‘In a race to destroy any lasting legitimacy the Columbia brand maintains, the Barnard Center for Research on Women is undoubtedly a top contender,’ student says
Rebecca Jordan-Young, a gender studies professor at Barnard College, is a member of the school’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter. Last spring, she volunteered to serve as a “protest marshal,” part of a group of faculty members and staff who helped student radicals secure the perimeter of their illegal encampment and stood by as those students stormed a Columbia University campus building, photos obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. Now, she will lead the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Barnard named Jordan-Young the center’s interim director on Friday. The role opened up after Premilla Nadasen, a Barnard history professor, resigned last month, citing her discontent with stricter campus event rules and “surveillance cameras” implemented in the wake of the illegal encampments that roiled Barnard and Columbia.
Jordan-Young’s appointment ensures that another ally of anti-Israel students will lead the center, which was established in 1971 to “assure that women can live and work in dignity, autonomy, and equality.” It has since expanded its scope to encompass a wider array of social justice projects, including the “gay liberation movement,” the “histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism” in the field of botany, and the “intersections of social reproduction, racial capitalism, care, the state, and liberatory social change.”
Anti-Israel and pro-Hamas activism is also included within that scope. Under Nadasen, the Center for Research on Women was advertised as the host of the infamous “Resistance 101” event held last March, which featured a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group and saw speakers explicitly call for terrorism against Jews. When a doctoral student complained to Columbia, organizers moved the event.
Though Nadasen later denied any affiliation to “Resistance 101,” her successor has offered explicit support for Barnard and Columbia’s campus radicals.
Photographs obtained by the Free Beacon show Jordan-Young standing by as student radicals stormed Hamilton Hall in April. In one photo, Jordan-Young is shown standing just steps away from a group of protesters who blocked a side entrance to the building. In a separate video, Jordan-Young is shown conversing with other faculty members as students occupy Hamilton Hall. Metadata from the video show a timestamp of April 30 at approximately 2 a.m., shortly after students first stormed the building.
Jordan-Young wore one of the neon vests associated with “protest marshals,” a group of volunteer faculty members and staff who supported encampment participants by standing guard at the encampment’s entrance. A photograph taken on April 29 shows Jordan-Young doing just that.
When Columbia slapped suspensions on students who stormed the building and invited police to maintain order on campus, meanwhile, Jordan-Young rallied to their defense. She went on strike in May in solidarity with those students, with the Faculty for Justice in Palestine group she belongs to saying its members would “not return to campus nor engage remotely for administrative service work … until police are removed from our campus.” In her own statement, Jordan-Young said the “protests on campus were peaceful until the NYPD was called in.”
Months later, in September, Jordan-Young’s anti-Israel faculty group held a “Barnard Community in Crisis: Faculty Teach-In.” Jordan-Young dressed in a pink wig and clown makeup and called herself “Both Sides Bozo,” a reference to a university that she said is all about “facts and objectivity and established things and not, like, ethics, which really has no place in a university or college.”
Shoshana Aufzien, a freshman at Barnard, witnessed that event in person. Jordan-Young’s appointment to run the Center for Research on Women, she said, “undermines [the] institution’s credibility.”
Alon Levin, a Ph.D. student at Columbia’s School of Engineering, echoed that assessment.
“In a race to destroy any lasting legitimacy the Columbia brand maintains, the Barnard Center for Research on Women is undoubtedly a top contender,” he told the Free Beacon.
The Barnard Center for Research on Women and Jordan-Young did not respond to requests for comment.
Jordan-Young’s appointment comes as a new wave of anti-Israel radicalism sweeps Columbia.
Student activists, for example, kicked off the spring semester by storming an Israeli history class. They targeted Jews in the class with anti-Semitic flyers that glorified Hamas, depicted a trampled Star of David, and called for violence.
One flyer stated, “THE ENEMY WILL NOT SEE TOMORROW” and featured an upside-down triangle—a symbol Hamas uses to denote Israeli targets—to spell “TOMORROW.” The flyer depicted a truck full of Hamas terrorists brandishing RPGs and machine guns.
Last week, Columbia identified and suspended one student activist involved. Days later, on Monday, the school announced that it identified two more participants from an “affiliated institution” and referred those participants to their “home institution for further investigation and discipline.” Columbia’s affiliated institutions include Barnard, Union Theological Seminary, and Teachers College.
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