Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Meghnad Bose, 5/6/25
Headline: “A Student Journalist Covered a Pro-Palestine Protest. Soon, Her Graduation Came Under Threat.”
Subhead: “A botched challenge to press freedom at Columbia University’s Barnard College.”
“. . .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.”
“. . .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’ . . .”
“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. . .”