Is it fun to run a newspaper?

Earlier this week, Barnard President Debora Spar announced that Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times, will be Barnard’s commencement speaker this May. As a senior at Barnard, this is an announcement I’ve anxiously awaited, wondering who would become the figurehead—at least in the press—of the strong, smart class of 2012. A number of my classmates and I had pushed for Tina Fey, the creator of the hit show “30 Rock,” to be our speaker. Though it was my suitemates and I who started the Facebook group “TINA. FEY. COMMENCEMENT. 2012.” in fall 2010, I am excited about the choice President Spar has made. And I’m pretty sure Liz Lemon would be, too.

Abramson is the first female executive editor of the Times, an institution that is, well, an institution. White men dominated its masthead until the late 1970s. As the first woman to hold this distinguished leadership role at an internationally venerated news company, Abramson represents the type of persistence and drive that I think moves Barnard students. She grew up a New Yorker, and she now leads the organization after which the most iconic part of the city—Times Square—is named. For a college in New York, it is fitting to have one of our city’s leaders honored at our commencement.

Though Abramson isn’t a Barnard alumna herself, her mother is. She was also born and raised on the Upper West Side, so chances are she’s sampled an Absolute bagel in her day. I won’t go so far as to try to draw parallels between Fey and Abramson, but I think that Abramson exhibits many of the characteristics that had made Tina Fey/Liz Lemon an appealing choice as a class day speaker. Both women are role models in large part because they rose to the top of traditionally male-dominated arenas—Abramson at the Times and Fey as the first female head writer at “Saturday Night Live.”

President Spar has often spoken of the need for more smart women in the boardrooms of big banks and corporations. Students’ admiration of Fey and the selection of Abramson as our class speaker speak to the paucity of women in leadership roles in diverse sectors, including comedy and journalism. At a school that boasts numerous distinguished writers among its alumnae, Barnard’s choice of Abramson as a commencement speaker reveals the ongoing opportunities for women to be the firsts in their fields.

Without hesitation that I’m falling into the trap of an “I read it in the New Yorker”-ism, I must point out that both Fey and Abramson have been featured in the New Yorker during the past year (as was Sheryl Sandberg, Barnard’s commencement speaker in 2011). In the Oct. 24 2011 issue, Ken Auletta profiled Abramson a month after she had assumed the executive editor post. He wrote, “Once, it was preposterous to think that a woman could become the editor of the Times.” In the piece, Auletta quotes an assistant manager of the Times who had told a reporter in 1962 that “no woman will ever be an editor at the New York Times.” Abramson represents a shift, albeit 50 years later, from that paradigm. For Barnard graduates in 2012, she also symbolizes an optimism that change is occurring, that patience is a virtue, and that success, defined broadly, is not out of the question, whereas many older adults are quick to remind us of the bleak economic, political, and social climate.

On a personal level, I am excited to have the executive editor of the Times speak at my commencement. Like many other Barnard students, the school’s emphasis on its legacy of successful writers was one aspect that drew me to the college four years ago. My journalistic writing for Spectator has certainly been a defining aspect of my college experience, and writing was integral to my elementary, middle school, and high school years as well.

In 11th grade, a U.S. history teacher showed my class the 1940 film “His Girl Friday," starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Russell plays Hildy Johnson, a newspaper woman whose ex-husband and boss tries to woo her back to the business. I remember little of the plot line, but I can vividly recall Hildy’s character traits as a mid-20th century female reporter: She was pushed around in the newsroom, but she was tough and to-the-point when getting the facts. As an aspiring reporter, I loved the film because Hildy represented the way things were for women in the newsroom, and the ideal that things could change. Abramson is certainly an emblem of that change.

“Citizen Kane” came out just a year after “His Girl Friday.” In it, Orson Welles plays Charles Foster Kane, a character based in part on the powerful publisher and politician William Randolph Hearst. Early on, an idealistic Kane is drawn to the newspaper business, proclaiming, “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” I have often ruminated on that dream. I look forward to hearing from Abramson what it’s like in reality.

Jessica Hills is a Barnard College senior majoring in political science and French and Francophone studies. Urban Dictionary runs alternate Fridays.