From Million-Dollar Homes to Radical Activism—These Posh Private School Alumni Were Among the Arrested Columbia and Barnard Students
22nd May 2025
Emma Biswas grew up in a life of luxury. She led the robotics team at the Harker School, which bills itself as one of the nation’s top college prep schools and where tuition can reach $65,000. While there, she interned with a biotech company that boasts, “Prospective Nobel Prize Winners Work Here.” And until she left for Barnard College, Biswas lived in a San Francisco Bay Area mansion worth about $5.8 million, according to a Redfin estimate.
Then she was arrested for storming a Columbia University library, along with 80 other radicals. The May 7 mob injured two security officials, damaged bookshelves, distributed pamphlets praising Hamas, and renamed the library after a terrorist. They were led by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a notorious anti-Semitic group that wants the Ivy League school to cut all ties with Israel, and chanted, “We want divestment now.”