Outside the gates of Barnard College, one student held up a handwritten sign that said, “There are no universities left in Gaza.” Over the last 16 months, Israel has destroyed every university in Gaza, in addition to killing at least 5,800 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors, according to an April 2024 report from the UN, which has condemned Israel’s actions as “scholasticide”.
Several dozen anti-war student protesters gathered outside Columbia University and Barnard College in New York on Thursday to protest against the expulsion of two students who interrupted a class on Israel last month.
“We are here specifically today because we are standing in solidarity with the students here at Barnard and Columbia who are being punished severely for standing in support of the Palestinian people and calling out this university for being complicit in war crimes, and now two students have been expelled … they must be reinstated,” Lotta said.
At the end of their demonstration, the students marched to join up with a separate protest against the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, who on Wednesday, ordered the publicly funded City University of New York (Cuny) to immediately remove a job posting advertising a Palestinian studies professor role at the state university system’s Hunter College.
One man who appeared unaffiliated with the students approached the anti-war student protesters holding what looked like a pager, saying, “Who wants a fucking pager?” an apparent reference to the pager and walkie-talkie attacks across Lebanon last September which killed at least 20 people and injured nearly 3,000 others.
