Barnard Names New Head of Women’s Center: Anti-Israel Gender Prof Who Stood Watch as Student Radicals Stormed Columbia Campus Building
31st January 2025
Rebecca Jordan-Young, a gender studies professor at Barnard College, is a member of the school’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter. Last spring, she volunteered to serve as a “protest marshal,” part of a group of faculty members and staff who helped student radicals secure the perimeter of their illegal encampment and stood by as those students stormed a Columbia University campus building, photos obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. Now, she will lead the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Barnard named Jordan-Young the center’s interim director on Friday. The role opened up after Premilla Nadasen, a Barnard history professor, resigned last month, citing her discontent with stricter campus event rules and “surveillance cameras” implemented in the wake of the illegal encampments that roiled Barnard and Columbia.
Jordan-Young’s appointment ensures that another ally of anti-Israel students will lead the center, which was established in 1971 to “assure that women can live and work in dignity, autonomy, and equality.” It has since expanded its scope to encompass a wider array of social justice projects, including the “gay liberation movement,” the “histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism” in the field of botany, and the “intersections of social reproduction, racial capitalism, care, the state, and liberatory social change.”