Against Subsumption: The Student Intifada At Bard College

Emile B.

From the beginning, we knew our experience would not look like that of our comrades at Columbia. Bard prides itself on being the most progressive institution of higher education in the country and, as its promotional materials make clear, relies heavily on maintaining this image.¹ Rather than combat violence and repression from police, the state, and the institution, the Bard encampment faced a more nebulous beast: liberal Zionism.

Unlike most forms of Zionism, which explicitly embrace the settler colonial ideologies intrinsic to the Israeli project, liberal Zionism disguises these same violent logics behind the language of human rights, peace negotiations, and so-called rational debate. By claiming to be the only realistic, moderate, and civil approach, liberal Zionism characterizes the Palestinian struggle for liberation, self-determination, and the right to return as irrational, fanatical, and antisemitic. However, this “middle ground” version of Zionism that liberals so vehemently champion is a fiction. Its moral cover serves to obfuscate and thus legitimize the very violence it pretends to oppose.

Joel Kovel’s 2011 essay, “Sacked by Bard,” offers a blistering account of how the college, under the stewardship of its half-century president Leon Botstein, functioned as a laboratory for liberal Zionism.² By identifying and stripping away the liberal varnish, Kovel illustrates how Bard was not simply complicit with Zionism but, rather, actively weaponized liberal Zionism specifically to serve as both moral cover and tool for repressing anti-Zionist voices within the college while enabling a settler-colonial apartheid project abroad.

What Kovel documented in 2011 was not an isolated episode but a blueprint. The same mechanisms Kovel identified—the academic bureaucracy, the liberal Zionist pretensions, the weaponization of procedure and civility—revealed themselves in real time over the course of the Bard encampment fourteen years later. 

Bard’s material alignment with empire and Zionism has never wavered; what has changed are the masks—the PR campaigns, the linguistic pivots, the constant shrouding of power and repression behind the veneer of dialogue and activism. For example, one of the college’s key tools is counter-insurgent academic programming. After Al-Aqsa Flood, Bard rolled out its playbook of public lectures, workshops, talks, and statements that work to control the Palestine narrative on campus. In the months that followed, departments platformed speakers whose ideologies reinforced normalization and undermined the struggle for Palestinian liberation, turning pedagogy itself into a mechanism of containment. This programming was but one part of the college’s multipronged effort to repackage the struggle for Palestinian liberation into a ‘conflict’ and human rights issue. Such a reconstruction normalizes the Zionist project and reduces the Palestinian cause to an object of academic discourse.

Bard platformed former U.S. diplomat and military officer Frederic Hof and former Palestinian Authority advisor and comprador Ghaith al-Omari to parrot Zionist talking points shortly after Al-Aqsa Flood. Under the guise of expertise and diplomacy, the two blatantly prioritized Israeli security over Palestinian rights, situated Palestinian statehood as conditional, and promoted regional normalization with Israel. 

This programming was but one part of the college’s multipronged effort to repackage the struggle for Palestinian liberation into a ‘conflict’ and human rights issue. Such a reconstruction normalizes the legitimacy of the Zionist project and reduces the Palestinian cause to an object of academic discourse rather than a decolonial struggle for liberation. On the one hand, these events attempted to abstract Palestine, bifurcating it from reality. On the other, they recast the Palestinian cause into a liberal project of managed reform, re-centering and preserving Bard’s progressive image and moral high ground.

Given the intensity with which Bard students were being inundated with liberal Zionist propaganda, Bard’s student encampment had another vital objective: to learn to identify, expose, and counter liberal Zionism as it manifested in subsumption, manipulation, and co-optation by the college. 

The encampment sought to heighten contradictions and identify connections between liberal Zionism and its more overtly fascist iterations. One such example is epitomized by the chair of the Board of Trustees, James Cox Chambers. Chambers simultaneously funds the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) and Atlanta’s Cop City—two projects with diametrically opposing goals. BPI provides AA degrees to incarcerated people; Cop City trains police in urban warfare. 

By drawing these connections, students exposed liberal co-optation as a material and irreconcilable contradiction that directly conflicted with Bard’s stated values. In addition, various workshops on so-called “liberal” trustee members and their war profiteering clearly illustrated how, in Kovel’s words, “those most suitable for the sales pitch are financiers reflecting the most ruthless fraction of capital, and also the one most ideologically suitable to align with the projects of empire.” 

Throughout the encampment, students continued to identify how many of Bard’s pursuits and pedagogic frameworks emphasizing human and civil rights are duplicitous projects that further entrench imperial objectives. We made clear to each other that Bard’s commitment to not call the cops on its students was not a sign of its benevolence. That Bard promised not to suspend, expel, or otherwise penalize student activism was not a sign of its solidarity with our actions. That Bard alleged its solidarity with our cause, though not our tactics, was not a sign of allyship. That Bard said they would work with the students to actualize our demands was not a guarantee of collaboration. Instead, these discursive tactics appeared clearly to us as a shameless attempt to protect Bard’s image, pacify and de-radicalize the movement, and redirect our energy into the institution’s sanctioned avenues of “democratic activism” that posed no material or ideological threat to Bard’s reputation and legitimacy.

Following a fourteen-day encampment and three-day occupation of Bard’s main administrative building, negotiations came to a close. The administration agreed to “collaborate” with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), but only on a watered-down series of agreements that fell short of the encampment’s original demands. Most of these so-called victories were promises of future decisions or long-term projects—with delayed timelines stretching out months or even years—designed to dissolve with lost momentum, student turnover, and shifting public interest. Ultimately, Bard preserved its image as cooperative, progressive, and benevolent without ever having to make good on its promises.

