Nov 2024 ACLU, AI, HRW open letter to universities to protect student right to peaceful protest

Oct 2024 NYU’s terrible, dangerous settlement of campus antisemitism lawsuit, Christopher Sprigman (NYU Law professor)

 

28 August 2024

 

NYU spokesman, John Beckman, claimed here on 27 August that the new  “‘Guidance and Expectations on Student Conduct’ document does not change our policies,” which is clearly untrue; or perhaps the policies were simply kept secret, when, as you will see in my report below on the April 22 student protests, we faculty supporting students on the Gould Plaza spoke with NYU security officers repeatedly, all afternoon, and they never once said that we were trespassing, or were making too much noise, or that our lively speakers denouncing atrocities in Gaza were being antisemitic or offending Jewish students. We in fact had Jewish students among us and an Orthodox contingent cheering us on. NYU never gave us any order to leave the plaza, or any indication that we were violating any NYU policy; instead, NYU had the NYUPD arrest us (on charges that would not hold up in court, for lack of warning by the owner of the property we were supposedly trespassing).  These new guidelines were composed in summer 2024 in order to stop students from protesting the ongoing mass murder of innocent civilians in Gaza, which is now approaching 50,000 dead, with countless injured, homeless, diseased, and harmed for life by the Israeli army, with full US support. The NYU administration is supporting those crimes against humanity by criminalizing protest against it, and by turning any critique of ideology that justifies genocide into a Title VI violation.

    

Here is a link to the NYU policy, which effectively makes any religiously self-justified ethno-nationalist ideology the basis for a protected religious identity. It extends Title VI protections to nationalists who tie their politics to religion and who claim their opponents discriminate against them on the basis of religion. [Following the logic of the House Bill passed in May 2024, in response to student protests critical of Israel: HR894.] 

 

Here is NYU FJP response … Here is update with details, 27 August 2024. Here is the MESA “Letter to New York University expressing concern about its new “Guidance and Expectations for Student Conduct” Here is AHA Resolution on Scholasticide.

“Zionist” Is Now a Protected Class at NYU.” by Natasha Lennard, The Intercept, 27 Aug 2024.

“‘A police state’: US universities impose rules to avoid repeat of Gaza protests,” The Guardian, 28 Aug 2024

Here is a collection of faculty letters to the President and Provost. More letters. Letter from Nikhil Singh. 

 

Below is a copy of the letter I sent to NYU President Linda Mills, on April 23.  I will continue to edit it for clarification.  Here is a collection of materials on Gaza. 

 

Dear Linda,

 

I want to clarify a few things about yesterday, which you do not seem to know. You surely do know, of course, that the protest was entirely peaceful and that whatever obstruction there was to Stern access was caused by the barricades and restrictions enforced by NYU security, not by students. You surely know that the so-called breach of the barricades was made by students and faculty with NYU IDs, not by “outsiders.” 

 

You may not know that the effort to check IDs from everyone in the plaza in the afternoon was proposed and begun by the faculty and then rejected and stopped by NYU security. Everyone in that plaza had an NYU ID: there is no proof otherwise. We were all students and faculty, exercising free speech on our own campus, where we work and students pay tuition. The chanting was free speech. If there was noise disruption of Stern classes, we were not told that or given any option to alter the free speech volume to improve the situation.

 

What you will not know is that several of us faculty and one of the student leaders spoke with the NYU security detail there in the afternoon. They repeated the same (false) “breach scenario” [asserting that non-NYU people breached the barricades] that you present in your statement, as the reason they would SPEAK TO THE CROWD over a bull horn and convey a 4pm deadline for everyone to leave the plaza or face arrest. 

 

They never did speak to the gathered protestors in Gould Plaza. 4pm passed, 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, and then around 8pm or so, all of sudden, the NYPD arrived en masse through the W3rd St entrance. A very large gang of them, whose massing by the gate made it difficult for anyone to imagine leaving by that entrance, which I was starting to do when I was arrested. (This was during Muslim prayers in the plaza, by the way.) 

