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Back in March, pro-Palestine protesters staged a sit-in at Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia University, just across the street. Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and lead negotiator at last year’s encampment, was there, among others, including a few student journalists, who reported as Barnard officials made it known that police had received a bomb threat and said they had to clear the area. Soon, nine people were arrested. (“Anyone who refuses to leave the location is subject to arrest,” officers said.) As it turned out, the bomb threat was fake. Three days later, Khalil was arrested by federal immigration authorities. In early April, Georgia Dillane, a Barnard senior who works at WKCR, Columbia’s radio station, got a “fact-finding” email from Barnard’s Community Accountability, Response, and Emergency Services (CARES) that would eventually place her graduation under threat.
Dillane, who is twenty-two, was not at the protest that day in March. She was at the WKCR studio, anchoring the broadcast. On the scene was her colleague Celeste Gamble, a twenty-year-old sophomore at Barnard, who had been wearing a press ID, and who left when Barnard officials told the crowd of the bomb threat. Gamble received the same email. Gary Maroni, the director of CARES, had written to each of them requesting a meeting “to provide any information you would like to share, including information that refutes any suggestion that you were involved, are a witness, or have information about this incident.” (The emails were shared with CJR.) Dillane and Gamble were told that they would not be permitted to bring anyone along with them for the meeting. Failure to engage, Maroni wrote, could be viewed as a violation of Barnard’s student code of conduct.
Dillane, Gamble, and the rest of the WKCR team were taken aback. “There would potentially be questions about what I knew as a journalist having an ear to what was going on, and they would try to extract that from me,” Dillane said. She didn’t want to violate journalistic ethics, or her sources’ trust. “I owe it to those that I report for, WKCR and its listeners, to be honest, truthful, and objective,” she said. “To pander to the calls of the administration to extract information to then target students is not something that I feel morally aligned with.”
WKCR was particularly concerned about the audible presence of Khalil’s voice in its report. By now, he was in federal custody. The team drafted a response to Barnard, shared with CJR, explaining the circumstances of Dillane and Gamble’s reporting. “It is critical for student journalists to be independent in their coverage,” they wrote. They referred to New York State’s “highly protective shield law”—which, they noted, “recognizes the importance of keeping journalists outside of the investigative and judicial process as much as possible.”
Maroni didn’t respond to that message, but he did follow up with Dillane and Gamble, giving them an April 14 deadline to meet. WKCR’s legal counsel sent a message to Barnard. (These emails were shared with CJR.) Three weeks passed. Then Dillane received another email—this time from Ange Concepcion, Barnard’s director of Student Intervention and Success, alleging that she had violated the student code of conduct on the day of the protest, charging her with “disorderly conduct, disruptive behavior, failure to comply, unauthorized entry, threatening behavior, and theft, vandalism or damage to property.” Concepcion added, “In order to participate in Commencement, you must participate in this conduct meeting.” (CJR has reviewed this email, too; the emphasis is as it appeared.)
Gamble didn’t receive that note—which led the WKCR team to suspect that Dillane had been singled out because she was about to graduate. “That first fact-finding meeting email positioned me as a witness,” Dillane said. The new email had seemingly cast her as “a perpetrator.” WKCR’s legal counsel replied to the message, describing “the hazards of investigators trying to turn journalists into witnesses.” Considering Dillane wasn’t even there, the lawyer added, “the inference if this conduct meeting goes forward must be that Barnard College is considering punishing one of its students for engaging in journalism.” (This email was shared with CJR.)
The meeting was set for May 5, Dillane’s last day of classes. “I spent the last academic weekend of my undergraduate career at Barnard preparing for this meeting, to be ready to be interrogated,” she said. She was filled with anxiety. Then, a couple of hours before she was meant to appear, she received another email from Barnard: “You do not appear to have been present in the Milstein Center on March 5, 2025 during an unauthorized protest because you were in an in-studio broadcast from WKCR, you are no longer required to attend this meeting. This matter is now closed.”
In response to this reporting, Barnard provided a statement: “While we made every effort to identify and exclude students who were working as journalists from the conduct process, a small number were inadvertently included. As those students have been identified and their roles as journalists confirmed, we have notified them that they will not need to engage in this process. We will continue to make notifications as necessary.” (In the afternoon, Gamble received a notification that the matter was resolved, as far as she’s concerned.)
Dillane was stunned. It was a relief that she didn’t have to attend the meeting. Even so, “there is a lack of respect for conducting journalism on campus if you are devolved to the role of an accused student,” she said. She remained uneasy about the experience—and what it could still mean for others, including Gamble, who continued to worry about Barnard pressuring her to share information about the protest, or other stories she intended to cover. Until today, Gamble had received no assurance about her own status on campus or updates about the “fact-finding” investigation, and feared disciplinary action. That did not dissuade her from reporting, though: “It doesn’t make me want to do journalism less,” she said. “If anything, it kind of makes me want to do it more.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include a post-publication comment and action from Barnard.
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