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About 20 New York University faculty members were arrested alongside 100 to 120 students involved in a pro-Palestinian protest on the lower Manhattan campus Monday night, according to the president of the university’s American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter.
Rebecca Karl, a history professor and president of NYU-AAUP, said the New York City Police Department apparently “couldn’t keep count properly” on how many faculty members were arrested, so she didn’t have an exact number. Karl said all the faculty members were charged with trespassing, even though the protest was on Gould Plaza. “In other words, it’s a spurious charge,” she said.
An NYPD spokesperson wrote in an email that “120 individuals were taken into custody,” 116 of whom were released “with summonses for trespass,” while the other four, all in their 20s, each face charges of resisting arrest and “obstructing governmental administration.” The police department didn’t clarify how many of those arrested were faculty members. CNN reported that the NYPD confirmed to it an unspecified number of faculty arrests Monday night.
NYU spokesman John Beckman wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the university doesn’t know the number of faculty members arrested. In an earlier statement, he wrote that the university had called in the NYPD.
The demonstration began Monday morning, Beckman wrote, and the university “closed access to the plaza, put barriers in place, and made clear that we were not going to allow additional protesters to join because the protests were already considerably disruptive of classes and other operations.” But, on Monday afternoon, “additional protesters, many of whom we believe were not affiliated with NYU, suddenly breached the barriers” and joined the protest, he wrote. He said the university told the protesters to leave, but many didn’t, and “there were intimidating chants and several antisemitic incidents reported.”
Karl said the students were trying to create an encampment—pro-Palestinian demonstrators have created these on multiple university campuses. She said Jewish students taking part in the Gould Plaza pro-Palestinian protest hosted a Passover seder there Monday, followed by Muslim demonstrators’ Maghrib prayer. But she said “the NYPD came storming in” amid that prayer, and faculty members attempted “to form a protective cordon around” the students.
The last faculty member was released around 3:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, and the last student around 9 or 10 a.m. that day, Karl said.
“We are helping, along with other campus organizations, to coordinate a campus-wide response to the unprecedented way in which [NYU president Linda G. Mills] called in the cops and how they treated faculty and students,” Karl said. She said faculty members are shocked “at how our president betrayed us, the faculty, and our students.”
