Welcome to Sarah Lawrence

“Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”

That was college president Cristle Collins Judd’s joking reaction on stage after members of the local Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter disrupted a “building bridges” event that featured New York Times columnist Ezra Klein.

Welcome to Sarah Lawrence (SLC), indeed. The college has actively cultivated itself as a romper room for anti-Israel campus radicals. It gave a student leadership award to SJP two years ago. It allowed students who said they were answering the call of Hamas to occupy a building and distribute pro-Hamas propaganda. It did nothing when students tried to boycott a professor for being a “proud Zionist.”

SLC is the kind of place where people draw swastikas on the office door of a Jewish faculty member, and a student can feel comfortable wearing a T-shirt that reads, “Israel is a garbage country that’s only loved by garbage people.”

And lest one might think President Judd should be forgiven for a less-than-ideal reaction in the heat of the moment, she posted later on social media that the event was “lively, thought-provoking, and a real-time demonstration of how to engage opposing (and seemingly opposing) views.” Those words are true of Mr. Klein, but they can hardly be used to describe her students. President Judd knows it: She turned the comments off.

Why, in SJP’s view, is Mr. Klein unfit to speak on an American campus? Is it because he has platformed people who do not condemn Israel—or because he lamented the murder of Charlie Kirk, noting that Kirk “was practicing politics the right way”?

SLC has created a space where even dissent within the left is no longer tolerated. Mr. Klein is himself a critic of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, yet because he rejects political murder and has engaged voices outside the activist consensus, he is treated as beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse.

These students have free expression rights like everyone else, but they are also bad actors who want to capture the university and use it for their political ends. They believe they have a right to disrupt. They think the college should subject its financial decisions to their ideology. They are attempting to weaponize principles they do not believe in.

And too often, radicals like these have been met with unseriousness, as they have been at SLC, which is already facing civil rights and congressional investigations for allowing anti-Semitism to fester on campus.

Is SLC’s leadership, including its board, so lost in its leftist virtue-signaling that it believes its tolerance of SJP’s anti-Semitism will not draw justifiable intervention from the federal government? Is President Judd trying to earn an invitation to Congress? Did she follow the news from Columbia University last year? If SLC cannot ensure common decency, it will fully merit the sanctions that will befall it.

Students who disrupt speakers on American campuses and demand divestment from Israel are not inspiring moral visionaries. They are not just kids being kids. (Many college administrators seem to think they are somehow both.) They are close-minded, anti-civilizational ideologues who should spend more time learning and less time violating the rights of others.

Colleges should let them have their say like anyone else, but they should not tolerate their illiberal behaviors or allow them to harass others on campus. President Judd has announced there will be an investigation. The result will tell us not only what kind of behavior is acceptable, but also who is welcome at SLC.

This piece was originally published by Minding The Campus on February 9, 2026.