(JNS) Laura Rosenbury, the Barnard College president, condemned anti-Israel protesters, who took over an administrative building on campus last week, and defended the college’s decision to expel two anti-Israel demonstrators in a March 3 Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed.
“Over the last year and a half, an unauthorized group of anonymous individuals calling themselves Columbia University Apartheid Divest have exploited the conflict in the Middle East to try to tear our campus community—our Barnard home—apart,” she wrote.
Rosenbury denounced the four “masked individuals,” who disrupted a modern Israeli history class at Columbia University on the first day of the spring semester in January, noting that Barnard students participated in the protest.
“This disruption was not designed to expand thinking or advance civil discourse,” she wrote. “Instead, it was a calculated act of intimidation, with the disruptors taunting and loudly speaking over the professor, distributing antisemitic flyers and refusing to join the discussion even when the professor graciously invited them to sit in on the class.
“This wasn’t an isolated incident but an escalation of an ongoing threat to our community,” she added.
The student group’s members “operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence and ‘Zionist billionaires,’” and it “calls for violence and disruption at any cost,” Rosenbury wrote.
“They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve,” she added.
The anti-Israel student group responded to news of the expulsion of the two Barnard students by protesting at the school’s Milbank Hall on Feb. 26. Protesters forced their way through a rear exit, knocking down a community safety employee in the process. (The New York City Police Department confirmed to JNS that an injured party went to the hospital.)
“The disruptors continued to engage in activity utterly at odds with our mission,” she wrote. “They caused $30,000 in damages to a building that houses not just the offices of the president and the dean of the college but also multiple classrooms and the offices that seek to further diversity, equity and inclusion at Barnard.”
Rosenbury wrote that Barnard successfully “de-escalated the situation without further violence, fully clearing Milbank Hall by 10:40 p.m. that night.”
Though protesters wore masks, Barnard identified who it says are the perpetrators and plans to take disciplinary action against students who violated college policies and guidelines.
“To those who hide behind masks, we invite you to step forward, not in anonymity but in dialogue,” Rosenbury wrote. “We welcome respectful conversation in a space of shared learning and accountability. That requires knowing who is at the table.
“Last week was a test, set in motion by Barnard’s decision to act decisively after the classroom disruption,” she wrote. “Expulsion is always an extraordinary measure, but we did what needed to be done, and we will continue to do so.
“Disrupting classes and defacing buildings to intimidate and divide our community is not academic exploration,” she added. “It is a betrayal of the goals and sanctity of higher education.”
