Bold, Beautiful, Bomb Threat?
Protestors clash with the NYPD Strategic Response Group on Futter Field. Photo courtesy of Stella Ragas, Columbia Daily Spectator.
On a chilly December evening, I received a folder containing a paper copy of my acceptance letter to Barnard. The front of the folder read, “YOUR VOICE JUST GOT: LOUDER, STRONGER, BOLDER.” A fear of speaking out had dictated my life up to that point, and when I read those capitalized, bolded words on Barnard’s acceptance package, I felt a surge of empowerment, an excitement about what was to come.
There is some truth to the slogan “Bold, Beautiful, Barnard.” These past two years here have given me an opportunity for unprecedented personal growth. Surrounded by a plethora of passionate, supportive and inspiring peers, I can confidently say that—for the most part—Barnard students have helped the college live up to its reputation of fostering an environment that promotes free expression. Barnard’s administration, however, has curated quite the opposite sentiment, hollowing out its advertised activism into little more than a performative promise.
Seeing no shortage of mainstream media coverage and federal government call-outs, Columbia University has become one of the most significant battlegrounds for the ongoing American culture wars. The most prominent battle, perhaps, has been over Columbia’s central role in catalyzing the nationwide Palestinian solidarity student movement to protest Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Little national attention, however, has been paid to Barnard College’s role in all of this. Barnard has been more or less lumped in with discussions of Columbia without recognition for the distinct role Barnard’s students and administration have played in this unfolding crisis.
Barnard was founded in 1889, after student and writer Annie Nathan Meyer and her peers petitioned the Columbia trustees to certify Barnard’s affiliation as a women’s college. To this day, Barnard has retained many of its distinctive qualities, including its own administration, curriculum, and finances, while also having developed a significant connection with its partner university. Perhaps most distinctively, the college has prided itself on its 130-year “Fearless History” of “Majoring in Unafraid.” Barnard’s website flaunts this legacy, claiming that “there has never been a better time to be part of a college whose purpose is to amplify women’s power to change the world.” Barnard’s status as “both an independently accredited and incorporated educational institution as well as an official college of Columbia University” has laid the groundwork for an enduring and contentious debate: “Is Barnard, Columbia?”
Though there has yet to be a clear answer to this age-old (misogynistic and elitist) question, the student protests have thrust this debate back into the spotlight. Last spring, during the height of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia’s campus, President Laura Rosenbury appeared to utilize Barnard’s degree of separateness to the administration’s advantage. Following President Minouche Shafik’s unprecedented police sweep of Columbia’s south lawn on April 18th, 2025, Rosenbury made no public statements for a full week. As a consequence of Rosenbury’s inaction, the Barnard faculty reached a unanimous vote of no confidence in their president. To this day, Rosenbury’s presidential tenure remains highly controversial and largely criticized, and rightfully so. Yet, unlike Minouche and Columbia’s former interim president Katerina Armstrong, who faced similar backlash due to their own handling of campus protests, Rosenbury has yet to step down. While the Barnard administration ignores the backlash, it continues to reprimand its students for demonstrations of their moral conscience. For instance, more than 53 Barnard students who participated in the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” last spring were not only suspended but evicted, while their counterparts at Columbia merely faced disciplinary threats. As protests persisted on campus, Barnard administrators stood idly by while much of their own student body was violently arrested, rendered unhoused, and made unable to access campus dining services; many were also subjected to persistent doxxing campaigns.
Barnard’s administration has been particularly hypocritical in the way it has responded to student mobilization. While Columbia celebrates its history of student activism and flaunts an impressive array of high-profile changemakers, Barnard has gone much further, strategically marketing social justice as an integral part of the college’s identity. Nevertheless, this historic women’s college that specifically appeals to passionate, politically engaged students silenced and endangered them when it became convenient to do so.
On March 5th, 2025, after over a year of consistent and overwhelming Barnard participation in protests calling on Barnard and Columbia to sever ties with Israel, the events that unfolded on Barnard’s campus could not have illustrated a clearer picture of despotism. This student mobilization was largely in protest of the expulsion of three Barnard students who participated in a disruption of the “History of Modern Israel” class taught by ex-Israel Defense Forces soldier Avi Shilon. The sit-in fell in line with the broader effort of student demonstrators to object to incursions on their liberty as members of a university that should, in theory, respect both the principle and the practice of free expression for everyone. This is to say nothing of their efforts against institutional complicity in Israel’s murder of plausibly 186,000+ Palestinians since October 2023. After over three hours of a staged sit-in at the Milstein Center, Barnard faculty warned of an alleged “bomb threat” and instructed all protestors to clear out of the building “for the safety and security of our community.” Minutes later, a flood of NYPD Officers poured through Barnard’s gate, occupied our small campus, and held the demonstrators in the very building that they claimed they were protecting from a lethal threat.
While I had felt a growing sense of complacency, complicity, and cowardice from Barnard’s administration as Israel’s assault waged on, this was a moment that made those attributes undeniably clear. The way that President Rosenbury, Dean Leslie Grinage, and other Barnard faculty members responded to two dozen student protestors—many of whom were women of color between the ages of 17 and 22—is deplorable. After several hours of chanting, drum-playing, flyering, and holding hands while dancing, Barnard found it appropriate to meet their student body with NYPD and its Strategic Response Group, despite profound opposition to this deployment tactic by faculty and the larger Columbia community. To me, Barnard’s endless regurgitation of the concept of “safety” no longer holds meaning. Among all the rhetoric lauding the college’s feminist approach to higher education and tradition of cultivating changemakers, I can confidently say that all of these claims are fraudulent.
As I witnessed the scene unfold that rainy evening, as the Barnard administration had emboldened the NYPD to physically, and largely violently, arrest their students, I couldn’t have felt more lied to by the college I remember being so eager to attend. While watching NYPD—emboldened by the administration—violently arrest and detain students for practicing exactly what Barnard preaches, I thought about how, just below ground, there was a mural beautifully displayed in Barnard’s Hewitt Dining Hall. It quotes the human rights activist and Barnard alumna Grace Lee Boggs: “ACTIVISM IS ABOUT THE JOURNEY, NOT THE DESTINATION.”
The time is now for Barnard to step up and act in accordance with the values they claim to stand for. It is paramount for administrators to reflect on their messaging, respect democratic practices and the will of their student body, and—above all—not punish their students for using their voices boldly. I desperately call on Barnard to be bold and diverge from their partner institution on this matter of utmost importance. The hypocrisy is embarrassing, and I hope that somehow half my faith and love for Barnard can be restored to how I felt opening that acceptance letter. Your students deserve better, and Palestinians deserve life.
Carolina Javier (BC ‘27) is a staff writer at the Columbia Political Review, studying Human Rights and Political Science. In her free time, she enjoys making music, dancing, and going on hikes!