Barnard College required students to remove all decorations depicting messages from their dorm rooms as a way to avoid “isolating people with different views and beliefs.” It comes days after it was hit with a lawsuit accusing it of allowing anti-Semitism to spread. .
Students at the New York City campus have until Wednesday to remove any dry-erase boards, decorations or messages posted on their doors, according to a letter sent Friday by Barnard College Dean Leslie Greenage. The Columbia Spectator school newspaper reported..
“Our goal is to be as clear as possible about the guardrails and do everything we can to support and foster the respect, empathy, and kindness that should guide everything we do on campus at this time,” Greenage said. he wrote. .
The school did not say how students could be affected if they did not follow the new policy. Mr Barnard previously faced disciplinary proceedings after he cracked down on two students who hung pro-Palestinian banners outside the Quad in December.
Barnard officials did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment on the specifics of the policy or whether it was prompted by controversy over the Gaza war.
The embattled Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) similarly proposed and denounced the new embellishment policy as a way for schools to censor students’ free speech. There is.
“This sets a dangerous precedent for the suppression of academic political discourse, where it is acceptable to silence dissent using excuses that may offend someone with a different view,” the group said. said in a statement on Sunday.
“Sending a notice to Barnard College students requesting that they remove the ‘decorations’ on the doors of the dorms we paid to live in is so ridiculous,” Columbia SJP added. .
This sentiment was echoed by the school’s faculty, SJP, who claimed that posters listing the names of Palestinian academics killed in Gaza had begun to be removed from the doors of the Barnard campus.
Columbia University and Barnard College trustees were named in a lawsuit filed last week by Jewish students who claimed the school’s crackdown allowed “rampant anti-Semitism” to flourish during the Israeli-Hamas war. This was done in response to what was said.
The lawsuit, filed by five students and two nonprofit organizations, alleges that Columbia University did not intervene substantively as anti-war protests escalated anti-Jewish hatred on campus.
“Anti-Semitism in Colombia has been especially severe since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and massacred, tortured, raped, burned, and mutilated 1,200 people, including infants, children, and the elderly. It’s rampant. – Documents filed in federal court in Manhattan.
Last November, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched anti-Semitism or Islamophobia investigations into three New York schools: Columbia, Cornell, and Cooper Union.
