"Your Best and Brightest"

By Tali Beckwith-Cohen, who read this at her Barnard conduct hearing

Dear Barnard Conduct,

I applied to Barnard, early decision, because I was craving a rigorous and expansive liberal arts education. As I’ve told prospective students on all the tours I’ve given in my role as an admissions representative, I wanted to be intellectually stimulated, I wanted to be challenged, I wanted classmates and professors who would push me to see the world differently and give me a greater appreciation and understanding of the world around me. I didn’t realize how much I was craving this kind of environment until I learned about Barnard. My idea of Ivy League and other competitive schools was that they were elitist, cut-throat, and excessive, but Barnard seemed different. The students seemed genuinely passionate about their studies, supportive of each other, and empowered by the school to translate their high-quality education into creating necessary change.

I was also drawn to Barnard because I felt it would be a place where I could nourish my interest in activism. In the winter of my junior year in high school, my school district, which has one of the highest rates of childhood poverty in the country, was hit with a multi-million-dollar budget deficit. They had to lay off a hundred teachers in the middle of the school year, which had disastrous effects on an already vulnerable population of students. I became involved in student-led efforts to advocate for equitable school funding. Local activists took us under their wing and taught us how to organize, how to lobby, and how to movement-build. These incredible women showed me how I could use my voice to advocate for myself and others through grassroots organizing. I felt that Barnard would be a place where I could ignite this spark, alongside others who felt similarly. In my admissions essay, I wrote about my experience with organizing in high school, and my desire to ground this work in the education Barnard could give me.

As a Barnard student, I have loved my classes and have worked hard to get the most out of my education. I have made the Dean’s List every semester. I became a history major, and the Barnard history department has given me the tools of analysis to understand the nuances of the present world. I have learned how to recognize historical processes of power and inequity, and to think critically about the narratives I am presented with.

I have worked at the Barnard admissions office since my sophomore year. I have loved engaging with new students: I truly enjoy sharing what I love about Barnard, especially talking about my classwork and internship experiences. Even as I have been frustrated with decisions made by Barnard’s administration, I have continued to approach my job as a Barnard student admissions representative with enthusiasm and professionalism. I’ve been able to rationalize promoting a school that suspended and evicted me for protesting genocide by compartmentalizing the institution that has sold out its students from the community that has embraced, nurtured and encouraged me to stand for what I believe in.

Also in my sophomore year, I began working with the Columbia Housing Equity Project, which transformed my life trajectory. Since my sophomore spring, I’ve led a team on weekly trips to bring food and other essential supplies to unhoused community members in Morningside Heights, and to engage with our neighbors to combat the stigma and isolation they experience. I know most of the unhoused people in Morningside Heights by name and have learned so much working with HEP. I also designed and lead the HEP Inventory Initiative, where I have exponentially increased the number of supplies we have through outreach to campus partners, and built a team of inventory volunteers who help source and organize supplies. My work with HEP inspired my senior thesis project—last week I turned in my 81-page thesis, ‘Homeless not Helpless’: The National Union of the Homeless and the History of Homeless Agency in the Fight for Housing Justice—and I’m now hoping to go into homeless services after graduation as an outreach worker, and eventually work in public interest law, perhaps as a public defender. I am very passionate about housing justice and the criminalization of poverty, and hope to use my education to challenge these unjust systems.

But the past few semesters have been very difficult for me. As a Jew, it has been very painful to see the mass slaughter of Palestinians carried out in the name of the religion I love. I truly believe that the safety of Jewish people and Palestinians is intertwined. One cannot come at the expense of the other. I have reached this belief not only out of the deep value I hold for all human life, a value captured in the Jewish concept of “B’tzelem Elohim,” but also through tools of historical analysis that I learned in Barnard classrooms. Moreover, I have watched friends lose loved ones to the genocide in Gaza. My heart breaks every time I see in the news that more Palestinians have been killed, more hospitals bombed, and more universities destroyed.

