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College’s first female president always felt like an outsider

BARBARA Gitenstein, who has just published the first volume of her biography, Experience is an Angled Road — Memoir of an Academic, was the first female and first Jewish president of the College of New Jersey.

In America, a college president is roughly the equivalent of a vice-chancellor at a British university. Barbara was appointed president in 1999.

It compares favourably with Cambridge, which appointed its first female vice-chancellor in 2003, and America’s female president at the prestigious Harvard in 2007.

Barbara always felt an outsider. She was one of only 10 Jews among the 1,800 Baptists and Methodists in the Alabama town of Florala, where her factory owner father was the town’s principal employer.

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