As this academic year draws to a close, we have lost our confidence in the Mills administration. We are appalled at the discriminatory treatment of our students who are protesting what international courts have determined to be a genocide in Gaza. The NYU administration set a shameful national precedent by calling the NYPD to arrest its own faculty who were attempting to protect students and staff on April 22nd. On that date, and again on May 3rd, the university leadership invited the police to arrest its own students for peaceful political assembly. The public spaces on our campus have been walled off ever since, with check-points, increased surveillance, and the presence of private security and NYPD officers in addition to campus security. 

On April 23, a large group of faculty of color, responding to these excessively punitive measures, asked the administration to “end the excessive surveillance, securitization, and cooperation with NYPD enacted as part of the ‘Ten Point Plan,’ which exposes people of color to disproportionate harm and risk.” Today we, the faculty, staff, and graduate workers of New York University, collectively echo and amplify their call. We repudiate the dangerous presence on our campus of armed police who are notorious for their racial profiling and violence against communities of color. Public opposition and university-wide condemnation of the April 22 and May 3 arrests led to the charges being dropped for all students arrested by NYU.  However, instead of apologizing for the grave mistake of calling police on campus to arrest students protesting an unjust war, the administration has imposed further disciplinary sanctions against our students, including coerced confessions for political speech and actions. 

The Mills administration has not listened to repeated pleas by staff, faculty and graduate workers  to remove the police presence on campus and grant disciplinary amnesty to student activists protesting for justice in Palestine. They have not listened to the AAUP, FSJP, or to hundreds of other faculty of all ranks and from all schools who have written and sent group and individual letters. While President Mills and Interim Provost Dopico appear to have read the Faculty Senators’ Council Resolution of May 9  urging leniency for nonviolent University policy violations, their disciplinary actions on the very next day (and subsequently) show they have not heeded its message. Nor has the administration listened to our students, or even afforded them opportunities to speak out. 

We thus have no other choice but to take action. If the administration does not agree by August 1st to remove NYPD permanently from our campus, fully reopen public campus spaces, and grant full amnesty for students, staff, and faculty engaging in protests over Palestine, we will withhold our administrative labor from the university for the Fall semester. Faculty and staff will withdraw from activities including: serving on administrative committees, task forces, “listening sessions,” taking part in admissions and orientation, event- planning, drafting and sending communications that do not acknowledge the ongoing genocide and that misrepresent our students and colleagues. We are especially loath to participate in administrative tasks that aim to “diversify” our faculty and student body, when our communities of color are directly threatened with the growing presence of NYPD throughout our campus.

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