Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard Philosophy Professor and President of the College’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, spoke with Bwog regarding student protests in 1968 versus 2024. 

On Friday, September 6, Bwog met with Professor Frederick Neuhouser to discuss his recent article comparing and contrasting Barnard and Columbia’s responses to the protests in 1968 versus those in the Spring 2024 semester. Neuhouser is the President of the College’s newly-founded chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the Viola Manderfeld Professor of German, and a Professor of Philosophy at Barnard and Columbia. He also discussed his article at the recent faculty teach-in criticizing Barnard’s new Expectations for Community Conduct.

The American Association of University Professors is a non-profit association of faculty and other academic professionals at American collegiate institutions with the goal of ensuring academic freedom, defining values, and helping to promote the common good. It is also an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).

Neuhouser’s article, titled “Barnard and Columbia in Crisis: 1968/2024,” discusses the disparities between the administrations’ actions and policies in both 1968 and 2024 regarding freedom of speech, pointing out a consistent trend of the Barnard and Columbia administrations disregarding committee advice from faculty, staff, and students. According to Neuhouser, in both 1968 and 2024, the presidents of Columbia and Barnard took action without consulting students or faculty despite the pre-existing institutions of shared governance. This includes Columbia’s University Senate, which was set up in response to 1968 to give students and faculty a voice in University proceedings. However, Columbia’s administration has made decisions over the past year, such as approving the NYPD to arrest students, without the required consultation of the University Senate Executive Committee. 

Neuhouser’s article emphasizes the parallels between 1968 and 2024 in terms of student discipline, including similarly inconsistent application of disciplinary procedures. It also mentions the widespread support from faculty members for the student demonstrators in both pivotal years, even if the faculty disagreed on the issues amongst themselves.

Drawing on the 1968 Cox Report, a published report written in the months after the 1968 protests, and Robert McCaughey’s 2003 book Stand, Columbia, Neuhouser’s article also points to the changes over time in Columbia and Barnard as evidenced by their handling of the protests across decades. According to Neuhouser, “Reading today about the campus disruptions at Columbia and Barnard in 1968, one is immediately struck by a sense of dejà vu, accompanied by the dispiriting impression that fifty-six years after those events, Barnard and Columbia administrations have learned little regarding university governance and wise responses to student protest.”

In 1968, Barnard’s Board of Trustees, separate from that of Columbia, reacted quite differently than in 2024 to the protests. In his article, Neuhouser writes that some Board members even offered to pay bail for arrested students and urged the College to support them. In 1968, Barnard also had a Judicial Council, begun in 1965, that gave administrators, faculty, and students a voice in matters like student discipline. In 2024, the Judicial Council is still listed on Barnard documents, although it is also referred to as defunct.¹

On September 6, Bwog Publisher Ava Slocum, News Editor Emma Burris, and Staff Writer Gina Brown interviewed Professor Neuhouser virtually. This interview has been edited for clarity. 

Emma Burris: Based on your article you discussed the similarities and differences between the University’s response to the protests in 1968 versus 2024. What do you think the University—Columbia and Barnard—did well in 1968 that they didn’t do in 2024 and vice versa?

Frederick Neuhouser: I don’t think the Columbia administration in 1968 did a lot of things that were right. I think they may have done fewer things that were wrong than the Columbia administration in 2024. One thing I might mention is that in 1968 the President of the University appointed several ad hoc committees to investigate various things. And one thing that I found really interesting was that it was just a matter of course for him. It was common sense back then to appoint both faculty and students to these committees. Now, in the end, the President usually didn’t listen to the recommendations anyway. But there does seem to be something good about the fact that students were considered just as important on these committees as faculty members were. 

The other obvious thing, more important thing, is that the punishments that were meted out by Columbia in 1968 were much less severe than they were in 2024. No students ended up getting expelled. A fair amount of students got suspended for a semester, and then they were allowed to come back, but they were suspended in such a way that they were allowed to complete the semester in which the so-called crimes had been committed, which is a kind of leniency I don’t think we saw at Columbia. 

