After two weeks of tensions stemming from the expulsions of two pro-Palestinian student activists, Barnard College has become mired in a thorny debate about protests and discipline, heightened by fresh scrutiny from the Trump administration.
The situation came to a head on Wednesday, when nine people were arrested during a sit-in at Barnard’s library — two days after the college’s president, Laura Ann Rosenbury, wrote a Chronicle opinion essay defending her decision to expel the two students. The expelled students had participated in a disruption of an Israeli history class in January, along with several Columbia University students. (Barnard is Columbia’s undergraduate women’s college but is also an independent institution with its own administration.)
In her essay, Rosenbury vowed to “vigorously pursue” punishments for students who participated in a February 26 sit-in protesting the expulsions. Protesters, Rosenbury said, “forcibly and illegitimately entered [Milbank Hall], damaged or destroyed property, disregarded our community expectations, and violated many policies and rules.”
The nine arrests on Wednesday occurred at a subsequent sit-in protesting Rosenbury’s promise of discipline. In response to a request for comment about the arrests, a Barnard spokesperson pointed The Chronicle to a New York Police Department statement.
Adding to the turmoil was Friday’s decision by the Trump administration to yank $400 million in federal grants from Columbia. Government officials cited the university’s alleged inability to crack down on antisemitism and antiwar protests. Both the Biden and Trump administrations opened investigations into Columbia under Title VI, the civil-rights law barring discrimination in education based on race, color, national origin, and shared ancestry.
Katrina Armstrong, Columbia’s interim president, said in a Friday statement: “We are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns.” Earlier in the week, President Trump said all federal funding would stop for any college that “allows illegal protests.”
In the same social-media post, Trump threatened to deport and arrest student protesters. Over the weekend, a former Columbia graduate student who had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in university-owned housing, according to his lawyer, multiple news outlets reported.
According to student activists, a third Barnard student was expelled in late February for participating in an April occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, a classroom building. Barnard officials have not confirmed the third expulsion. Columbia’s separate disciplinary proceedings for that incident, as well as the January disruption of the Israeli history class, are still in progress.
The expulsions and arrests at Barnard have put a spotlight on its president, Rosenbury, who arrived in June 2023 and quickly clashed with some professors and students over disciplinary actions and changes to college policies. Her tenure has coincided with a surge of activism calling for Columbia and Barnard to divest from Israel, citing the country’s military actions in Gaza that have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
The college’s faculty voted no confidence in Rosenbury in April 2024, condemning her decision to evict some Barnard students from college housing after they were arrested for putting up an encampment on Columbia’s main quad.
Some faculty members are now calling for Rosenbury’s resignation as Barnard’s president. The Barnard and Columbia chapters of the American Association of University Professors said in a joint statement on Friday that they believed Rosenbury had “endangered our community” by calling the police on student protesters.
The statement called for the full faculty to take “an immediate vote” on Rosenbury’s future.
‘In the Shadows’
Rosenbury’s Chronicle essay, which was also emailed to Barnard’s students and staff, had harsh words for a group of pro-Palestinian student activists who have led a monthslong campaign calling for divestment from Israel.
The organization, called Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), initially formed in 2016 and reactivated following the university’s suspension of its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace in the fall of 2023.
Rosenbury described CUAD as “an unauthorized group of autonomous individuals” that has tried to “tear our campus community — our Barnard home — apart.” Senior leaders have disavowed the group, she wrote.
“They 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 call 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.”
What is really underlying this is almost now complete lack of trust, especially between the students and the administration, but I think also between faculty and administration.
In the piece, Rosenbury also wrote about Barnard’s response to the February 26 sit-in outside the office of the dean of the college, who oversees the campus disciplinary-appeal process. Students were calling for the dean to overturn the two students’ expulsions.
Rosenbury touted the college’s de-escalation and negotiation tactics, which she said dispersed the sit-in without calling the NYPD, making concessions, granting amnesty to student protesters, or allowing an overnight occupation.
At the February 26 sit-in, Barnard administrators made a tentative agreement with CUAD to meet with three students the following day. That meeting did not take place. Rosenbury’s March 3 essay then reignited activists’ frustrations with the college’s approach to discipline, leading to the sit-in at the library on March 5, which culminated in the arrests.
