C, a Jewish senior at Columbia University’s Barnard College, said she found out she had to attend a disciplinary hearing two days before her senior thesis was due. She was being called in, she was told, because she attended a demonstration earlier in the semester and because she had, a few weeks later, chained herself to a campus gate. (As she and other Jewish students have been doxed for their participation in pro-Palestine protests, I am not using her real name in this piece.)
Weeks later, she was in a disciplinary hearing, trying to explain to a conduct officer what had happened. “My friend was abducted. My university was complicit. This was done in the name of the religion I love and care about.”
Her degree conferral has been deferred until October. Hers is one of several similar cases: Jewish students disciplined by a university that has said, publicly and repeatedly, that it is attempting to demonstrate that it takes Jewish safety seriously.
“I just felt so angry at my commencement, and I feel sad because I worked so hard for four years. I wanted to feel good and proud. And I just couldn’t feel anything but frustration and anger.”
Barnard is not the only college—and Columbia not the only university—to use graduation and the awarding of a degree as a way to push back against students protesting for Palestinian rights. The universities say it is a matter of enforcing rules; their critics, that they are chilling speech.
The universities say that they are upholding their own rules and policies and keeping campus safe for all. New York University decided to withhold the diploma of a student speaker, Logan Rozos, who delivered an unapproved graduation speech on “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine” that quickly went viral. “He lied about the speech he was going to deliver and violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules,” an NYU spokesperson said in a statement. “NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.”
Barnard, for its part, insisted in a statement that “no students were disciplined or had their degrees deferred as a response to the content of their speech or expression.” Instead, “disciplinary measures were taken in response to vandalism, course disruption, and other actions that violated Barnard’s Student Code of Conduct and interfered with the core academic mission of the college.”
“The College is using degree deferral to scare students into silence,” Debbie Becher, an associate professor of sociology at Barnard, who is Jewish, said in an email. “It accomplishes what the administration wants: a show of force with no regard for due process. There is no warrant for this. The College has the power to revoke a degree, so it could wait until due process has been followed. Instead, it chose to impose a punishment before the process.”
“There needs to be a sound conduct process for breaking rules; this would include judgment by peers, transparency, accountability, reasonable sanctions, and protection of student rights. Barnard has none of this,” she replied. There’s just centralized power and harsh punishment.
H, a Jewish recent graduate of Barnard who was also disciplined for chaining herself to the gate, said that the administration talks “about wanting to build community.”
Jewish students are not the only, or even primary, individuals caught up in crackdowns against pro-Palestinian speech and criticism (including often harsh criticism) of Israel. After all, the reason C chained herself to the gate, she said, is that she thought she’d be safer than many of her peers. In our conversation, she repeatedly stressed that her Palestinian and Arab peers in particular are “subjected to worse” than what she faces as a Jewish student. Piacentini too made clear that Jews are not the most impacted by policies that challenge pro-Palestinian speech and protest—many others are “more at risk than we are.”
Still, as Becher put it, “the punishment of Jewish students for these protests reveals the hypocrisy of the claim that the college or federal administration wants to protect us. The punishment of Jewish students instead betrays a disregard for their safety.”
Piacentini said that, while he considers himself anti-Zionist, even Jewish colleagues and students who don’t but are critical of Israel’s war feel “primarily threatened and targeted by people with power who claim to be trying to protect us from antisemitism.”
C told me that she had chosen Barnard because “I wanted to be around people who would encourage me to stand up for what I believe in.” And she loved so much of her experience. But in the end, she said, she felt her identity and beliefs—those of an anti-Zionist Jewish student—were ignored.
“If it wasn’t so dangerous and sad, it would be bordering on a farce,” said Piacentini. “‘The best way to protect Jewish students is to silence them, arrest them, and take away their degrees.’ How can you say that out loud and not hear you’re wrong?”
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