Registrar Barry Kane Puts Academic Trains on Track

If Barry Kane does his job right, you may never know he exists. As associate vice president and University Registrar for all 17 of Columbia’s divisions, he oversees the invisible but vital tasks of academic life: class registration and course enrollment, classroom assignments, final exam schedules, transcripts for tens of thousands of students, and mandatory reports to the federal government and NCAA. And, of course, the 10,000-plus diplomas conferred each year.

“I’ve often said that the very best registrar’s offices are those that are utterly and completely taken for granted,” said Kane, who took over as Columbia’s registrar a year ago, succeeding the long-serving John Carter, who retired.

Kane comes to Columbia with plenty of experience, having served as the senior registrar at six colleges and universities. They were as small as Colgate—enrollment 2,900, where he managed a staff of five—and as large as Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with 10,000 students. There the registrar’s office numbered over 50 employees, whose responsibilities included producing major academic publications, building a suite of electronic applications for faculty and students and helping coordinate an advisory program for undergraduates.

“The bigger the school, of course, the more complicated the task,” he says. Columbia, with a student enrollment of 28,211, is Kane’s biggest undertaking yet. His mandate is to make sure the University is at the forefront of developing technology to replace cumbersome manual forms and eliminate lines at the registrar’s office. Priorities include updating and enhancing the 20-year-old database currently in use; replacing printed transcripts with electronic records transmittable via the Internet; developing tools to add or drop courses online; and establishing uniform, clear policies for all schools to report and process student withdrawals.

Already, he has overseen several projects requiring collaboration among dozens of University administrators, such as the recent effort to build an online Curricular Planning Statement offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which allows departments to schedule courses only at approved time blocks. That means fewer courses overlap and translates into fewer scheduling conflicts for students.

“Being new to an institution is a great thing,” said Kane, “not because I have some special wisdom or skill set but because it allows a new set of eyes to be viewing and thinking about an old set of problems. And, hopefully, coming up with some solutions that will work for the institution, given its unique history, set of circumstances and special ways of doing business.”

In 1996, Yale hired him away from Colgate to merge the formerly separate registrar’s offices in Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and to implement the new Banner student information system. Both came with the challenges of changing business practices at institutions that pride themselves on tradition.

The lessons Kane learned there were put to good use when he joined Harvard in 2003, where class registration was still done on paper card stock and course listings were available in printed catalogs the size of small phone books.

“When Barry got to Harvard, the registrar’s office was something out of the 19th century,” said Benedict H. Gross, who hired Kane when he was dean of Harvard College and now is the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Mathematics. (Last semester, Gross was the Eilenberg Visiting Professor of Mathematics here at Columbia.) “It was amazingly difficult to even get a transcript.” He added, “When Barry left, he left us in the 21st century.”

Working behind the scenes—The Crimson nicknamed him “Harvard’s international man of mystery… rarely seen but often heard”—Kane put all the registrar’s functions onto virtual platforms. When the school started its first advising office for undergraduates, Kane’s team built an online portal where students could contact each of their advisers, and vice versa.

“When we worked together at Harvard, he anticipated our needs, helped us articulate them and took the solution to a level higher than anyone else could have imagined,” said Monique Rinere, who founded the Harvard advisory program and is now dean of advising at Columbia College and the engineering school.

At each of his previous jobs, Kane says, he has learned skills and gained experience that will help him in his new position.

“I like to think that Columbia is getting a better registrar than Harvard had with me and that Harvard got a better registrar than I was when I was at Yale, and so on,” Kane said. “You just learn a lot along the way, and, hopefully, those lessons will translate into being far more effective with each opportunity for service that comes your way.”