According to an NYPD spokesperson, all nine people were charged with obstructing governmental administration, trespassing, and disorderly conduct. The arrests — including four Columbia students — were made after college officials told protesters that there was a bomb threat and they needed to evacuate the library.
The police were called to respond to a demonstration at Barnard, according to an NYPD spokesperson. People were then arrested because, “while the officers were attempting to clear the vicinity and location for an active bomb threat, they remained in the area,” the spokesperson said.
Following the arrests, Rosenbury sent an email to the campus. “Today has been unsettling and disturbing, and these continued disruptions take a toll on our community,” Rosenbury wrote. “The desire of a few to disrupt and threaten cannot outweigh the needs of the students, faculty, and staff who call our campus home.”
Robert Cohen, a professor of social-studies education at New York University, studies student activism and protest movements. He said that when protests escalate at colleges, “it’s a sign of poor administration” and that “the place is not functioning well.”
“To me, that’s a failure of the university, not just a failure of the students. You’ve alienated them,” Cohen said. “They feel bitter about what’s happened to them.”
Cohen said that in cases like Barnard and Columbia, administrators can become estranged from their students.
“There’s a cycle here of escalation that began with the fact that the administration was under pressure to suppress this movement and didn’t find a way to basically forge a kind of trusting relationship with the protesters,” Cohen said. “I’m not saying that’s easy to do, but if you don’t do it at all, then this is what happens.”
Questions About Trust
Some faculty members believe the recent escalation stems from a series of missteps in Barnard’s handling of campus discipline.
“What is really underlying this is almost now complete lack of trust, especially between the students and the administration, but I think also between faculty and administration,” said Taylor Carman, a professor of philosophy at Barnard.
In the fall of 2023, shortly after Rosenbury became president and war broke out in Gaza, the college revised its student code of conduct process. According to Columbia Daily Spectator, the campus newspaper, officials did not involve student government or faculty leaders in the review, and did not notify the campus of changes.
Under the previous code, students had the right to have an lawyer present when they were “alleged to have engaged in conduct that potentially violates both the criminal law and this Student Code of Conduct.” The 2023 changes meant that students could no longer have legal representation at their hearings.
Columbia’s separate disciplinary proceedings do allow lawyers to participate. Columbia also recently altered its approach to student conduct, which Armstrong, the university’s interim president, touted in her Friday statement responding to the Trump administration’s decision to cancel federal contracts.
Armstrong said the university had created an Office of Institutional Equity last fall and tapped a new rules administrator. That office has sent investigation notices to some students who have expressed criticism of Israel, alleging that they may have subjected other students to “unwelcome conduct” based on religion, national origin, or military service, the Associated Press reported.
On Monday, at a regularly scheduled faculty meeting, Barnard professors pushed for more due process at their college: They proposed to reinstate the Barnard Judicial Council, a group of faculty, students, and administrators who had previously overseen conduct proceedings. A total of 128 faculty members voted, and 104 of those members voted “yes” in a nonbinding vote, according to a slide presented at the meeting that was obtained by The Chronicle.
Then the arrests on Wednesday brought frustrations with Rosenbury’s leadership to a boil, some students and faculty members said.
Barnard’s student government wrote in an email to students that their leaders had “been explicitly told by President Rosenbury, in the presence of other senior staff, that the college would never invite the NYPD onto campus. To go against this commitment blatantly violates a precedent that was meant to protect our students.”
Carman said that faculty members are “shocked and dismayed and very distressed that the police were called and that the arrests were made.”
“There’s sentiment on all sides, at least lip service, to the idea that we need to be de-escalating these conflicts, and the administration is saying they have been trying to de-escalate, and the faculty have been urging the students and the administration to de-escalate. Everybody is saying the word ‘de-escalate,’” Carman said. “I think calling the police, as they did yesterday, was absolutely not de-escalation.”
Rosenbury’s Chronicle op-ed defending her earlier decision to pursue expulsions said that she was drawing a “line in the sand” and that student protesters had crossed a line. Friday’s joint statement from the AAUP chapters at Barnard and Columbia said that Rosenbury had done the same.