As the 2024-25 school year commenced, Bard’s “red tape” strategy was set into motion. When student activists sought to fulfill a demand that the college co-facilitate the creation of a “representative and elected cross-campus committee consisting of up to twelve members that consists in equal part of students, including elected members of the Socially Responsible Investment Committee (SRIC), faculty, staff, and administration that will provide written ethical investment guidelines for the responsible fiduciaries of Bard College,” Bard’s CFO Taun Toay simply refused. He insisted that Bard’s SRIC was sufficient and that this ethical investment committee could simply be a sub-group of the SRIC. Since then, and at the time of this article’s writing, “collaboration” has dissolved into bureaucratic maneuvering and neither students nor the Bard administration is any closer to actualizing this demand. 

Regarding Bard’s commitment to challenge EO157 (a 2016 executive order signed by then-governor Andrew Cuomo that blacklisted institutions that support BDS) by engaging “with elected officials, civil rights organizations, legal advocacy groups, and other interested parties,” there is no evidence to suggest that the Bard administration has undertaken this work since the encampment. 

In all respects, Bard has stalled, neglected, and outright refused to cooperate with its students. Without the leverage of the encampment, student organizers found themselves being shuttled from one meeting to the next in an endless cycle of legal and bureaucratic convolution. 

It is worth noting that, while never committed to paper, the administration made a verbal promise to student negotiators. They assured us that the College would not escalate security, surveillance, or police presence on campus, nor would it punish student activists in response to the encampment. However, Bard’s ostensibly restrained disciplinary response was guaranteed only under public scrutiny, as the community and country closely watched the student uprising. In other words, students were safe only as long as Bard’s reputation depended on it. Once public attention faded and the encampments disappeared from the headlines, Bard’s promise collapsed into hollow rhetoric with no follow-through.

Prior to the encampment, 19 security cameras were installed across the campus (already a jump from zero in 2019). Since the encampment, the College has installed over forty cameras across the campus, including one directly facing Ludlow, the building students occupied from May 16-19, 2024.

In the fall of 2024, just days before the school year began, administrators began an information campaign to find out which students had occupied the building, despite alleging that they would not seek to penalize activists. As part of the campaign, administrators presented students with over seven pages of melodramatic testimonies from staff who had lost office access to Ludlow during the three day occupation. Multiple staff reported feeling unsafe, violated, and betrayed. Some expressed deep grief that students had violated the sanctity of Bard as a place where things can be “solved through dialogue.” Such accusations and grotesque displays of manipulation amidst an escalating genocide reveal a calculated effort to redirect attention away from the Palestinian cause.

In March of 2025, the college called local police to intervene and identify individuals spray-painting pro-Palestine slogans on the campus. In addition, students reported that campus security targeted and followed individuals wearing keffiyehs while walking at night. These instances, which took place just one year after Bard promised encampment negotiators that they would not involve law enforcement, once again illustrate the Bard way: Bard cares little to uphold its purported values unless its reputation is at stake.

Joel Kovel traces Bard’s hypocrisy back to Botstein’s courtship of the billionaire class, whose fortunes and interests are sunk not only into the liberal arts industry but into the machinery of global imperialism. Such figures include the likes of board of trustees members James Cox Chambers and Stewart Resnick, who weaponize their relationships with Bard to launder their reputations.³ Philanthropists in name alone, they are a conglomerate of war profiteers who have positioned Bard College as their willing beneficiary.

Most recently, Botstein’s relationship with infamous convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein came to light. By virtue of his knowledge of Epstein’s sexual predation, Botstein not only provided social capital but moral cover for the child sex offender, using Bard as a vehicle for Epstein’s image laundering. At this juncture, we are beyond questioning the legitimacy of Bard as a champion of human rights and liberal values. Botstein’s nefarious ties indeed expose a longer history of suppressing accounts of sexual violence on campus under his tenure to preserve his and the college’s public image. In fact, the same building students occupied in 2024 was previously occupied in 1991 by Bard students in protest of Bard’s serial protection of sexual predators on the campus and lack of justice or protection for sexual assault survivors.⁴ 

As Kovel so succinctly puts it, despite “the propaganda that places like Bard foist on the public with their slick brochures [. . .] [Bard’s] funding came principally from direct donations by the Board of Trustees, and we had to depend, like Blanche DuBois, upon ‘the kindness of strangers,’ or so Botstein’s mythologizing of his plucky little school told us on countless occasions.”

Like so many liberal arts institutions, Bard cloaks itself in progressive language, allowing Zionist individuals and structures to masquerade as allies to students in solidarity with liberation struggles while erasing genuine solidarity with the Palestinian people. Their attempts at infiltration, co-optation, and ideological control are not accidents; they are imperialist interventions disguised by the mask of civility.

Liberalism, and especially liberal Zionism, will never lead to the liberation of Palestine. Bard may have built a fortress of civility around itself, but the encampment reminded us that collective power rooted in clear analysis of material conditions cannot be contained in a boardroom or silenced by policy. As long as Palestine remains under occupation, our work continues — sharp, unsparing, and unbound by the illusions of the liberal academy.

As student organizers, our duty is clear: to name, disrupt, and dismantle Zionism wherever it festers, however polite its disguise. We resist liberal subsumption and cooptation of revolutionary possibility. We resist its subtle erasures, toothless reforms, and performative gestures of “dialogue” that conceal a deeper loyalty to empire. We recognize that the battle is both ideological and material, and that the fight for Palestine cannot be reduced to committees, petitions, or compromise. As long as our colleges and universities continue to entrench themselves in Zionist genocide, so too must the students must remain vigilant and steadfast in our refusal to let bureaucracy, empty promises, and liberal normalization dull our revolutionary edge.