by Haley Scull, 3RP Publicity Associate

The past several months on my campus have been ___. Fill in the blank, take your pick: scary, hard, enlightening, confusing, empowering, enraging, loud, unjust, demeaning, you name it. As student voices have grown louder at Barnard College and Columbia University, so have punitive measures by our administrators, and now, by federal politicians.

Nine students arrested on Barnard’s campus by NYPD. $400 million in funding stripped from Columbia. An alum living in campus housing with his pregnant wife detained by ICE. Expulsions for student protesters. Degrees revoked.

I came to Barnard four years ago eager to find the unique community it promised and boasted, one shaped by strong opinions and loud voices, one burgeoning with radical ideas of change and improvement. I’ve watched this crumble under the heavy weight of money, power, and bureaucracy.

But it isn’t just on my campus. A hierarchy has emerged across the country. It’s not a new hierarchy, no, but rather an old system being rapidly unveiled and publicly consumed. It is one that favors complacency, denial, abuse of power—and Columbia and Barnard seem unable (or rather, unwilling) to push back. I’ve watched institutional power become synonymous with righteousness and morality. It’s not.

Especially as a student journalist on Barnard’s campus right now, the importance of truth-telling, of personal narrative, of allowing each voice to be heard as distinctly as the next has become urgently evident. Read the news, and make sure not to discount those on the ground, the local and student newspapers with their feet planted firmly in the middle of the action. Listen closely when someone shares their story. Question whether sheer volume and power equate morality. Ask ‘Why?’ when authority calls on us to place some people’s worth higher than others. You might find yourself asking ‘Why?’ a lot. I know I do.