The Students are Okay
Columbia and Barnard students are learning more than their classrooms could ever offer
During my junior year at Barnard College, I met with our school’s president after a hand-painted banner featuring a historic map of Palestine alongside the statement, ‘Stand for Justice, Stand for Palestine,’ was abruptly pulled down by our administration. Within hours of the banner’s installation, a former student president of Columbia/Barnard Hillel started an email campaign opposing the banner’s message, posting on Facebook that Israeli Apartheid Week on campus was “perpetuat[ing] the pernicious lie that Israel is an apartheid state,” as well as calling the banner “anti-Semitic”
Below is the email I wrote to President Debora Spar prior to our conversation. This email was sent on March 11, 2014…
Throughout my time at Barnard, I recall avoiding certain corridors before the summer holiday because I knew they would be covered in posters advertising thin, tan women sitting on the beach with copy underneath that read “learn the secret behind her tan” and the date and time for an information session welcoming all—Christians, Jews, and Atheists alike—to learn more about Birthright and a free trip to Israel.
After years of seeing these kinds of messages displayed across campus—messages that never acknowledged that not far from these same beaches were refugee camps in Gaza, militarized checkpoints across the West Bank, and illegal settlements that every month threatened the indigenous Palestinian community—I was furious that Barnard’s administration removed the only banner showing solidarity with Palestine.
When I spoke to President Spar, she kindly told me she had been to Palestine, seen the occupation for herself, and felt genuine remorse for the Palestinian students on campus impacted by the school’s actions but, “The donors,” she said, “were upset,” effectively closing the conversation.
I wish I could say that I’ve been shocked by Barnard and Columbia’s recent response to their students demanding divestment from organizations and companies connected to Israel’s occupation. I wish I could say that after my years as first a Barnard student and then a Columbia graduate student and then later an instructor at Columbia College teaching one of their core classes I expected more from these administrators. I wish I could say that as a student once myself I felt protected and safe on this campus as a Palestinian. But that’s never been true. It wasn’t true in 2014 just as much as it isn’t true in 2024. I feel sick, angry, appalled by it all, but I’m not surprised.
School was a priority in my household growing up. My parents, both raised by Palestinian refugees, made it a point to ensure that we knew just how unique and valuable our education was almost every single day—it was what they saved for, worked hard for, and the reason that our futures were possible. Though they never demanded we attend top-tier universities, they wanted us to know that we could, that these opportunities would open doors to other American dreams. The American dream in our household was so ingrained in us, an inheritance from our immigrant grandparents who fervently believed that hard work and then more hard work would help us with the assimilation game. Education was the key to this assimilation—sit in classrooms with wealthy Americans and perhaps one day you too will be a wealthy American.
As a dyslexic student who struggled her whole life with reading and writing, I desperately wanted to attend a top-tier university. This was an unnecessary dream, one born of my own volition to prove something that no one needed to see proven. But I felt so belittled by my learning difference, so behind. This goal was tangible—it created a map I could follow that gave me a semblance of hope.
But my time at Columbia and Barnard did not make me feel like I had finally “made it.” No. Columbia was my first purview into how institutions run—I learned what lip service looked and sounded like, what it meant to preach a growth mindset while entrenched in stagnant practices. I learned that “protecting” students’ interests meant the interests of students whose families donated or, most often, a vague idea of the “donors” at large. More than anything, I learned the bitter truth of institutional apathy—that higher education is a facade built on hollow promises and stagnant ideals.
During my time at Barnard, I witnessed countless female peers file complaints to Columbia alleging that they were victims of sexual assault. I personally knew more friends than I had fingers who had also experienced this same violence on our campus and had chosen to remain silent. I left Barnard strangely empowered by my education and deeply disappointed by its limits.
When I decided to return to Columbia for graduate school for an MFA in nonfiction writing, I did so holding my breath. I had seen enough of the administration’s carelessness to know that its students were never their priority. I knew this to be especially true as a Palestinian student—anytime I would post about my being Palestinian or Palestinian liberation on Facebook I would receive a slew of hateful messages from peers who claimed I was anti-Semitic. Regardless of what I knew to be true of Columbia’s student body and administrators, I was eager to accept my offer—I was one of very few students who was given a scholarship, one that left me debt-free and even employed by Columbia as a writing instructor. To be able to learn on a campus that was familiar to me was appealing, but more than that I wanted the opportunity to teach in higher education. I also wanted to return to the institution where Edward Said’s legacy loomed large.
