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Laura Rosenbury is the president of Columbia’s sister school, Barnard, where anti-Israel demonstrators have been especially active and destructive. She has now denounced, in an op-ed that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a viciously pro-Hamas group that has been active on both the Barnard and the Columbia campuses. More of her comprehensive criticism can be found here: “Barnard College President Blasts Anti-Zionist Columbia Group as Trump Sets Campus Antisemitism in Crosshairs,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, March 5, 2025:
Barnard College president Laura Rosenbury has issued a scorching rebuke of the anti-Zionist campus group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), accusing it of causing $30,000 in damages during a recent protest and betraying “the goals and sanctity of higher education.”
Rosenbury — whose June 2023 ascension to Barnard’s presidency took place just months before anti-Israel activists upended higher education by staging mass, unauthorized demonstrations and other disruptive activities to express support for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel — issued the censorious statements in an op-ed published on Monday by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“They [CUAD] operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence, and ‘Zionist billionaires,’ and calls for violence and disruption at any cost,” Rosenbury wrote, citing CUAD’s involvement in a January incident in which several of its members disrupted Columbia professor Avi Shilon’s course on modern Israeli history to spew pro-Hamas propaganda. “They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve. Columbia has disavowed the group.”
In fact, many of the masked participants in this mob violence on Morningside Heights have turned out not to be students; a number of them are Muslims, or far-leftists, from the New York area, eager to join in these demonstrations so as to harm the Jewish state.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD stormed and occupied the Milbank Hall administrative building at Barnard College last week to protest the expulsion of two students who participated in disrupting Shilon’s course. During the demonstration, a staff member was assaulted so severely as to require hospitalization, according to a source with knowledge of the situation….
The staff member had been roughed up so badly at Milbank Hall by the protesters that he required hospitalization. CUAD had months earlier stormed Hamilton Hall at Columbia, where the mob splashed the walls with red paint, and poured cement into the toilets, stopping them up.
Now the Trump Administration is about to come down like a ton of bricks on those colleges and universities that have failed to adequately punish — or sometimes, to punish at all — those who have until now have been assaulting, harassing, attacking Jewish students and faculty, calling for the violent destruction of the Jewish state (“Intifada Now”) from their campus encampments, noisily interrupting in order to stop classes taught by Jewish and Israeli faculty, and creating a threatening atmosphere of antisemitism everywhere on campus. The weapon to be wielded against those universities will be financial — the threat of withholding of federal contracts and grants that are a huge part of the elite universities’ funding, in Columbia’s case amounting to five billion dollars. American universities are about to enter the long-delayed Day of Reckoning, for having failed to halt these antisemitic and violent protests by expelling their perpetrators. And as Trump would say, “It won’t be pretty.”
WOW❗
WHAT GUTS❗
WHAT RESOLVE❗
With leadership like (🏆) hers, we can’t lose❗
Maybe she should reflect on the fact that the CUAD communists and Islamacists have cost Columbia $400,000,000 in federal funds and completely ruined any stature and decent reputation it and Bernard may have once had. Had enough yet, Columbia? Op-eds aren’t going to cut it.
I strongly oppose this horrible violence and they should be severely punished but why should taxpayers be giving a rich man’s university $400,000,000. That stinks.
If we don’t give them $400M, they might have to charge more reasonable tuition so slightly less wealthy kids can attend. There’s only so many people who’s parents can afford to write a tuition check for $50,000 – $80,000 a year. The taxpayers pick up the rest. When it started, it was a program to educate young people who otherwise couldn’t afford it and taxpayers got a return on their money by the later deeds of the students. Then Ivy League colleges realized if they raised their tuition precipitously, the taxpayers would give them more. That’s why tuition is so completely out of reach for so many today without taxpayer backing. We’re no longer seeing a return on our money with the invention of useless degrees like “Critical Race Theory through Lesbian Dance and Basket Weaving.” I’m exaggerating, but not by much. It’s ridiculous and it’s about time we reigned this craziness in.
Well, they shouldn’t but they were and now Columbia has lost it. I’m sure the school officials could have purchased a backbone for far less on Amazon. But they didn’t.
Ham-A** is nothing but a mob of Anti Semite Hooligans and all support of Ham-A** needs to totally End
What took her so long? By the way, those protestors need to be identified, removed from Barnard if indeed they are students, and deported if they are on student visas. If they are paid protestors, arrest them. These protests cannot be allowed to continue under any circumstances. Period.
Watching these elite institutions full of haughty leftists receiving a little smackdown will be most entertaining.
Hamass sympathizers = nazi sympathizers – they have no place on campuses. If they are “students” they need to be expelled.
Money talks and Trump is a big game player who detests antisemitism and we taxpayers should NEVER be underwriting this sycophantic reverence for those barbarians engaged in this hatred! Strip them all of our hard earned tax dollars as their reputations, already faltering, can hit the skids if they don’t weed out these malcontents from both students and professors and return to being institutions of higher learning and not the Petrie dishes promulgating the violent disregard of others.
Between loss of federal funding and deportation of alien ME students and professors we might begin to resuscitate them. We also need to deny funding from Middle Eastern countries peddling money for influence at the cost of collegiate integrity and adherence to our values and Constitution.
Or, in street terms, get em’ outta here!
Personally, I think the university or college presidents need to charged with the crimes committed on their campuses. They also need to be personally liable for interruption to education, discrimination against Jewish students and pain and suffering not to mention physical injuries. If they are liable for expenses and may go to jail for the crimes, perhaps they will change policies and finally stop these hateful behaviors on campus.
Her comments are too mild and way way way too late.
The colleges did a lot more than admit a diverse cadre of students who needed financial help. They also invited a diverse cadre of professors. That was only fair, right
What did anyone think would happen? The sad part is that the administration is also diverse. How do you clean away all of that? If it isn’t cleaned up, it won’t change one bit.
force multiplier in action