In terms of Barnard, Barnard did everything right in 1968. Of course, Barnard wasn’t as directly involved with it as Columbia was, but Barnard was extremely supportive of its students—the students who got arrested, the students who participated. No students at Barnard were even suspended or expelled. Some of them got letters of censure. As I mentioned in the article, some of the trustees even offered to pay the fees for students who got arrested, and one trustee offered to pay bail for a student who wasn’t able to meet her bail. The thing that really impressed me is that the President of Barnard at that time, on the day after the big police evacuation on campus, she called a campus-wide meeting—a town hall of staff, faculty and students—to sit down and discuss in an uncontrolled environment how the College should move forward. And that’s just a form of democracy at the College that we don’t see anymore at all.

EB: Yeah, definitely. That would be sort of unheard of at Barnard today. 

Gina Brown: As you said earlier, you are the president of the Barnard chapter of American Association of University Professors. How do you think that this newly founded Barnard chapter could help to promote shared governance and greater faculty input in the Barnard administration?

Frederick Neuhouser: We’ve been trying to figure that out ever since February when we were formed. We’ve done a variety of things, including writing lots of statements, most of which get ignored by the Barnard administration. We requested and finally got a meeting with the Trustees of Barnard College. So far they have not responded to that meeting. I think we feel pretty pessimistic about them responding in positive ways, although you could be surprised by that. 

The big thing we did last year was we started up a resolution of no confidence in the President of Barnard College. We sent that on to the FGP, the Faculty Governance and [Procedures] Committee. That’s sort of the closest thing Barnard College has to a college-wide body that has some kind of—they actually don’t have much authority. It’s an elected body, so it has a certain amount of legitimacy. They then carried out the vote, which was very successful—77% of professors who voted voted in favor of the resolution. But that too has been completely ignored by the Barnard administration. They don’t even acknowledge that it happened. 

So we’re trying to just continue talking to the press. We are trying to form alliances with the Student Government Association at Barnard, because they are also outraged at some of the things that we’re outraged about, especially student discipline. We’re trying to form alliances with the Columbia AAUP. We’re also reaching out to alumni and to parents of Barnard students. All of these we think of as potential allies and people that we’re going to have to work together with in order to get anything done. 

But to be truthful, we’re still searching for things that will move the administration. I think a little bit of that has finally begun to happen, because two other faculty groups on campus have now kind of stepped up and made some similar complaints to the administration. I’m talking about the chairs of various departments. They meet once a month, I believe. And then there is also this FGP that I referred to earlier. So we’re starting to cooperate and sort of converge these three groups and hopefully with student allies we can do a little bit more than we’ve been able to do so far.

Ava Slocum: Our next question is related to the moment in your article where you describe your recommendations for the Barnard and Columbia administrations. What are the most pressing and important recommendations that you would recommend the administrations to take regarding their handling of the protests? Which ones do you think the University has the highest chance of actually responding to or implementing?

FN: My article was written sort of from the Barnard perspective. It covered Columbia too, but I was trying to address my Barnard colleagues, and so I don’t actually have any recommendations in there for Columbia. One thing Columbia needs to do is reinvigorate and beef up its Senate. The Senate was created after 1968 for precisely the failure of shared governance in 1968, but it has degenerated into a body that was toothless and not very well respected. Faculty just didn’t really participate in it. One thing that both Barnard and Columbia need to do is beef up the University Senate. 

Barnard doesn’t have a University Senate. We have this Faculty Governance and [Procedure] Committee. But it has no real authority. It has no real power. One thing we need to do is to beef that up. We need to get, traditionally, the FGP was supposed to have all the faculty meetings. Now it’s the administration who controls the faculty, so we need to insist on some of our old rights and authorities. It might be a good idea for people at Barnard to institute a Senate where representatives are elected and they have some kind of final authority on at least certain matters. That just doesn’t exist. 

But the thing I’m most excited about is—we need to return to what at Barnard used to be the Judicial Council. Now Columbia has something, I think, similar to this even now. But Barnard in 1965 started the Judicial Council, which was set up to oversee student discipline and to determine the penalties of people who had broken the Code of Conduct. And the important thing about the Judicial Council is that it was composed of people from the administration, faculty, and students. 

