MANHATTAN — Police evacuated a Barnard College building Wednesday after a bomb threat was allegedly reported during a sit-in staged by pro-Palestine protesters.
More than two dozen masked protesters occupied the school’s Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning around 1 p.m. Wednesday, Fox 5 reports. The bomb threat was reported around 4:30 p.m., the New York City Police Department wrote in a social media post. Officers shut down the block and swept the building. No explosives were found and the area was cleared around 8 p.m.
Nine protesters who refused to leave the building were arrested. All individuals received a desk appearance ticket and were charged with obstructing governmental administration, trespass, and disorderly conduct, an NYPD spokesperson told the Columbia Spectator Thursday morning.
“Today has been unsettling and disturbing, and these continued disruptions take a toll on our community,” Barnard President Laura Ann Rosenbury said in a statement following the protest. “The desire of a few to disrupt and threaten cannot outweigh the needs of the students, faculty, and staff who call our campus home.”
The group Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine said the bomb threat was “manufactured by Barnard administrators” to clear the protest, noting in posts on X that police brought detained students back into the library even as they continued their investigation, NBC reports.
The Barnard Student Government Association released a statement Wednesday night condemning the presence of NYPD on campus, calling it an “act of cowardice.”
“Rather than engage in honest dialogue with our ‘community of care,’ you have chosen to betray your community,” the statement said. “In othering students who dissent, Barnard has found itself on the wrong side of their ‘line in the sand.'”
Wednesday was the second recent protest at Barnard. On Feb. 26, protesters occupied Milbank Hall for more than six hours, demanding amnesty for all students disciplined for “pro-Palestinian activism,” including two Barnard students who were expelled last month for interrupting a lecture on the history of modern Israel at Columbia University. Barnard is an independently accredited institution but is an official college of Columbia University. According to school officials, the Feb. 26 protesters pushed their way into the building, which houses the offices of the dean, and injured a school employee in the process.
As of Friday afternoon, more than 125,000 people had signed a letter urging Barnard College to reinstate the expelled students. The letter was campaigned by Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
