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Lisa Coleman, Senior Vice President for Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation

On April 22, 2024, NYU leadership called in the NYPD’s notoriously violent Strategic Response Group to brutally repress a peaceful protest, resulting in the arrest of over 120 members of the NYU community. On May 3rd, despite widespread condemnation of these arrests, your administration once again called the NYPD to arrest over a dozen NYU student protestors outside the Paulson Center, without notice at 6 AM when many students were sleeping.

Since then our campus has been divided by walls, fences, and phalanxes of armed police. This raises grave concerns about our status as a place of learning and inquiry, a self-governing university, and a free and democratic institution. As an NYU employee, I am writing to tell you that your actions have created unfair and dangerous workplace conditions that you must address immediately.

The NYPD has a well-documented history of brutality against people of color, and calling police onto our campus has disrupted access to our workplaces and made NYU an unsafe learning and working environment for all of us. The health and safety threat posed by the NYPD’s presence on campus is recognized by NYU’s collective bargaining agreement with GSOC-UAW 2110.

The crisis produced by your mass arrests has also generated considerably more teaching and advising labor, as well as more care work, for NYU faculty and staff. This increased workload has fallen disproportionately on minoritized community members, as NYU fails to provide administrative support for, or even acknowledgement of, the impact on Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students at NYU. Across campus, NYU workers have been forced to clean up the mess you made.

The arrests of April 22 and May 3 and the subsequent retaliatory disciplinary processes undertaken by your administration must be understood in the context of other abuses and misapplications of the university’s non-discrimination policies, overseen by NYU’s Office of Equal Opportunity. By weaponizing a contested definition of antisemitism, your administration has trammeled the academic freedom of NYU employees.

As you know, other universities have not required a police response for successful negotiations with students and university community members, as seen at Evergreen State College, Northwestern University, Brown University, or Johns Hopkins University. Cal State Sacramento has even committed to full divestment effective May 24th. Disclosure and divestment are possible; productive negotiations with protestors are possible. One-sided listening sessions set up solely from the president’s office are not sufficient. NYU needs good faith negotiations leading to tangible next steps.

We demand that you:

1. Rescind all internal disciplinary actions for all NYU community members stemming from protests;
2. Protect our workplace safety by upholding the university’s commitments to keep police off campus;
3. Repair trust on our campus by engaging in meaningful negotiation with protestors;
4. Restore academic freedom and ensure that our campus is a safe and supportive environment for all by ending the asymmetrical weaponization of Title VI to surveil, intimidate, and silence NYU students and workers.