We need to have a more democratic body overseeing student discipline. The punishments that are handed out cannot be regarded as legitimate punishments if what’s happening is there is one administrator, the Dean of the College, who is in control of everything that takes place in that office. There are no checks and balances on her; there’s no authority over her. We need to democratize that. The thing that really surprised me writing this article is all that means is returning to what Barnard once had. It’s not anything new. In fact, if you look on the website, this Judicial Council still exists, but I don’t think there are any members, and I don’t think it ever meets.¹ And so this again, we need to reinvigorate certain things that we’ve had before.

EB: As a quick follow up, the University Senate webpage states that Barnard also has some seats in the Senate. Do you believe that Barnard should have its own separate Senate only regarding Barnard matters, or just have more representatives on the overall Columbia one? 

FN: Maybe we could have both. But basically, Barnard has no real presence, no real power in the Columbia Senate. And I think the reason I think simply beefing that up wouldn’t be enough is because Barnard and Columbia really operate as two different institutions on many of these issues. We have different presidents, we have different rules, we have different procedures, we have different budgets. And so there does need to be a Senate, or a Senate-like body that’s concerned only with Barnard and not with Columbia.

EB: It does say that out of every college in the Senate, there are two Barnard faculty members and one Barnard student.² 

In this spring 2024 semester, we know that the Office of the President authorized NYPD on the campus without the approval of the Executive Committee, which was required. In your opinion, do you think the administration values the input of the University Senate and intends to work to repair the relationship, or that the administration will continue to act independently of the Senate? 

FN: I think if the old [Columbia] President had remained, she would not be interested in consulting more with the Senate and so on. But with the new President, or the new Interim President, we have to hope. I think there are some grounds for hoping that she will be at least more responsive to the Senate and to faculty opinions in general. 

Now over at Barnard, I have no hope whatsoever that the President and the Board of Trustees will pay any attention to faculty opinions or to resolutions of the FGP until some kind of external pressure is brought to bear on them. They have shown no signs of taking faculty seriously. 

But I think there’s some reason for hope at Columbia. Speaking now of Columbia, I think it would be wrong at this juncture just to assume that the President is every bit as intractable and unconcerned and arrogant as the previous President was. I think that’s not right. And so people at Columbia should really find a way to give the new President a chance, while at the same time being very cautious—a wait and see attitude instead of immediate rejection.

GB: Do you think there is more that the faculty, unions, or groups at the College can do to sway the opinion of the Board of Trustees and the President? The faculty did organize a protest on Low Steps last spring, but to my knowledge, none refused to hold class in solidarity with the students like they did in 1968.³ Why do you think they were not on board with that idea and what power could unions and faculty groups have over changing the current state of affairs with the Board of Trustees and President?

FN: It reminds me that I forgot to mention the unions at Barnard. We’re also trying to establish connections, alliances with the unions, especially the unions who represent the contingent faculty at Barnard, but also the union that represents the staff at Barnard. So your question was, what more can we do? Well, there was an interesting question there about why a fair number of professors in 1968 at Columbia were willing to strike by not holding classes. 

There was a lot of discussion. I’m speaking now not just about the AAUP. I’m speaking about the broad range of faculty at Barnard and at Columbia. There was a lot of discussion about whether professors should go on strike, and there were many people who were in favor of it, but there were many people also who thought it was a bad idea, and for two reasons. One is that they were afraid that the professors going on strike hurts the students too much and ultimately will alienate much of the student body. This is an opinion. I don’t know exactly what I think. 

The other feeling was that there were not going to be enough professors behind the move to make a real difference. So other possible forms of strikes were also discussed, so doing our teaching but withholding all other work activity on the Barnard campus. One problem with that is if we stop doing administrative work, that’s going to hurt the students again, and we don’t want to do that. But if we stop doing committee work and so on, I think it’s not really going to matter that much to the College that we’re not doing those jobs. I think they’re not really that important to make a difference to them. 

