From: Nikhil Singh <nps3@nyu.edu>Subject: Yesterday’s Arrests at Gould PlazaDate: April 23, 2024 at 12:45:12 PM EDTTo: lgm2@nyu.eduCc: Gigi Dopico <gdb3@nyu.edu>, Antonio Merlo <amm7@nyu.edu>, Susan C Antón <sca2@nyu.edu>, Una Chaudhuri <uc1@nyu.edu>, SCA Faculty <sca-faculty-group@nyu.edu>, history.faculty@nyu.eduDear President Mills and Provost Dopico,
I write with anguish at your decision to call in the NYPD at yesterday’s non-violent student and faculty protest at Gould Plaza. I see today that the university is actually building a wall there. This seems in every way the wrong lesson to our students, and to our community, about the nature of an open and global university.
Having witnessed the events yesterday for myself, I can attest to what I saw with my own eyes. There was no significant threat to public safety, no expressions of bigotry or intimidation from the students and faculty protesting, no hint of violence, at least, that is, until the police were called in to use force by your administration.
To indicate otherwise, as you did in your message to us last night, President Mills, including unspecified charges of anti-Semitism, is superficial, dishonest and unbefitting of a serious leader of a diverse institution such as ours, in this time that calls for so much more from you.
Our students are protesting a humanitarian catastrophe. Just a few short years ago, when the murdered victims were black men and women gunned down by the police in US cities, we praised them and promised new initiatives for diversity and inclusion at our university. Today as mass Palestinian graves are uncovered under hospitals in Gaza, with hands zip-tied, more than 14,000 Palestinian children killed, untold numbers buried under the rubble of US supplied bombs, and millions facing conditions of mass starvation, we see our own students and faculty zip-tied, for insisting on bearing witness to these atrocities in public.
The events of October 7th and the loss of Israeli civilian life were terrible and tragic. Any war crimes committed that day should be adjudicated. They also have a context, as every serious scholar of the region knows, which extends back before 1948, to the contested founding of a Jewish state under imperial mandate on land already occupied for generations by a majority of Arab Palestinians. To frame the current protest in the language of hate and bigotry, is simply to fail to consider this context. Our students who are protesting are not bigots — our faculty who are protesting are not bigots — they are people of conscience who are crying out for justice long deferred and denied. Thus far, you have not said a single word about their cause.
I would argue that the real precedent for what is happening today on campus is the movement against South African apartheid, where students also erected structures — “shantytowns” — in plazas on college campuses, like mine at Harvard. We never faced police force, let alone, police force issued in such a drastic and summary manner as you did yesterday.
I will also add that as a scholar of policing, and as someone who has long respected President Mills as a thinker committed to reparative approaches to justice, I am confounded that you have not been able to consider a better and more creative approach to the current conflict on campus, one that takes into account the needs and opinions of our entire NYU community.
I implore you to make every effort to regain our trust and confidence.
Yours,
Nikhil Pal Singh
Nikhil Pal Singh
Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis and History
New York UniversityChair, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
(Founding Faculty Directory, NYU Prison Education Program)
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