 

The cops played a recording over and over announcing that the University had declared that we were trespassing and that we would be arrested if we did not leave, WITHOUT INDICATING any time frame for that demand. Then all of a sudden they started grabbing people and tying their hands very roughly behind our backs. The guy who arrested me was clearly angry that I was a bit stunned and did not immediately put my hands behind my back. He and one other guy grabbed and forced my arms back, and tied my ties so tight they hurt like hell and cut off the blood supply to my fingers. I asked them politely over and over to loosen the ties; they refused until two hours later in Police HQ. 

 

We were expecting — based on our conversations with NYU security officers that afternoon — that Fountain Walker, you, or at least someone in NYU security would come speak to us over the bullhorn and explain how a peaceful demonstration had been declared illegal on our own campus, and give us a deadline to leave. We had talked to student leaders about how to respond and we had asked the security people to have further conversations about how to proceed. No effort was ever made by anyone at NYU to communicate with us and I was there with other faculty ready to talk all day after 2pm.

 

Clearly, the CIVIL way to handle the situation was for NYU administration to discuss with us how and when to disband. (I have been in protest situations before where that has happened, once when occupying a classroom/office building at Penn, which was clearly illegal but handled in a very civil way by the administration.) There was a rumor that you were on the way to talk with us; I was recruited to talk with you, and accepted because I know you from GNU work.

 

Instead, with no discussion whatever, we were roughed up with typically rude NYPD treatment as criminals. This treatment was inflicted upon us by our employer, for whom, I must say, I have worked very hard over the years, particularly to improve global education, as you know. 

 

We were engaged in the plaza in a public-facing global education project; our students were learning a lot. It was a public classroom on university property: just what public education should be. Unfortunately, our students learned, as I have learned, that NYU — and other universities — are now places more of arrogant discipline and rough rude treatment than of civil discourse and critical learning, places where blatantly false statements are used to justify arresting and roughing up university community members engaged in free speech and in serious critical public education.

 

Sadly

david

 

Here are my thoughts on how student protest might proceed effectively under the new conditions that we face at NYU. Dated 30 Aug 2024. 

 

Dear NYU News Editor,

I am a faculty member who was arrested on 22 April 2024 for protesting the war on Gaza in Gould Plaza. In consideration of trends since then, I recommend that NYU students concerned with that war consider its economic foundation in the American “military industrial complex,” a useful term invented by Dwight David Eisenhower in his farewell speech as President, on January 17, 1961.

He encouraged us then to remember now that all the billions and billions of US dollars that are called “aid” for wars being waged by US allies actually go into the pockets of investors in the US military. Political support rallied in defense of wars waged by Israel and Ukraine is actually support for massive and ever-expanding US government subsidies for the American military industrial complex — amounting to over 50% of the annual discretionary budget — paid for by American taxpayers, draining funds from education, health, and social welfare programs.

An anti-war movement on campus would not violate NYU policies justified as protections from ethno-religious discrimination and also would get to the heart of the struggle for justice in Palestine. Demands for NYU divestment from military industries and to end US military aid could be waged on the streets and directed at Trustees who control NYU’s funds (including your tuition) and legislators who represent us and control our taxes in Washington. An election year is a perfect time to mount such a movement.

Sincerely,
David Ludden
Retired NYU Professor of History

 

 

Presentation: “Globalization, Religion, and Ethnonationalism”

This presentation is part of a research project in the NYU Global Asia Program on Troubled National Territories. Over many centuries, mobile imperial powers and settlers produced mobile territories where fixed borders of national sovereignty were imposed. This produced numerous troubled national territories where conflicts persist in old imperial frontiers, where national states impose their will by force in the name of national identity, unity, and security. We have been studying areas all across Asia where troubled post-colonial states have used violence against people inside their borders to pursue national unity and security inside the global legal framework of national sovereignty. Each case is unique, with its own history and meanings, but when seen together they reveal features of national territory that enrich understandings of Asia’s globalization.

I will discuss (1) Historical processes that generate and sustain religious ethnonationalism, (2) the globalization of national politics, where “diaspora” is only one among many avenues, (3) current ethnonationalist mobilization techniques, and (4) the inflection of American politics in 2024 by the globalization of religious ethnonationalism.

