Professors criticized NYU’s response to President Donald Trump’s executive orders, including his crackdowns on immigration and gender-affirming care, at an American Association of University Professors town hall on Tuesday.
At the meeting, eight executive members of NYU’s AAUP chapter discussed four areas of concern — cuts to research funding, attacks on gender-affirming care, repression of pro-Palestinian speech and immigration. The group also opened the floor to audience members to share first-hand how they have seen federal mandates impact the NYU community a month into Trump’s presidency.
NYU AAUP president and Tisch professor Anna McCarthy said that administrators should offer more clarity on what the university will do to address student and faculty concerns.
“We’re in a time of crisis — we’re witnessing an unprecedented assault on higher education, and the crisis affects all areas of the university,” McCarthy said at the town hall. “We have come to the conclusion that if our administrators are not explicitly opposing the Trump administration’s executive actions, they are enabling them.”
Members of NYU’s AAUP chapter said that the organization invited President Linda Mills to join the meeting over email. They said Mills responded on Monday, saying that she would not be able to attend the town hall and reiterating the university’s commitment to the NYU community. The group displayed an empty chair reserved for Mills next to the stage during the town hall.
CAS professors Zachary Samalin and David Hogg, both NYU AAUP executives, raised concerns that the executive slash to research funding might halt advancements across a variety of academic fields. A psychology professor in the audience said that she witnessed her colleagues’ research proposals getting revoked by the National Institutes of Health for mentioning the word “diversity” in them, and that NYU never offered any guidance to the department as to how to respond.
In a statement to WSN, a university spokesperson had said that the administration is monitoring federal policy changes and collaborating with peer institutions and higher education organizations to respond to research funding cuts effectively. CAS professor Sonya Posmentier, another member of NYU AAUP, said that faculty have yet to receive updates from senior leadership on this process.
“Faculty need to be very intimately involved,” Posmentier said in an interview with WSN. “A broad base of faculty from different disciplines need to be involved in these conversations about how to move forward.”
Trump’s pause to all federal aid on Jan. 27 led to the termination of at least two of NYU’s grants within days. While the order was rescinded two days later, federal agencies have since targeted thousands of research grants related to “woke” subjects including race, gender and environmental justice.
To address faculty concerns about Trump’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at institutions, NYU AAUP members specifically elaborated on NYU Langone Health’s decision to deny gender-affirming care to two children, in line with a Jan. 28 executive order threatening medical centers with federal aid withdrawal. Posmentier said that although the NYU Student Health Center has continued to offer gender-affirming care, many faculty members are worried that the reportedly denied treatment could pose problems for university employees whose children receive gender-affirming care from NYU Langone.
“There has been no request or suggestion from the Trump administration that the university change its gender-affirming care,” Hogg told WSN. “It’s just preemptively removing gender-affirming care because they imagine that at some point that could be the problem for them.”
Earlier this month, the national chapter of the AAUP filed a lawsuit against Trump, alleging that his mandates against DEI and research funding violate the First Amendment and unfairly enforce vague existing legal obligations. As a result, a Maryland court temporarily blocked the president’s orders related to DEI programming at institutions.
NYU’s AAUP chapter invited NYU Law student Hamza, who was suspended last semester after participating in a pro-Palestinian sit-in in Bobst Library, to tell the meeting’s attendees about his disciplinary hearing process.
In response, two Stern professors in the audience said that they did not view pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus as peaceful. They specifically referenced the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in Gould Plaza last April — which disbanded after New York City Police Department officers arrested dozens of students, faculty and alumni — claiming that the noise made it “unbearable” to teach students inside Tisch Hall.
“I will tell you that to characterize the protests outside of Stern last year as ‘peaceful’ is an absolute gross mischaracterization of those protests,” one of the Stern professors told the crowd. “For someone who is Israeli and/or Jewish, you would have felt very fearful to go by those protests.”
Paula Chakravartty, a Steinhardt professor and the vice president of AAUP, then spoke about NYU’s Immigration Defense Initiative — which was created during the first Trump administration to assist university members with immigration-related procedures. Chakravartty said that the IDI only has one attorney, making it an unfeasible solution for international students on campus, which made up 44% of total enrollment last academic year.
“Folks are feeling nervous,” Chakravartty said in an interview with WSN. “The university needs to make more resources available and be more clear about what those resources are for students.”
The university had told WSN that it “will comply with the law” amid Trump’s promised crackdown on student visas, stating that Campus Safety officers have been trained to only allow law enforcement officials on campus if they have issued a search warrant or subpoena. The week before, the AAUP had exposed Mills’ close correspondence with an NYU parent and founder of an influential Facebook group who had pressured the university president to deport “foreign students and faculty that support Hamas” with intimidation and financial threats.
Contact Amanda Chen at [email protected].
