From Million-Dollar Homes to Radical Activism—These Posh Private School Alumni Were Among the Arrested Columbia and Barnard Students

One student won an ‘international friendship’ award before joining a mob that injured two

By Jessica Schwalb, Jon Levine and Jessica Costescu

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.”

By joining in those demands, Biswas was essentially taking aim at a source of her family’s wealth. Her father, Baribrata Biswas, has been a senior vice president with Synopsys for over 20 years, according to his LinkedIn page. The multibillion-dollar tech company has offices in Israel, which it calls a “hub for innovation,” and has supplied components to Elbit Systems, an Israel Defense Forces weapons maker that anti-Israel radicals have targeted.