So now we’re entering a new phase in all of this. Two Barnard students were suspended under very, I would say, cruel circumstances [recently]. And now there is a huge conversation going on among faculty—I suppose this is mostly at Barnard, because it happened at Barnard—about what kind of work stoppages might be effective. So I don’t really know. I think it’s worth thinking about. I definitely think we need to start doing something more than just sending out statements, because those statements just get ignored. 

You’re right, and it’s interesting. You mentioned that rally on the steps of Low Library last spring, and I think that was very successful. That had an impact. It was visible. It got coverage in the press. And then maybe people don’t know this, but after that, the professors who were demonstrating—of course, not everyone, but it was a large number of professors—then moved over to Barnard and went to the Office of the Dean of the College to present our demands about regularizing student discipline. She wasn’t in, but it was quite an impressive scene, all of us inside Milbank, not fitting there on the ground floor. We had some people above on the stairs. These are things that the faculty and the students too need to think about together insofar as we have converging aims, which they do converge for in large part.

GB: It sounds like there’s work to be done, and that’s a really good insight. When the faculty protests were happening and they were part of our coverage, we didn’t have much perspective about what was really going on with our professors. We were just receiving a certain end of it. 

EB: I remember reporting on the fact that [the faculty members] tried to deliver the demands via a piece of paper, and the security officers wouldn’t let you drop it off at the Dean’s office. 

FN: Oh, really, maybe my memory is bad. We were definitely there at the office. The office was dark and locked, and so we had no way of delivering them. Now maybe you’re right that there were somehow security guards that intervened, but I don’t remember that the main thing that stopped us was that the office was locked. No one was in. If you’ve noticed, in front of the Barnard President’s office now there is a security guard. The President is afraid of these kinds of manifestations of public opinion, but it’s the only way we have of expressing our opinion that gets heard or noticed.

EB: We [wrote] that the faculty members chanted, “Talk to us! Talk to us! Talk to us!” outside Rosenbury’s office… At that point, it had been days and Rosenbury had not released a statement about the Encampment or the first round of arrests. Then, that very night she released a statement. So it makes one wonder, was that because of the faculty protest or because of something else? 

FN: You’re probably right, but every time she releases a statement, it doesn’t really respond to the complaints. It’s a kind of corporate speak public relations boilerplate, and it doesn’t feel like the President knows how to communicate, or wants to communicate, with the faculty. By the way, now that you say this, I do believe you’re right that once we started chanting those things, some security guards showed up. They were certainly not threatening, and they were not particularly worked up about it so much, but I think they probably told us to leave… I don’t know if they told us to leave, but I think they told us not to shout and so on and so forth. But the fact that I can’t really remember that very well, I think, means that it didn’t have a very big effect on us. 

One thing that I’ve noticed, and this is really good, is that the security guards themselves are almost one hundred percent against the new method, the new means of securitization. Every time a security guard asks me to swipe my card, rather than get angry at that security guard, I say things like, “Sorry that you have to do this. This must be really awful.” And they’re very happy to hear that, because they say, “Yes, this is awful.” And so the security guards are another possible contingent of people at Columbia and Barnard who are potential allies.

AS: Thank you. It’s so interesting that so many people in the University, including students, security guards, and faculty, were put in sort of the same position of just being in the dark as to what the administration was doing. It wasn’t just students, but many groups of people at the University were in the same boat. You already mentioned the former Judicial Council and how it seems to be now defunct. At the same time, Columbia has the Senate, so there’s theoretically more faculty and student governance than in 1968, although we just saw in the spring that the University did not really pay attention to the words of the Senate. Combined with the Judicial Council at Barnard, do you have any thoughts on why the power of both entities might have diminished so much since then?

FN: Student government has been pretty effective. That’s my impression. You guys would know more about them than I do, but I don’t think of this SGA of Barnard as being defunct or ineffective. I think they have a strong voice and it matters. But, yeah, you’re right about these other things. When there are crises, it’s probably natural that when crises tend to simmer down a bit, people lose their interest. It’s a lot of work. Shared governance is a lot of work. You know, being on a real Senate would be a lot of work. And so, when the crisis diminishes, it’s probably natural for people to lose their involvement in it, which is unfortunate. It’s something we need to work on for the future. It’s funny. 

