The April 18 protests at Columbia University over the war in Gaza and Columbia’s investment in weapons manufacturers and companies doing business in Israel led to more than 100 arrests, and sparked widespread unrest not seen on campuses in decades. Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia, suspended at least 53 students and evicted them from their dorms, cut off their meal plans and barred them from campus.
We wanted to learn how the suspensions and evictions felt to students on a personal level, and what the experience meant to them. So we interviewed several Barnard students who were suspended. Most have had their suspensions lifted on the condition that they refrain from unauthorized protest, and to allow them to speak freely we are not identifying them.
A Barnard spokesperson said the college does not comment on confidential student conduct proceedings. The administration said in a statement that it was “committed to open inquiry and expression” and that “students rejected multiple opportunities to leave the encampment without consequence.”
The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
L.S., who is Jewish, attended the protest on April 18 but said she was careful not to get arrested. Barnard suspended and evicted her from her dorm anyway. Because she is an international student, a long-term suspension could have meant the loss of her visa. She would have had to leave the country within 15 days.
How did you find out you lost your housing?
I was not counting on being suspended. I didn’t know that that was even a possibility. I figured that out when I tried to enter my dorm [that night] – they had my face on a poster in my lobby, with the words ‘ban list’ written on it.
You could only imagine what all could happen in a moment like that in the middle of the night. It’s cold. Some people genuinely had nowhere to go. I was scrambling at 2:30 a.m. to find somewhere to sleep. Luckily, there’s a huge community that was kind of immediately mobilized to help the evicted students.
How do you understand the university’s rationale for the arrests, with concern for student safety?
I don’t think anyone buys the safety narrative. There’s nothing safe ever about evicting students. Barnard is treating us worse than an American court would.
Why is this movement important to you personally?
I think this movement invites a lot of other people to see their own struggles and their own principles in the causes of Palestinian liberation. I’m not a politician. I’m just a student who comes from a background of generations of genocide survivors, and that’s why I’m a part of this.
It’s because I see the struggle of the Palestinians and the struggle of my ancestors as very, very clearly connected. I come from the region. The places I’m from have also been destroyed by war and by empire, and by diaspora and by exile. And so, you know, exile is like a universal experience I think a lot of us can identify with.
No matter what people are saying about us, we will continue to hold our Jewish identity close to our organizing and we will be Jewish even as people continue to deny that.
Is there anything you want people to know that you think isn’t getting covered enough by the media?
It’s horrible what we’ve gone through, and eviction and homelessness of students without due process is unacceptable. But at the same time, we are all going to be okay. The students in Gaza are not going to be okay. There are no universities left in Gaza. And every single bit of media attention we eat up with repeating our same story over and over again – that needs to be that same energy for the people in Gaza. Because the reason that we started all this, the reason that people were willing to get suspended and arrested is because they know that there are no universities left in Gaza, and we do not want to be financially or politically complicit in that.
I.L., a Jewish student from New York City, was arrested at the protest and allowed to return to her dorm that night, but was told she had to leave the next morning.
What happened when you found out you had to leave the dorm?
It was honestly one of really the worst parts about this whole experience. I have two friends who have an apartment off campus. They had an air mattress so they offered it to me and I tried to sleep there, but a lot of students who were suspended and evicted have housing accommodations through our Center for Accessibility Resources and Disability Services. And I’m one of those students.
How do you understand the university’s rationale for the arrests, with concern for the student safety?
It’s absolutely not true. I blame [Columbia President Nemat] Shafik for what’s happening on other campuses with all of these arrests. She normalized calling the cops on her own students. She said that we were a threat when we were just sitting on our campus singing songs [on April 18].
Why is this movement important to you personally?
When October 7 happened, I didn’t really know anything. I went to Hebrew school for 10 years. I was pretty critical when anyone would say anything negative about Israel, because I kind of internalized this conflation between antisemitism and criticizing Israel.
But then I started seeing how Israel responded after October 7th. I basically had another Jewish person swipe up on my [Instagram] story that started the conversation with me. I was like, let me do my research, and I spent a lot of time just reading.
Once I learned, I was like, ‘Whoa, how is any of this about being Jewish?’ I felt like Judaism was being weaponized to somehow support what the State of Israel was doing. I felt like it was absolutely my duty as a Jewish person, and also just an American, because I knew that this was my tax dollars and my family’s tax dollars, that directly funds all of the brutality.
October 7 to me was just a major turning point in the whole rest of my life because I see the struggle of the Palestinians as part of the struggle for liberation of all people, and I become more aware of the other struggles throughout the world.
And so I think that now what’s happening with this encampment is such a beautiful combination of really everything that I believe in. It’s about people coming together.
I continue to bear witness because this is the worst thing that I’ve ever seen in my life. I think how I got here is definitely informed by the fact that I was watching Judaism being kind of twisted to somehow support this. So as an American and a human, that’s why I show up now.
My goal in all of this is a phrase that I’ve really come to in the past seven months. It’s that another world is possible.
Is there anything you want people to know that you think isn’t getting covered enough by the media?
I think overwhelmingly the media doesn’t understand what we’re doing. I’ve been really upset to see the way that the media is focusing on specific individuals who say things that are antisemitic, but they never say anything about the Islamophobia that I see happening every day.
I think that if you actually spend time at the encampments, you’d see that there’s something very beautiful going on. This is about divestment, because it’s the one tangible way that as college students we have the power to change what was happening to Palestinians.
This is because the world does not have to be this way and that other worlds are possible. It’s been the greatest honor of my life to be a part of this.
This story about protests at Columbia University was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.