A suspended Barnard College student who was arrested during the disruptive anti-Israel protests on Columbia University’s campus moaned Friday about waiting “for an entire hour” to get back into her dorm to pack her things after she was cut loose from jail.
Maryam Iqbal was among the handful of Barnard students — including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s daughter, Isra Hirsi — to be slapped with suspensions from the college on Thursday over their involvement in the tent city encampment on Columbia’s Morningside campus.
“Just got out of jail after Columbia called NYPD to mass arrest 100+ students. I have been suspended and evicted from housing by Barnard,” Iqbal posted on X in the early hours of Friday.
“It’s 2am. I was forced to stand outside the Barnard gates for an entire hour waiting for someone to let me in, while Barnard Public Safety told me they are ‘going above and beyond’ by even considering allowing me into my own room for 15 minutes. I haphazardly packed and have left,” she continued.
“Giving us 15 minutes to pack up and leave from our housing is seriously twisted. I am not surprised at all — I am glad administration is finally showing their face to the general student body, because student organizers have known from the start how evil these administrators are.”
Iqbal, who is a member of the anti-Israel student group Apartheid Divest, received notice of her suspension in the hours before the NYPD were called in to help dismantle the large anti-Israel protest encampment.
Administration at Barnard, which charges $64,000 per year for tuition, said students started receiving warnings late Wednesday that they risked being suspended if they didn’t leave the encampment.
The suspensions started being doled out first thing Thursday morning, according to a statement posted on the college’s site.
“We started to place identified Barnard students remaining in the encampment on interim suspension, and we will continue to do so,” it read.
Iqbal shared a screenshot of an email she received from administrators in the wake of her suspension, notifying her that her ID card had been deactivated and her access to her $20,000-per-year dorm was cut.
“If you need to come to retrieve any of your belongings from your residence hall, please go to CARES. A CARES responder will escort you to your room and you will have 15 minutes to gather what you might need,” the email read.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many Barnard students had been slapped with sanctions so far.
A spokesperson at the Columbia-affiliated college told The Post it “does not provide information about confidential student conduct proceedings.”
Meanwhile, at least 108 protesters ended up being cuffed and slapped with trespassing summonses during Thursday’s NYPD clear out of the Columbia encampment.
Columbia President Minouche Shafik said Thursday she had “authorized” the NYPD to crack down — despite her hopes that the move would “never be necessary.”
“I took this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances,” she said in an email to students and faculty. “The individuals who established the encampment violated a long list of rules and policies.”
“We also tried through a number of channels to engage with their concerns and offered to continue discussions if they agreed to disperse,” she continued. “I regret that all of these attempts to resolve the situation were rejected by the students involved.”