 

 

Headlines to read:

 

“How the Babri mosque destruction shaped India”
BBC. 5 December 2017

 

“Death threats sent to participants of US conference on Hindu nationalism,” The Guardian, 9 Sept 2021

“Modi Calls Muslims ‘Infiltrators’ Who Would Take India’s Wealth.” NYTimes 22 April, 2024

 

“Modi Concedes Defeat in Ayodhya” Reuters 4 June 2024. Al Jazeera Indian Election 2024 coverage. Spring 2024 Election Results Graphic

Nora Fisher-Onar and Ahmet Erdi Ozgturk, “An Emerging Paradigm: Ethno-Religious Nationalism in an Age of Anxiety” LSE 

 

Rebecca de Souza, “Hindutva and Ethnonationalism in the Indian American Diaspora,” Oxford Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. (PDF 23pp)

 

“From Savarkar to Golwalkar, why Hindutva admires Zionism,” Indian Express, by Christophe Jaffrelot , Kalrav Joshi.

 

 

Writing assignment: How has religion served nationalist movements?

 

Other reference.

 

Azad Essa and Linah Alsaafin, Hostile Homelands : The New Alliance Between India and Israel, Pluto Press, 2023. [requires NYU ID via Bobst], Chapter Two: “A Tale of Two Partitions,” pp. 13-23, and ” Chapter 4. “The Indian4 Diaspora and the Israeli Lobby in the United States,” pp. 73-96 

 

“The Problem with Defining Antisemitism: Kenneth Stern helped write a definition now endorsed by more than forty countries. Why does he believe it’s causing harm?” By Eyal Press, The New Yorker, March 13, 202Ilan Pappe,

 

“Modern Palestine,” in the Oxford University Press Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 

 

Zachary Lockman, “Exclusion and Solidarity: Labor Zionism and the and Arab Workers in Palestine, 1897-1929,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, edited by Gyan Prakash, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 211-240.

 

 

 

 

This is a file of material for my lecture on September 13, 2023 at the NYU History Course, “History in the Headlines,” plus additional material for the study of global Hindutva and its current dominance in India.

 

1. Title for the presentation: “Modi’s India: What’s in the News and Not”

 

Hindutva History Archive. 

 

“India’s slow-burn affair with Israel heats up,” by Rohan Venkat, Himal Southasia, 1 Dec 2023. 

 

“‘India Is on the Moon’: Lander’s Success Moves Nation to Next Space Chapter,” New York Times, 23 Aug 2023.

 

“India’s Kashmir clampdown continues four years after Article 370 abrogated,” Al Jazeera, 5 Aug 2023

 

“India’s Modi faces a no-confidence vote over silence on ethnic violence tearing at remote Manipur,” AP News, 7 Aug 2023

 

News/Opinion Pieces:

 

“Narendra Modi is the world’s most popular leader,” The Economist, June 15, 2023. 

 

Ramachandra Guha, “The Cult of Modi,” Foreign Policy, April 11, 2022.

 

Arudhati Roy, “The Illusion of a U.S.-India Partnership,” New York Times, July 13, 2023

 

Debashish Roy Chowdhury, “India is on the Brink,” New York Times, August 10, 2023.

 

3. Context.

David Ludden, Making India Hindu: Community, Conflict, and the Politics of Democracy. Preface to the Second Edition, OneWorld Publishers, 2005, 10pp.

Christophe Jaffrelot,  Modi’s India : Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021, PART 1, pp. 1-30, 148-154.

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiya, “Despite Modi, India Has Not Yet Become a Hindu Authoritarian State,” Cato Institute (2020). (PDF online) 21pp

Rebecca de Souza, “Hindutva and Ethnonationalism in the Indian American Diaspora,” Oxford Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. (PDF 23pp)

Reference:

 “The Nazification of India,” Justice for All report April 2023.

“When the state Bombs its own people,” CounterCurrents.org April 2023.

Hindutva study resources: Hindutva archive.

 

 

Weaponizing Hinduism video … with Babri Masjid footage.

 

Partition: a popular history, William Dalrymple, The New Yorker, 2015

 

My Presentation: GoogleSlides.