January 11, 2025

Dear President Mills and Provost Dopico,

We write to follow up on our letter of December 26, 2024. We acknowledge that NYU’s Department of Campus Safety complied with our demand to remove the PNG status for all colleagues by January 2, 2025. However, we are reiterating our request for a January meeting with President Mills to discuss accountability measures for Vice President Walker’s and Campus Safety’s abuse of authority and violation of university policies. Furthermore, we repeat our request for more information and transparency about administrative protocols for suspending, banning, and arresting faculty. By withholding transparency and refusing accountability for its punitive actions, the administration further corrodes student, staff, and faculty confidence in university leadership.

We also call on you immediately to rescind the suspensions of the students punished for the recent sit-in at Bobst Library. It is the position of the Executive Committee of AAUP-NYU that these punishments are not only excessive and disproportionate, but constitute discriminatory actions in the form of disparate treatment against Palestinian students and their supporters. The discriminatory punishments manifestly harm our students, while also exposing the university to legal action. We draw your attention to the recent finding by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights that Rutgers University has apparently engaged in a “pattern and practice” of anti-Palestinian discrimination since October 2023 that has created a hostile environment. We observe that, compared to those of Rutgers, recent actions taken by the NYU administration have if anything been more egregious.

It is also the position of the Executive Committee of AAUP-NYU that the suspension of students for nonviolent protest constitutes a form of censorship that violates our students’ first amendment rights. Here we direct your attention to the letter sent on January 6, 2025 by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) to New York area colleges and universities making clear that even at private universities the “federal Office of Civil Rights has long recognized that Title VI must be applied in conformance with the constitutional standards enshrined in the First Amendment.” The letter singles out NYU’s updated guidance to its NDAH policy at great length for going “so far beyond an appropriate interpretation of Title VI that they will chill protected speech and curtail academic freedom,” and cautions other schools from pursuing the unconstitutional path that NYU leadership has chosen to follow. AAUP-NYU has been in conversation with senior NYCLU attorneys, whose legal argument informs our position.

We urge you to act immediately to undo the harm caused by suspending our students. Please consider this letter formal notice of our position that recent punitive actions taken by the NYU administration appear to be both legally discriminatory under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and to violate the constitutional speech rights of students, staff, and faculty.

We request that you acknowledge receipt of the letter, which we are also sending via registered mail. We expect to hear back shortly in order to arrange a time for our meeting with President Mills.

Sincerely,

NYU-AAUP Executive Committee