae Association, and Avsar has published a children’s book about a young DSpar (“it’s a passion project,” she said). These women were there to share wisdom and reminisce about the good old days, but mostly they just humblebragged. Their conversation, peppered with interruptions from their fellow panelists and full of laughter, covered everything from Snapchat (“I deleted it from my phone when I realized it stopped being popular with young people,” said Brown) to how great the nineties were (“We could let whoever we wanted come in to our dorm room,”Brown boasted. She continued, “There weren’t diversity issues necessarily… everything was very easy, very calm). Some things haven’t changed – Menon remembered that one of the biggest issues during her time on SGA was Barnard’s swipe policy, which remains unsolved.

In short: SGA’s meeting was taken over by some excited and surely well-meaning alums, who were good at talking about themselves and didn’t have much of anything useful to share. Here’s to hoping that next week our student Reps take back control.

Processional via the Barnard alumni site