NYU Alumni for Palestine, a group with the support of 2,410 university alumni, and the NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition announced that they are “organizing to offer legal support” to any students, faculty or other university affiliates at the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in a shared Instagram post earlier this afternoon.
In the post, the groups advised protesters to “document everything” and save any correspondence from NYU administration. They also told protesters to contact them to report incidents or if seeking legal representation.
“To all protesters at the NYU Gaza Solidarity Encampment, we got your back,” the post reads. “@nyuniversity, we are watching you.”
Campus Safety head Fountain Walker previously said that those at the encampment, which began at around 6 a.m. Monday and has since gathered hundreds of protesters, would face consequences if they did not leave before 4 p.m. The New York City Police Department has increased its presence in the area, with about five police vans and around 20 NYPD officers standing nearby.
“We don’t have anything to report at this point,” NYU spokesperson John Beckman wrote in a statement to WSN. “But what’s really regrettable is that protesters failed to heed Fountain Walker’s call to clear the plaza by 4:00; if they had, we had promised there’d be no student conduct proceedings, no police, no adverse consequences.”
At Columbia University and Yale University, where similar encampments have been set up for multiple days, dozens of student protesters have been arrested — more than 100 at Columbia, and 47 at Yale. All Columbia students who participated in the encampment at the university have been suspended. As of publication time, there have been no arrests at the Gould Plaza encampment.
NYU has reviewed more than 160 conduct cases “related to current concerns” since October. The university has also been criticized by free speech watchdog groups and on-campus activist groups for suspending two professors after they made remarks related to Israel’s ongoing siege in Gaza. One student who was suspended after taking down protesters of Israeli hostages is now suing NYU for allegedly misapplying its conduct policies to her case.
Contact Carmo Moniz at [email protected].