I think there is also, in this country, a much different attitude toward freedom of speech, the importance of the right to demonstrate, than there was back in the 1960s. This sounds very strange, because we think that in the 1960s the University was very repressive, and it was, but it was also the case that at that time, people were very, very broadly committed to the idea that students have a right to demonstrate, and I think even the administrations recognized that. I don’t think our current administration at Barnard has the slightest interest in protecting students’ right to demonstrate.

AS: Thank you. It’s so curious that in the past, there have been, theoretically, these means for student and faculty governance, especially when it came to the discipline of students, and how that’s changed so much.

FN: I don’t know the details of this, but I think Columbia still has something that’s a little bit more like what the Barnard Judicial Council used to be. I’m not exactly sure, but I think that in the Columbia system, students also have more rights in terms of who they can bring with them, what those people who come with them are allowed to say, and so forth. At Barnard, first of all, the rules keep changing. The rules keep getting written without any notification. But at Barnard, as things stand now, you’re not entitled to legal counsel. You can bring a faculty advisor, but the faculty advisor is not supposed to speak, and so I think things are a little more liberal at Columbia. Still. 

I’ve been at Barnard now for 21 years, and the first 20 years, I totally loved my experience here. I totally loved being at Barnard. And during those 20 years, we did not have shared governance written into any code, or we didn’t really have official institutions of shared governance, but there was a certain trust. I’ve served now under four presidents at Barnard College, three provosts. There was, before this year, a certain level of trust that you could talk to these people, even to the President, and even though the President wouldn’t always do what you wanted them to do, there was really a possibility for dialogue, a genuine conversation. And that has disappeared. It’s in the moment of that disappearance that we notice and become aware of what little real power we have according to the official documents and the official institutions.

EB: Going off of that, how do you think things changed with the turn from President Beilock to President Rosenbury, even before all the protests started? What was it like to be able to interact with her and have her as the head to the College? Was President Rosenbury, in your opinion, at the beginning and now, as interactive with faculty and students as Beilock was?

FN: There was a very superficial engagement with faculty. I think every faculty member got a personal conversation with her at the beginning of her term in which she was very friendly. I have to say I can’t answer that question well because I was on leave during her first semester as president. So I came back to school. It would have been in mid-January and by that point, you know, the problems with the demonstrations and so forth that had already erupted. And so I can’t really say much about what things were like before that under the new President.

EB: I can attest to that. I got the chance to interview both Beilock and Rosenbury for Bwog. I met with Rosenbury in person and she was very friendly, but I think the difference between both is that Beilock was always around campus going up to students and talking to them and I’ve never seen Rosenbury do that. That’s something that definitely stuck with me.

FN: Yeah, I believe that. I wasn’t sure whether that was just as a result of the demonstrations and so on or whether that was also the case before [when] she didn’t have a presence on campus. 

EB: There was only one month of the semester last fall before the Israel and Palestine demonstrations began. Even then, I felt the students didn’t have a great idea of what she would be like as President. 

GB: I think many were upset with her background and they wanted someone a little more radical. I remember a lot of [students] saying they had really wished [the new President] was a woman of color because that would have been a really huge advancement for a historically women’s college…

In your article, you also discuss about the very inconsistent application of disciplinary procedures for different students at Barnard. And, like you just said, this seems like it has kept going as of last night even. So, why is it so crucial that these disciplinary procedures be standardized before the College can begin to move forward? Do you think that this should be a priority of the College?

FN: Definitely, because if they’re not standardized, the people who are punished can’t recognize their punishments as legitimate. They look arbitrary to them and they are arbitrary. Columbia in ’68 was also very arbitrary in its application of the principles. There was one large demonstration; I believe it was an indoor demonstration. It was an occupation of a building where hundreds of people took part. The only six people who were punished were the six leaders of SDS. And the University said at the time, well, they’re the only ones we knew, whom we knew that they were there, which is not very plausible. And after that, a number of students, scores of students, wrote to the Columbia administration saying, “I was there too and I demand that you punish me the same way that you punish these SDS leaders.” Of course, that didn’t happen. 

