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The New York City Police Department arrested two New York University professors who were at a pro-Palestinian protest on campus Thursday, according to the vice president of NYU’s American Association of University Professors chapter.
Paula Chakravartty, the AAUP vice president and an associate professor of media studies, said the two faculty members arrested were Andrew Ross and Sonya Posmentier. Chakravartty said both are members of the AAUP chapter’s executive board.
NYU said eight people were arrested Thursday, but neither the university nor the NYPD provided full information on who was arrested, or on what charges.
Chakravartty said the two arrested professors weren’t actually participating in the protest outside Bobst Library (where NYU’s administration is headquartered) but were there to ensure the protesters’ safety. NYPD officers zip-tied and jailed both professors, she said.
“We see this as a gross violation of academic freedom, of civil disobedience, in an already hypermilitarized campus where we have to literally go through checkpoints to go to our offices and to teach,” Chakravartty said. She said the protest was peaceful.
NYU spokesperson John Beckman said in a statement that it wasn’t peaceful, but he didn’t specify whether faculty were there or what they had done.
“These protesters sought to block all the entryways into and out of the building, ignoring the clear direction of NYU Campus Safety Officers and repeated attempts by university personnel to de-escalate,” Beckman wrote.
“The people involved were intentionally targeting members of our community; their harassing behavior disrupted our academic operations at a particularly critical moment in the semester (as finals start), ignored the rights of students who wish to study in the library, and interfered with safe passage into and out of a core academic building,” he wrote.
