Barnard’s Restrictive New Free Speech Guidelines Condemned at Campus Teach-in (original) (raw)
Barnard College, the liberal-arts women’s college of Columbia University, is facing criticism for new policies that restrict the freedom of speech and limit student protest.
About 200 Barnard and Columbia affiliates gathered in front of Barnard Hall Monday evening for a faculty-led teach-in opposing Barnard President Laura Rosenbury’s decision to create the new “community expectations,” which have been strongly condemned by the school’s American Association of University Professors chapter. Several faculty speakers at the teach-in expressed that some of their colleagues without tenure were not present because of fear of repercussions from the administration.
The new guidelines, which have been revised since Rosenbury’s initial announcement on Sep. 11, include the prohibition of Barnard affiliates from engaging in demonstrations that have not been pre-registered with the college, the unfurling of banners from elevated spaces, employees from posting political signs on their office doors, and more.
The original, pre-revision community expectations prohibited any division or department of the college from “supporting a geopolitical viewpoint or perspective while denigrating or remaining silent about an opposing geopolitical viewpoint or perspective.”
The new guidelines prohibit Barnard affiliates from engaging in demonstrations that have not been pre-registered with the college.
Barnard’s new policies follow theintense scrutiny student protesters at Columbia and Barnard received after they sparked a nationwide student protest movement for Palestine in April by establishing a 24/7 encampment on the Columbia Morningside campus. Among other demands, they were calling for the university to divest from companies supporting Israel in its assaults on Gaza and the West Bank. Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, resigned before the start of this academic year in the aftermath of twice calling in the NYPD to disperse and arrest protestors.
There was a strong Barnard presence at the Gaza solidarity encampment. Although the college’s student body of around 3,000 only makes up one tenth of Columbia’s total population, Barnard enrollees accounted for around half of the students arrested during the first NYPD raid on April 18.
Barnard surveilled pro-Palestine student protestors, and it notoriously gave some of its suspended students only 15 minutes to leave their campus housing back in April, according to the Columbia Daily Spectator.
“I’ve been watching with great concern how this administration has handled these protests,” Barnard alumna, actress and former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon told The Indypendent after speaking to the crowd. “Barnard students and faculty have been through a lot in the past year, but they’re not knuckling under,” she said, “they don’t want to see their beautiful institution destroyed” by “the silencing and the punishment that’s happening right now.”
Asked for comment on yesterday’s teach-in, a Barnard spokesperson shared the same statement given to Hyperallergicdays earlier. “We share the faculty’s commitment to free speech and academic freedom,” a Barnard spokesperson wrote, “and to ensuring the College remains a welcoming and inclusive place that fosters students’ learning and development. We look forward to working with faculty, students, and staff to achieve these goals.”
Barnard alumna Cynthia Nixon addresses the crowd at Monday’s faculty-led teach-in.
Barnard also recently adopted “institutional neutrality” on “matters of public concern.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning Barnard Journalist-in-Residence Maria Hinojosa, an alumna, spoke at the teach-in and told The Indy that “neutrality itself is weighted.” Invoking the Civil Rights Act, Apartheid South Africa, and police murder of George Floyd, Hinojosa questioned neutrality and both sides-ism. She said that as a journalist, she does her best to “be fair” and “speak to as many people as I possibly can,” and “any critical thinking journalist knows” that “absolute objectivity” is not possible.
“What worries me is that the Barnard administration is saying, ‘Well, we will know. We will know what neutrality is. We will know what both sides are. We know better than the faculty.’ I don’t think so,” Hinojosa said.
Asked whether the guidelines were made with the consultation and consent of faculty governance, a Barnard spokesperson shared a link to an announcement from President Rosenbury seeking feedback less than two hours before the teach-in.
Rosenbury, who faced a 77% no-confidence vote from faculty in the spring, wrote that the guidelines are “are not policies themselves but instead are designed to spur reflection and discussion about the application of our existing policies and rules.”
Barnard also recently implemented a new policy that formally handed more policymaking authority to its administration.
Faculty said Rosenbury’s relationship with them hasn’t been a dialogue. “No one has had any conversations with faculty about those guidelines,” Latin American history professor Nara Milanich told The Indy. She said Rosenbury “wrote an email [on Monday] clarifying that they are merely examples that the community asked for. But frankly, that’s really disingenuous.”
Philosophy professor Taylor Carman told The Indy, “I think what the current administration thinks is that we don’t really have any formal role at all, and they’re doing us a favor when they consult with us, which mostly means just letting us know what they’re going to do.”
Faculty at yesterday’s teach-in committed to taking future action to hold the administration accountable and to prevent the policies from spreading to other parts of the university.
“The Barnard situation is a test case,” Milanich wrote to colleagues before the event. “If we succeed in rolling back these speech restrictions, it’s less likely the Columbia admin will enact similar ones.”