It has been scary to see claims of my “safety” implicated in the punishment of friends and classmates who’ve engaged in nonviolent protest for divestment from Israel, fighting to make sure their tuition dollars do not contribute to the bombing of their family members. I have felt betrayed by Barnard and Columbia, who have both claimed to act on my behalf and given in to the intellectually unsound narrative that the beliefs I hold are antisemitic. I cannot tell you how invalidating it is, as a Jew who is deeply scared about the recent rise in antisemitism, to be told by the institution that I love, and that has shaped me, that what I believe is antisemitic. I have felt a profound responsibility as a Jewish American to push back against this idea, and profound fear about the implications of such a conflation, not just for my Palestinian and Arab peers, but for Jews like myself. It is not just hurtful, it is dangerous.

Over a month ago, my peer and community member Mahmoud Khalil was illegally detained by ICE in a Columbia-owned building. I know Mahmoud to be a compassionate and principled person, who has worked tirelessly to support his community, including myself. The thought of him in a detention center, one that has been cited for human rights abuses, is almost unbearable. I have again been horrified to watch “Jewish safety” be wielded in what is so clearly a fascist attack against immigrants, higher education, and broader progressive social critique. Even more terrifying, I have watched Columbia give in. Twenty-four hours before Mahmoud was detained, he reached out to Columbia asking for support and they did nothing, just as they had done nothing for months as Mahmoud was doxxed by other Columbia students and professors who paved the way for his targeting. Since he was detained, the first thing I’ve done every morning is check my phone to make sure none of my other friends have been taken by ICE. And they have been! Last week Mohsen Madawi, who I know from Columbia extracurriculars, was also taken by ICE, also after reaching out to Columbia and getting no response.

Like so many Jews, I grew up learning the warning signs of fascism, being told that it is all of our responsibility to stand up before it is too late. I grew up hearing the poem “First They Came for the Communists” and wondering what I would do were I faced with the choice to stay silent or to act. I cannot help but feel that this is that moment, and I am so scared for my friends, for myself and for my community. It has been very hard to continue with school and my normal activities while my international friends fear for their safety. I have been having trouble sleeping, and cried almost every day this month. Even so, I have pushed myself to keep up with my classwork and managed to turn in my thesis last week, which received departmental distinction. I received notice of these conduct meetings the day before and the day my thesis was due, prompting a panic attack, and I still managed to turn it in.

I say all this to make it clear: Barnard, the students you arrest, suspend, punish and silence—we are your best and brightest. We are the students in whom you saw potential and whom you admitted. We are the recipients of your scholarships, your research grants, your internship funding. We are the student workers who invest our time and energy into the community and whom you have relied on to carry out the basic functions of this college. We are the students who speak up in class, who ask important questions, who engage meaningfully with class material. We are leaders on campus. We run clubs, we start projects, we advocate for ourselves and for fellow students. We have watched the most documented genocide in history play out, have watched our international friends be targeted and disappeared, have watched a countrywide assault on free speech and higher education, and have been pushed to action by the social justice education we have received, and by deep fear for our friends, our community, our world. You want to believe we are the exception—that we are a few ill-intentioned troublemakers instigating disruption across campus out of malice—but that is just not true! We are what makes Barnard, and you have chosen to abandon us.

Right now, our friend Mahmoud is sitting in an ICE detention center and has missed the birth of his son. Our friends’ visas are being revoked. The people of Gaza have just run out of flour and are facing imminent mass starvation after over a year of bombing and indiscriminate killing. Just today fifty Palestinians have been killed! Your students are terrified. And meanwhile, I am being called into disciplinary meetings because students peacefully chained themselves to a gate that has been closed for months to bring attention to the abduction of their friend! My graduation is in jeopardy because Jewish students staged a peaceful sit-in on a public area of Low steps to protest the targeting of our peers by ICE in our name! This is the choice Barnard is making, and I cannot for the life of me understand it. I cannot understand how so many Barnard admin and conduct officers can so completely betray the values this institution espouses, and be so blind to the dangerous silencing of activism across this country that they are complicit in. Is this really what you stand for?

I am hoping to graduate this month. I am looking forward to what comes next. If in my future I accomplish anything, if I succeed at all in creating the more just, more equitable world I want to see, it will have everything to do with the classmates, the professors, the faculty who fought alongside me and supported me throughout these last two terrifying years, and nothing to do with the administration, which abandoned us students in our time of need and sought to stamp out our voices and our sense of right and wrong. If Barnard continues down the path it is headed and doesn’t start standing with its students, I fear I will be the last generation of Barnard students who can say that.

Sincerely,
Tali

[Re-posted from n+1; original here.)