Can I just read you one quotation? So this is in my article, but this comes from the Cox Report which was the report that was set up as an external report on what went wrong at Columbia. And it’s extremely interesting. And this is supposed to be a direct answer to your question. “The governance of… Columbia University requires… uniform rules and established organs and agencies. In their absence, arbitrary power flourishes. Power, in turn, encourages recourse to improvisation under pressure.” 

And so it’s really that idea of arbitrary power without detailed rules about what’s a violation of the Code of Conduct and what happens when you violate the Code of Conduct. It’s just too easy for administrators to use their power in an arbitrary way. And I think we’ve been seeing that at Barnard to an extreme degree. The Code of Conduct is written such that what counts as a violation is extremely vague. 

And so I think, in these last two suspensions students were charged with, it was for refusal to disperse and disruptive behavior. Refusal to disperse is pretty straightforward, perhaps, but disruptive behavior needs to be defined a bit more than that. So these students, or at least one of them… I’m not sure if it’s true. But the evidence that was presented against the students is that the student had swiped her ID card on that day to enter Columbia and there was a photo of her at the back of this Encampment. This is the third Encampment, where she was just simply standing, and that isn’t evidence of disruptive behavior. And so there’s no real due process at Barnard right now, and I can’t speak for Columbia. I’m not sure if it’s the same. 

AS: I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for the students in the disciplinary procedures because of how arbitrary it seems to be. In your article, you mentioned students getting charged in different months and how the disciplinary actions are different for different people at different times of the year; it seems like there’s no cohesion.

FN: And students being charged at the end of August for things they did at the end of May, that’s unheard of!… This quotation says in the absence of “uniform rules and established organs… arbitrary power flourishes… [and that] encourages recourse to improvisation.” It’s improvising and the students who are punished by rules that look arbitrary and merely improvised cannot recognize their punishments as just, maybe the students should be punished in certain ways. I’m not saying that there should not be punishments for some of the behavior. I really am being agnostic on that, but I don’t think they should be expelled. But in any case, even just punishments are not gonna appear as just to the people who are subject to them if they’re done in an arbitrary or improvised way.

AS: Our next question is related to your recommendations moving forward for Barnard. You specifically recommend restoring normal campus access, including non-affiliates being able to enter campus. Do you think that’ll actually happen, and what would it take to make Barnard return to how the campus access worked before? Are they waiting for something or is there any one thing that would make them say, “Ok, we’re fine, let’s go back to how we were before.” Or does that not seem possible?

FN: I don’t know. I hope that it’s possible because I find this heavily securitized campus extremely alienating. You know, people visit you from outside and they can’t get on campus unless you’ve requested whatever permission in advance. That’s just very, very burdensome to have to do. A university or college is supposed to be a free place where even members of the community can enter, walk across Columbia campus, walk in Barnard campus. These are supposed to be open places. I really don’t understand. 

I have to say very clearly, I don’t understand this mania for locking down campus. And when will it stop? I don’t know. I have the same question. This is another thing that both students and faculty are upset about. There’s a Barnard faculty meeting coming up on Monday where some of these issues are going to be discussed. But I can’t predict what the responses are gonna be. And if you’re going by past experience, I can’t be very hopeful; I’m sure you’re aware of this. 

An extreme example of this was on Commencement day at Barnard, when many people at the official Commencement refused to shake the hand of the President. Many of them turned their backs when she spoke and then many students didn’t go at all, but held an alternative commencement at Saint John the Divine. Immediately after that, those students were not allowed back onto campus. That is not a serious concern for safety, that is vindictiveness. There was no threat there; no noisy crowds with guns and torches. These are people returning quietly from Commencement. To me, that’s pure vindictiveness.

EB: That also evokes the report [of] some of the students who walked out of a Hillary Clinton speaking event. They didn’t disrupt, they walked out silently, and some of them received disciplinary action. It would be very interesting to see the reasons that the University provided for that.

