Yesterday, Barnard College and its president Laura Rosenbury escalated their war against the right to protest by bringing in the New York Police Department (NYPD) to arrest nine students participating in a sit-in against campus repression. This is the first time students have been arrested on campus since last year’s Palestine solidarity encampments, and it’s a clear attempt to terrify students into submission in the context of a growing wave of repression cheerled by the Trump administration.
Rosenbury’s justification for calling in the cops — a “bomb threat” — rings hollow. Students were met with NYPD officers storming the building without warning. This was not about safety — it was about fear. It was about silencing student demands for an end to the university’s complicity in genocide. In the wake of these arrests, Barnard has ramped up security measures, restricting campus access, implementing ID checks and random bag searches, and even enforcing unmasking requirements.
The crackdown at Barnard follows the recent expulsion of three students, the first since 1968. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the Far Right have been preparing to silence dissent at universities even further because they fear that students and workers will rise up as they have in the past — both last year to denounce the oppression of Palestinians, and during previous student uprisings like against the war in Vietnam and for the Civil Rights movement.
Concretely, Trump has already passed an executive order promising to deport immigrant students and workers at universities and schools. He has already introduced cuts which will likely lead to a slew of layoffs and program reductions. And he is sending the Department of Justice to several universities next week — including Columbia — to send a message that administrators must comply with his authoritarian offensive.
Luckily for Trump, administrators across universities have been completely complicit in the escalating attacks because they are ultimately beholden to the interests of the regime. Barnard has become the ground zero for attacks against the movement, as the university suspended at least 53 students during the encampment movement last year and also imposed these disciplinary measures without due process, stripping students of their institutional right to contest their expulsions and suspensions. This opens the door to more arbitrary decisions that are meant to make it easier for administrators to discipline students and workers.
Local politicians from Democratic mayor Eric Adams, who heads the NYPD, to Kathy Hochul, who showed her heavy hand in blocking the appointment of a professor for a course on Palestine, are also playing a key role in aiding and abetting Trump’s line. In the face of neo-McCarthyism that harkens back to the Red Scare and threatens our basic democratic rights as students, workers, and activists, we must stand up and protect our right to protest against genocide. As yesterday’s protest organized by the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) and the recent statement written by SWC alongside a number of student and worker organizations explain, we also need to stop the expulsions, deportations, and cuts that are being encouraged by Trump.
Today, there will be an emergency protest at 1 PM at the Low Steps. The entire Columbia and Barnard campus community, from students to workers, staff to professors, should come out and denounce campus repression in the spirit of the large protests on campus last year. We must organize ourselves democratically and without any illusions in the university administrators who have no problem calling in the NYPD. Instead, we must demand that cops from the NYPD to ICE are not allowed on campuses. We must call for expelled students to be reinstated immediately and for all charges and sanctions to be dropped against affected activists.
