HBS Prof To Lead Barnard College

Debora L. Spar, a 16-year-veteran of the Harvard Business School, will be the 11th president of Barnard College, the New-York-based women’s college announced Tuesday.

At 44, Spar is more than two decades younger than her predecessor at Barnard, Judith R. Shapiro.

“She’s got a lot of energy, and the room lights up when she walks in,” said Business School professor Janice H. Hammond. “The bulb is a little dimmer without her, as someone put it today.”

While her work at Barnard will be a change from her role at Harvard, where her primary responsibilities are researching and teaching, Spar said that the Business School, where she has served as an associate dean, has prepared her well for the position.

“One of the things that they have done at the Business School is take young faculty and give them administrative experience,” she said. “It was a fair amount in a short amount of time.”

Jacqueline Bhabha, executive director of the University Human Rights Committee on which Spar serves, says that Spar’s background is well-suited for leading a liberal-arts institution.

“She certainly has a lot of managerial and business related skills,” Bhabha said. “But she also has a broad set of interests that span different disciplines.”

Spar teaches courses on political economy and conducts research on issues of business-government relations and the political environment of international commerce. She recently published a book, entitled “The Baby Business,” on the political, social, and economic issues surrounding the market for babies, and is currently working on research about the global market for water.

She said plans to eventually resume teaching and research, but that she will need time to adjust to her new job.

“Barnard has been gracious in giving me an opportunity to teach and to keep several research positions,” she said. “I’m sort of going to figure that out as I go.”

Spar will have five months before she is officially installed as president and must leave her home in Cambridge for the bright lights of New York.

“Its vaguely terrifying, leaving a place I know very well and going to a place I don’t know at all,” she said.

Spar, who joined the faculty at the Business School in 1991, has spent the past 24 years in Cambridge. Before becoming a professor, she earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in government.

Barnard College, a top-ranked liberal arts college, is affiliated with Columbia. Spar has no previous ties to either school.

Anna Quindlen, a columnist and the chair of the Barnard Board of Trustees, said in a statement that the search committee found in Spar a candidate who was “a charismatic intellectual deeply committed to the value of single-sex education for women.”

At Barnard, Spar will oversee a student body of 2,389 undergraduates and a faculty of 319 professors.

—Staff writer Abby D. Phillip can be reached at adphill@fas.harvard.edu.