“I sat in that hearing, and I sobbed.”
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.)
The demonstration she and several other Jewish students attended was a protest of the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian green card holder, recent Columbia graduate, and her friend, by ICE. She and several other Jewish students had chained themselves to a campus gate demanding to know “the names of the Columbia trustees who facilitated the abduction of our beloved friend by collaborating with the Trump administration.” She and her fellow Jewish students had felt that, “as Jewish students, we were the only ones who could do this safely,” she told me, “AND send a message: This does not keep us safe.”
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.”
“I didn’t expect to break down that much,” she told me.
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.
She was able to walk at graduation, she said, even though the administration was withholding her degree. But the victory, such as it was, was a hollow one.
“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.”
“I think it’s both highly problematic and unfortunate,” James Piacentini, a Jewish adjunct assistant professor in urban planning and architecture at Columbia, told me, “that the university and school administrators have become so warped in their thinking that they’re purporting to believe that undermining free expression of Jewish students is somehow combating antisemitism on campus.”
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 backdrop to all of this is, of course, the Trump administration, which is threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from a number of universities, including Columbia, if they do not do what the administration tells them to in order to “fight antisemitism.” This series of demands includes turning over a university’s academic independence to the federal administration (Columbia has tried to acquiesce; Harvard is tied up in court). And so, with millions intended for scientific research hanging in the balance, ostensibly for the good of Jewish students, universities entered graduation season locked in an existential battle and firmly under the national spotlight.
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.”
George Washington University, meanwhile, announced an investigation after commencement speaker Cecilia Culver delivered a speech, also different from the one she submitted, encouraging her peers not to donate to the university until it divests from Israel. Culver (and the dean who followed her and thanked her for sharing her perspective) were denounced by some for antisemitism; Culver has since “been barred from all GW’s campuses and sponsored events elsewhere,” per the university.
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.”
Others see the response of these colleges and universities as little more than a scare tactic meant to chill free speech.
“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.”
I put to Becher that some would say that rules were indeed broken and that there should be consequences when policies are not adhered to.
“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.
Piacentini also suggested that people take more extreme action when other, arguably milder forms of protest have been taken from them. Perhaps if Jewish and non-Jewish pro-Palestinian groups weren’t kicked off campus, he said, “other forms of protest might not be necessary.” But they were, and so “people are putting their ideas, their bodies on the line because other mechanisms have been taken away from them.”
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.”
“I have tried to do that,” she continued. “The university has made that difficult at every turn.” She tried to organize Shabbat gatherings for Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist Jewish group. “But the university suspended the club.” She felt that it was difficult to be Jewish on campus—because her administration “has decided that we are not.”
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.”
There are dramatic examples of that risk: Khalil is still detained. Palestinian Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi was also arrested and detained (though he has been released and was able to walk at graduation). H noted that her own discipline was essentially “an art project”—she had to write an essay with visual accompaniment about how to properly register events on campus. She believes that, if she were not a white Jewish student, her punishment would have been worse.
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.”
The administrations at Barnard and Columbia alike, she added, have “ignored Jewish students, scholars, and community members who have told them repeatedly that they must adopt a definition of antisemitism as hatred against Jews for being Jews, not a definition that connects Jewish identity to Israel. The definition of hatred against Jews for being Jews would lead to policies that actually defend Jewish safety.” There are, after all, many types of Jewish students at Barnard, and Columbia, and every campus: students who relate differently to Israel and Palestine and Zionism and anti-Zionism and Jewish institutions of various stripes. (Studies suggest that the majority are neither agitating for Zionism and Israel nor for Palestine.)
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.”
Listening to C, I thought of how Jewish students should have the right to go to class and extracurriculars and parties and protests and feel safe. I thought about that as I listened to her tell me how she and her fellow Jewish students had been doxed and harassed and accused by a Jewish faculty member of being not dissimilar to the Judenrat, councils that acted as go-betweens for the Nazis and Jewish communities. I listened as she talked about trying to finish her senior thesis, crying in her disciplinary hearing, and attending musical theater class while worrying about her friend Mahmoud, sitting in a prison in Louisiana. Was the point of all of this to make sure that Jewish students can learn safely? So they can focus on being students? If the education of Jewish students had been disrupted on campus, who had disrupted it?
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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