“Six months on from the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7th, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed… Some 1.9 million people… have been displaced. Over two hundred aid workers have been killed during the conflict. At least 103 reporters are dead… Gaza is facing a famine. As long as it continues to invest in war, NYU is implicated in this devastation. Divestment is an issue of dire moral urgency…”
That’s from a statement issued by some current and former graduate students in the philosophy program at New York University.
In the statement, they make several demands regarding police presence on campus, allowing peaceful protest, disclosure of the university’s financial investments, and the divestment “from weapons manufacturers, war profiteers, and other companies complicit in the Israeli military’s ongoing war in Gaza.”
The full statement is below.
Statement on Divestment and NYU’s Response to Protesters
We, the undersigned graduate students and recent alumni of the NYU Department of Philosophy, join the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors and members of the faculties of the Departments of Philosophy, History, Sociology, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, the School of Law and many others in condemning the NYU administration’s decision to call NYPD officers to arrest peaceful protesters on the night of April 22nd and the morning of May 3rd. We also stand in solidarity with the graduate students of the Columbia University Department of Philosophy, who released a statement on April 29th decrying similar police involvement in peaceful protest on their campus.
On April 22nd, NYPD officers, many in riot gear, arrested over 100 peaceful protestors at NYU’s Gould Plaza, including students and faculty. Since then, the past two weeks have seen NYPD officers use stun grenades, tasers and pepper spray to injure student protesters at Columbia and CCNY; faculty members violently slammed to the ground by police at Emory; and violent, hours-long, explicitly racist assaults on peaceful protesters at UCLA. Despite nationwide condemnation of these events, including condemnation of violence committed specifically by the NYPD, NYU’s administration once again made the irresponsible decision on May 3rd to invite NYPD officers onto campus. These officers arrested a further 14 students who were protesting peacefully at the Greene Street encampment. The increasingly brutal responses of universities across the country to mostly peaceful student protesters have only worked to further erode trust and create a cross-campus atmosphere of antagonism and fear. Rather than follow this dark path, we urge NYU administrators to deescalate by removing NYPD presence from campus and engaging with protesters in good faith.
Beyond these issues of free speech, we call on the university to directly address the demands of the anti-war movement. Institutional neutrality on questions of academic interest is essential for free inquiry. But, for better or worse, the modern university is not merely a place of learning: universities are also employers, landlords and investors. It is reasonable and correct for students and employees to hold these institutions accountable for their actions as economic entities. Indeed, given the clear academic interest in the question of the legitimacy of the ongoing war in Gaza, we believe that the university can only maintain institutional neutrality by disaffiliating itself from the companies involved in prosecuting that war.
But divestment from war is not just an academic question. Six months on from the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7th, more than 34,000 Palestinians – most of them women and children – have been killed by the disproportionate Israeli military response. Some 1.9 million people, the vast majority of Gaza’s population, have been displaced. Over two hundred aid workers have been killed during the conflict. At least 103 reporters are dead; they make up over 75% of the total number of reporters killed worldwide in 2023. Gaza is facing a famine. As long as it continues to invest in war, NYU is implicated in this devastation. Divestment is an issue of dire moral urgency, and demands an immediate response.
Some have argued that NYU’s investments are simply too tied up in a complex network of managed funds and diversified assets to be efficiently divested; others, like NYU SVP for Public Affairs John Beckman, have claimed in public statements that divesting from implicated institutions would have financial consequences for NYU’s endowment. It is impossible to assess the force of these concerns unless NYU fully discloses its current investment portfolio. Even without disclosure, however, neither claim provides a meaningful defense against divestment. Investment portfolios of NYU’s scale have a range of options, and the administration has an obligation to explore these thoroughly and in good faith. NYU cannot claim to run an ethical institution unless it is capable of investing in a socially responsible manner that involves full oversight and knowledge of its investments.
To all of these ends, we demand that the NYU administration:
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- Immediately remove all NYPD presence from campus,
- Pledge to never again call police to arrest NYU students, faculty, staff or community members for exercising their right to peaceful protest,
- Provide general amnesty for and reverse any outstanding disciplinary measures, such as there are, against any and all students, staff and faculty members involved in peaceful protest,
- Disclose all investments and financial assets,
- Engage in a good-faith process to divest from weapons manufacturers, war profiteers, and other companies complicit in the Israeli military’s ongoing war in Gaza.
Precedent is on the students’ side. Divestment is possible. In 1985, NYU divested from South African Apartheid. In the last few years, universities across the country, including NYU, have begun divesting from fossil fuels. As of this week, Brown University has announced that it will formally consider divestment from the Israeli military. Faculty at Pomona College have already voted in favor of divestment. We urge NYU to listen to its students and stand on the right side of history.
Signed:
Carl Christian Abrahamsen (graduate student)
Cristina Ballarini (graduate student)
Evan Behrle (graduate student)
Daniel Brinkerhoff Young (alum)
Caroline Bowman (alum, lecturer)
Preston Budd (graduate student)
Clifford Carr (graduate student)
Tez Clark (graduate student)
Nikhil Dominic (graduate student)
Tom Forster (graduate student)
Iliana Gioulatou (graduate student)
Noga Gratvol (graduate student)
Bin Hui Kwon (graduate student)
Clara Lingle (graduate student)
Annette Martín (alum)
Ariel Melamedoff (graduate student)
William Nava (graduate student)
Samuel Rogers (graduate student)
Rose Ryan Flinn (graduate student)
Alec Sault (graduate student)
Soren Schlassa (graduate student)
Daniel Sharp (alum)
Christopher Sun (graduate student)
Justin Zacek (graduate student)