I wrote about my time at Columbia as a graduate student for TIME Magazine here — it was not a pretty experience, to say the least.
Someone recently asked me if Columbia taught me to write. I can’t say that it did, though I’m sure some of my professors would love to claim otherwise. I originally applied thinking I would write about my paternal Grandmother and complete a manuscript that she had written late in life about her dramatic and at times abusive childhood. Halfway through the program, however, professors and students kept requesting I write about myself. They insisted that as a nonfiction writer, writing the story of my grandmother from her point of view wasn’t the way things were done. The program liked to boast teaching their students genre-bending creativity all while remaining steadfast in outdated and unnecessary rules around what writing could and could not be. It was all such bullshit.
As the program grew to its close, I started writing about my experience of being Palestinian, a somewhat easy pivot as my grandmother’s story was one of the diaspora as well. But I wasn’t convinced it was going well or was worthwhile.
Especially because, more often than not, I received feedback regarding my being Palestinian. The writing itself was never critiqued, only the subject.
“I can’t believe you went there,” one student had said of my use of the word Zionist when referring to Israel’s politicians and founders as if this word was not one they proudly used themselves when referring to their ideology.
Professors told me over and over again that my writing lacked historical context, that my own lived experiences and by extension my family’s were not sufficient when telling this narrative. So I started writing what felt like a textbook, backing up every single date and claim with historical evidence that helped paint a sweeping portrait of why the Palestinian story had to be told. I hated this writing. It was dry and boring and most of all it was aimed to help sway a certain audience that ultimately would never read my work to begin with.
When I return to some of the comments professors and peers left on my writing, I want to fucking scream. Almost every professor told me my writing was too angry, that the writing would turn readers off because it would make them feel as though they were in trouble. One famous professor commented that perhaps if I educated myself on Palestine’s history I would be less angry because I could hold empathy for all “sides” impacted by this complicated history. Students told me that my writing felt pointed and direct and that these qualities were something to temper.
So, no. I can’t say I learned how to write at Columbia. I learned how to navigate feedback. I learned that some readers would stick around while others would not and I learned that that was actually okay. I read a lot, I wrote a lot, activities that without a doubt helped me learn what styles I liked and did not like. But what I learned most at these institutions, just as these students are learning today, was how to ignite my anger into action.
When Columbia and Barnard students first started protesting their university’s complicity in funding and profiting off of Israel’s genocide, I was furious that their peaceful protests were met with violence from campus security as well as the NYPD. Over 100 students from Columbia and Barnard were arrested, some suspended, some expelled, and many barred from returning to their campus dorms. Having taught some of the students camping out on those lawns and having once been a student there myself, I know that what they are going through is likely a complete shattering of the illusion that their hard work and fancy education will protect them or care about their wellbeing. I think that this is a shitty realization to ever have to come to. It sucks, actually, because ignorance really is bliss and there’s something beautifully safe about that bliss. But if this shattering doesn’t happen while at school, it will likely happen in the “real world” as they navigate corporations that claim to have employees’ best interests.
Ultimately, I’m incredibly proud to see these students take their learning, their required readings of Edward Said, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Angela Davis, bell hooks, W. E. B. Du Bois, or Michel Foucault, and put some of these teachings to practice.
While I regret that they have to go through the destabilizing experience of learning that their school is not a school (no, no) but a private equity firm with corporate greed and interests, I also know that what these students are facing on that lawn is likely the most authentic education they will receive in their four years at Columbia and Barnard. Shame on all of those professors who are scaring their students into showing up for class and turning in unnecessary papers that require critical thinking devoid of critical action. There is very rarely an emergency in teaching, this I know as a past educator myself (and thanks to some sage advice from current educators). But THIS moment, this global reckoning we are in as we witness colonial empires fund and simultaneously deny genocide, IS an emergency.
These students are learning more right now about the way their world actually works than they ever will in their ivory tower classrooms. Their rage has inspired their peers’ rage across college campuses—Columbia and Barnard students are not alone in their protest, they’ve been joined by MIT, Harvard, Smith, NYU, Berkeley, Yale, Vanderbilt, UNC, The New School, and this list is growing. Most recently their rage has inspired their professors’ rage. I might have hoped that this happened in reverse, that their professors walked out first and the students followed. But we all need to be reminded of what it means to practice what we teach.