EDITORS' CORNER
Resolution follows low free speech ranking from national group
Barnard College will be governed by a new set of free speech and academic freedom principles, President Laura Rosenbury and board of trustees chair Laura Blankfein announced Friday.
Barnard’s new “Principles of Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom” will take the place of the Chicago Principles, a widely used model created by the University of Chicago in 2015, according to the Columbia Spectator.
Barnard adopted the Chicago Principles in December 2023 amid anti-Israel campus protests and reaffirmed them in December 2025 while developing its own guidelines. The new principles protect free speech for students, faculty, staff, and invited speakers, while allowing community members to protest only in ways that do not disrupt a speaker’s presentation.
“…all members of the Barnard community must be willing to critically engage with viewpoints that are unconventional, controversial, or even offensive, recognizing that open dialogue is fundamental to the pursuit of scholarly knowledge,” the new guidelines state.
Further, they state that “Academic freedom supports an instructor’s responsibility to foster an environment in which relevant content and a range of views can be rigorously considered, including those that some may find objectionable.”
The college is only allowed to intervene in outside faculty speech if it “directly impinges on campus activities in such a way that it violates college rules or another community member’s legal rights.”
In an email sent to faculty last week, Barnard Provost Rebecca Walkowitz said 107 faculty members voted to pass the new principles, 95 voted against them, and 10 did not vote.
The new resolution comes amid criticism over how the college has handled free speech on campus.
The Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression ranked Barnard 221 out of 261 in the group’s annual free speech ranking. The school received an overall score of 55.45 out of 100.
“71% of students say they have self-censored on campus at least once or twice a month,” the report states.
In addition, “there are roughly 42.00 liberal students for every one conservative student,” according to FIRE.
Last year, Barnard expelled two protesters who disrupted a History of Modern Israel class to pass out anti-Israel propaganda, Columbia University Apartheid Divest announced Sunday.
“This is the first … serious escalation in the crackdown against students advocating for divestment from the Israeli war machine,” the group stated in a post on X.
The group also stated the expulsions were carried out by the newly created Barnard Office for Student Intervention and Success, “a new disciplinary body established just last fall with only one employee and near-total freedom to penalize students for political speech.”
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