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I write this as an open letter to our university’s Office of the President, as all other open requests for constructive conversation remain ignored or sabotaged — and I mean it to be an invitation, moreover, to all other readers at the end of another academic year since the escalation of the onslaught upon the Palestinian people by the Israeli and U.S. governments. I write this as a staunch supporter of the Palestinian fight for survival, and of the student movement for divestment here in turn.

The message I seek to relay is plain, after months of watching those with the most ardent commitment to resolution be maligned and blacklisted by leadership who portrays these students as the ones without commitment to conversation, and whose egos are too fragile to sit down and work out real remedies. I think you are guilty of a severe and repulsive dishonesty. I think it is made more acrid still by your touting of a rhetoric valorizing community safety and open dialogue while you categorically suspend students for simply nearing your doorstep and do so in blatant violation of your own procedures. You ban students from campus buildings indefinitely without proper investigation and insist that an interim measure such as this is not punitive on its face, and you have mobilized Campus Safety and police officers to abuse students in a manner unparalleled in NYU history. We have spoken civilly while sitting cross-legged at sit-ins, and then you castigate us inflammatorily as rabid combatants — even while it is right to fight for a cause preserving life, rather than cling to a state’s right to defend itself as if the legal fiction of statehood should or could ever defend taking priority over ending a devastating, ongoing and intergenerational mass murder. 

I am but one student among many more heavily impacted. And yet, I have even been harassed by our Campus Safety officers, refused access to buildings from which I bear no restrictions and denied my place of prayer. I have been outright ignored over group emails to you while seeking protections for our communities who endure growing threats to their immediate safety in this era of federal overreach. I have been approached by leadership I have never met while off campus and then refused official meetings with the literal Dean of Students, while still being a full-time student at the university. I have been lied about, and lied to, and it spells out a cadre of leaders who perpetuate insecurity in the name of security and miss the point, over and over.

But Palestine is the brutal exemplar of oppressed peoples everywhere who refuse their literal eradication out of bare necessity. The inescapable and shameful fact to be stressed for you administrators, in the midst of your spineless squirming out of even talking this through with students, is this: The silence we here are freely offered — when so in reprieve of proximity to a war zone, so replete in our decadence, that to rejoice over it seems trite — is a luxury we are afforded only when we ourselves do not face mortal threat which occupies us entirely. Almost every single person reading these words will share the fruits of that orchestrated loss of life and thereby share a responsibility to consider who bears that expense of life stolen, and then to directly face that inexorable debt. 

You have proven, now, that any conversation which truly negotiates student demands to make that known is infinitely more threatening — not merely to a peaceful campus, but to exposing the precarities which finance this peace — than any demonstration in protest of ignoring that debt could ever be. Administrative cowardice is the only actual and outstanding threat to community safety, and that is the perennial protest-related campus emergency at hand: your childish unwillingness to face a hard conversation and refusal to admit the reason for doing so.

This is what casual critics and more vitriolic antagonists fail to understand about the call for disclosure or divestment. It is not as simple as switching schools to redirect tuition as an individual consumer. Our insulation from true insecurity, here in New York, is built upon bloodied families whose deaths enable the very possibilities of our consumption of education to win access into tax brackets whose payments reinforce the same conditions of state-enforced bloodshed. We could not have our way of life save for that exceptionally exhausting and gory payment. And we all permit ourselves to be hidden from facing this, so long as we accept the opacities of your commitments, dear administrators, to people we have never met and are not part of our community. All while you demean my own, which are ever so transparent. 

It is my steadfast belief that it is gutless and deplorable to ignore that there is a bill sitting right there on the table; and that a finger taps at it, ashen and plaster-soaked, right through the rubble with every bomb that drops. It does so when the manufacture of these weapons and of their very necessity generates profits to fund our education, which you signed up to curate and now cheapen with every barricade and barrier put up in avoidance of confrontation. You are not taking a balanced position by staying silent. You do not even want us to know what the balance sheet itself has to say. You are entrusted only to your being terrified of that unspoken secret. You are averting your eyes from the cost with your stomach full, and it does not matter if you do not think so. 

This is a failure of your custodial commitment; all to better cover up these immoral idiocies committed here and international crimes committed abroad in the name of safety. Your students are terrifyingly intelligent, and it seems unavoidable now to admit you only flee them because they outpace you.

So, to our administrators: You are not being honest about your silence, your avoidances or your misdoings. You are transposing the violence suffered around the globe, and recreating its choreography upon those who are most prepared to withstand that exactly because they understand they will still preserve access to their lungs and breath when you deactivate their ID cards. You stunt your imagination toward however else we could decide to live together while students pay tens of thousands of dollars precisely in exchange for your spoiled goods: a lifeless promise of sharpened intelligence, of creativity, of moral clarity. You corrode this now, continuously, right down to the nerve; you do so with every corpse you pile on, every protest sewn shut, every checkpoint cropped up on your campus without walls.

You should confront the uncertainties that come with building community indebted to each other’s goodwill, rather than to the steady and unremitting blood loss of strangers; that occupation which you are all too willing to bring home when we insist on a right to organize our communities differently.

WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.

Contact Hamza Mankor at [email protected].