Barnard President Denounces Pro-Hamas Demonstrators

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.”