Since protests first emerged on campus, the administration has responded with an extremely punitive hand. It has pursued suspensions and expulsions of students accused of participating in unauthorized demonstrations. Along the way, it has evicted them from campus housing in the middle of the night and cut them off from meal plans. The discipline Barnard has meted out has not only been remarkably punitive–harsher than that pursued by Columbia–but has often been arbitrary as well.
Take the peaceful, “unauthorized” protest held on Futter field on December 11. At least nineteen students were brought up on disciplinary charges for attending the demonstration.
In order to identify individual students, according to an eye-opening investigation in the Columbia Spectator, the administration used security footage, reviewed students’ social media posts, and relied on the eyewitness testimony of administrators. Let that sink in for a minute. Barnard surveilled its own students and directed its deans to turn them in.
What’s more, some students brought up on disciplinary charges for participating in the demonstration were not even present at it. As reported in the Spec, one student was at her on campus job at the time. Another walked by the demonstration with two friends. She was on the phone with her mother and held her phone up to show her the protest. The student was brought up on disciplinary charges. The two friends with her were not.
President Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD on April 17 and then again on April 30 to arrest students involved in protests on the Columbia campus. The first of these two actions, involving the mass arrest of more than a hundred students, garnered vast media attention and set off a wave of encampments on campuses around the world. It’s worth noting something that was not reported in the media: that more than half of those arrested on April 17 were Barnard students, who were thus far overrepresented given the smaller size of the Barnard student body relative to Columbia's.
As of June 2024, the DA’s office has dropped all criminal charges against arrested students, citing insufficient evidence for vandalism, theft, and damage to property.
Barnard imposed suspensions, expulsions, as well as summary evictions against these students. Charges against some students were eventually dropped. However, two students have been suspended, with appeals denied, until January 2025. Four Barnard students face possible expulsion.
Not to our knowledge. The NYPD Chief of Patrol noted, following the April 17 arrests, that apprehended students were uniformly peaceful.
Arrested students were not only suspended but in many cases were summarily evicted from Barnard campus housing. In a particularly gratuitous display of cruelty, the administration gave students 15 minutes to clear all possessions from their dorms after their release from jail, which in a number of instances occurred after midnight.
Arrested Columbia students were not evicted from their dorms. Faculty feel strongly that the Dean of the College must update their policies to ensure that students are never removed from housing on such short notice except for in the most dire of circumstances involving imminent danger.
The problem with this response to the situation is that there are serious concerns about due process in the administration’s disciplinary proceedings. As noted above, punishment has often been arbitrary. Some students participating in protests have faced disciplinary measures while others have not. Sometimes students who were not even present at protests have been mistakenly brought into disciplinary proceedings. Rules that do not respect due process, discipline that is arbitrary and sloppily applied, are inherently unjust.
What’s more, it’s important to note that the rules themselves are constantly changing. Since the fall, the administration has implemented new restrictions on when and where demonstrations—and indeed expression generally–can happen. These policies have been written by the administration with no consultation with the community.
Even more strikingly, an investigation by the Columbia Spectator revealed that at some point this year, the administration quietly revised the Student Code of Conduct. Not only was the Code changed without consultation with relevant stakeholders and college governance structures, but no one in the community was notified of the revisions.
We only know about these changes because an investigative journalist with the Spectator used the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the internet, to compare the Code as it appeared on the Barnard website in September with the version that appears this spring. The comparison revealed that the new Code eliminated language involving accommodations for students during hearings and concentrated power to oversee proceedings in a “Conduct Administer” rather than a conduct hearing board.
Traditionally, discipline at Barnard is a collective, community concern. But Rosenbury's administration has hijacked the power to make and enforce the rules.
The response to student protesters this year has been consistently more draconian than in prior moments of campus mobilization:
In the protests of 1968, 115 Barnard students were arrested inside occupied buildings. Some received letters of censure but none were suspended, let alone expelled.
It is worth noting that the 1968 occupation was longer and more violent, and it involved extensive damage to property (including multiple fires, one resulting in the loss of a manuscript in a faculty office).
Meanwhile, where once different campus stakeholders established and enforced disciplinary procedures, today the administration exercises exclusive prerogative over those proceedings:
As far back as 1965, there was a judicial board with five students, two faculty members, and two administrators.
This time around, the administration has unilaterally decided on disciplinary measures without consulting a student disciplinary committee on which faculty and student representatives sit.
This is really the heart of the problem. The right to free speech is both enshrined in the Constitution and incredibly complicated. There is no question that there are things one cannot say on a college campus and that all students have the right to freedom from harassment. Where to draw the line between one student’s right to express their political opinions and another student’s right to live and learn in an environment free of harassment is thus complicated.
But rules unilaterally written and punishments harshly and arbitrarily meted out will not help us to draw that line. This is the work of the community itself, not of an administration that does not understand that community or its values, has failed to form relationships of trust with faculty or students, makes decisions unilaterally without consultation, and is motivated above all by fear of liability.
As a community, it is both our right and our obligation to discuss and debate questions of speech, harassment, expression, discrimination, protest, and safety. By usurping that right and responsibility, Rosenbury’s administration has further complicated an already complex situation, fractured our community, and left many of its members feeling less safe and less included.
At this moment, students are facing unprecedented disciplinary action for their protest activity. Despite publicly stating that all suspensions for protestors were reversed, the administration went forward with suspensions of two Barnard students and their appeals were denied. There are expulsion hearings for four other Barnard students. Learn more about the campaign for Amnesty for Barnard student protestors.
Talk to faculty. Listen to students. Read the Spec and the Barnard Bulletin for some remarkable student investigative journalism. Get involved in alumnae affairs. Ask questions when the administration characterizes its students in certain ways or throws its faculty–as individuals or collectively–under the bus. Stay involved in the Barnard community and integrate into the networks of wisdom and support that guide our students.