FN: So there I can tell you some extent of the reasons. I was one of the faculty members who has accompanied students to some of their disciplinary hearings. Many faculty members at Barnard have done more than I have, but I’ve been to, I don’t know, five or six of them. One of the students I accompanied was a participant in this. She did not open her mouth. She left the room when the other people who did stand up and opened their mouths left. The reason that was given to her [in regards to the disciplinary hearing] was because she was part of this group that was disrupting. Everything they did, she was guilty for as well. That was the justification that was given to the student. 

And as I say in the paper that I wrote, compare this with a similar thing that happened in 1968, where left-wing students disrupted the Martin Luther King memorial in the chapel. People were outraged that that happened, but nothing happened to the students. They were not disciplined in any way whatsoever. And so there was just a kind of leniency then that is completely foreign to our situation today.

EB: You mentioned in your article about the business-like structure that the College and the University have adopted over time. Why do you think the administrations seem to interpret themselves as businesses with a top-down structure? Do you find this to be common at other universities or only here?

FN: It’s common, I wouldn’t say everywhere, but it’s becoming the norm at institutions throughout the country. It’s very startling. It’s a big change from how universities used to be governed. So again, I had experience with three other presidents at Barnard College and it was not a top-down, no consultation, corporate-style management at all… This is not just here, it’s everywhere. Why is that, I don’t know, it’s part of a larger spread of neoliberalism in our country. It used to be the case that presidents of universities needed to have some kind of knowledge of academia, how academia works, how professors work, what they value, and what students value. And now we choose our presidents in the way that head-hunting takes place at corporate firms. I don’t have an explanation for this, but you’re right to note that it’s more than just Barnard and Columbia by all means.

GB: Going back to the various recommendations you included at the end of your article for Barnard’s administration. Do you plan to eventually propose these to the administration? Will it be something you spearhead or do you have other faculty behind you? What would that look like?

FN: Yes, we’ve already made these demands on paper to the President and then later to the Board of Trustees. These recommendations are supported by a pretty large group of faculty and not just the AAUP by any means. But as I said, we haven’t gotten real responses to the demands. So, we’re gonna have to find some ways to continue making the demands, but we’re also gonna have to find some ways of putting external pressure. And because I think only by putting some external pressure on the administration are we gonna get any kind of movement at all. I wish I could say more in answer to your question.

GB: By a real response—do you mean they’re just giving you fluff? What sort of external pressure are you envisioning?

FN:  So the response we usually get is no response. Sometimes we get the corporate fluff response. There’s a public relations firm hired by the President’s Office, and we get in emails sort of boilerplate, corporate speak boilerplate. That was the first question. What kinds of external things? So I don’t know, but we’re working on getting famous Barnard alums who are very upset with Barnard to become more outspoken about what’s going on. Some of them have already done things you may remember. Jhumpa Lahiri and Edwidge Danticat made public statements back last term, but we need to get some of them to do more. We need to do more. This is where we need the help of students because the students have been so much better at doing this kind of thing than the faculty. The students have been very organized, very creative, and very disciplined. And this is where I think us getting together more often with SGA and talking about what to do is really important.

¹ Bwog investigated the Judicial Council in an article on the September 23 faculty teach-in. We said, “According to the Barnard Archives, the Judicial Council was founded in 1964 and is no longer active as of April 24. The Archives state ‘the exact end date is unknown.’ However, the Barnard 2023-2024 Catalogue lists the Judicial Council as composing of ‘undergraduates, faculty, and administrators’ that ‘recommends disciplinary action for non-academic offenses and acts on appeals of academic disciplinary sanctions determined by the Honor Board.’” Bwog reached out for comment before the publishing of this article and has not received a response. 

² According to the University Senate webpage, Barnard and Columbia College both have three senators. The School of Engineering has eight, while General Studies has one. The rest of the senate seats belong to Columbia’s graduate programs and affilliate institutions.

³ Bwog is unable to confirm this claim. However, faculty and staff members did engage in a strike in May to demand the removal of the NYPD from campus. The official call asked for faculty to strike from activities that “directly serve the administration.” On May 1, 2024, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) called for faculty members to “not grade exams” or “teach classes.” It is unclear whether or which faculty members did so.

1968 protests via Columbia Magazine

Professor Neuhouser via Columbia Department of Philosophy

2024 protests via Bwog Archives