Barnard College is threatening disciplinary action against pro-Palestinian students involved in a brief takeover of a campus building last week, the college president announced Monday.
In an op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a trade paper, Barnard President Laura Rosenbury said the women’s college affiliated with Columbia University is working to identify all student participants in the Feb. 26 protest at Milbank Hall, which called for divestment from Israel.
“Even though all of the disruptors wore masks, we now know the identity of many of them and are continuing to identify the rest,” Rosenbury wrote.
“We will vigorously pursue discipline and other remedies against those who forcibly and illegitimately entered the building, damaged or destroyed property, disregarded our community expectations, and violated many policies and rules.”
It was not clear if Rosenbury’s op-ed marked a reversal from previous communications to students. Before leaving the building, administrators circulated a notice, posted online by protesters, saying students had until 10:30 p.m. to vacate the premises or face disciplinary action. They seemingly dispersed at that time.
There was no immediate response to a request for comment from university spokespeople.
The short-lived occupation, which lasted six hours, was called in response to the expulsions of two Barnard students who, on the first day of classes this semester, disrupted a modern Israeli history course with flyers of a boot stepping on the Star of David, a Jewish symbol. Rosenbury condemned the handouts as antisemitic.
“I was told countless times the value of voicing my opinions and standing up for what I know to be true and good,” one of the expelled students said last week in an anonymous statement through Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a campus protest group. Their identity could not be independently verified by the Daily News.
The takeover resulted in an estimated $30,000 in damages to Milbank Hall, according to the article. Protesters broke into multiple classrooms and offices for first-generation, low-income and international students.
Rosenbury denounced demonstrators who heckled the dean of the college for wanting to get access to the bathroom. A security guard was physically assaulted, Barnard spokespeople and the officer’s union have said.
The college president continued to accuse Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which is unauthorized, of having “exploited the conflict in the Middle East to try to tear our campus community — our Barnard home — apart.”
“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 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.”