The YeCao Collective is a student organizing group active in labor and community solidarity efforts.

Dear Mayor Mamdani,

In recent weeks, many of us in the NYU community have been following Intro 175-B and its implications for students’ academic freedom in New York City. The bill claims to protect students’ safety, but its method — expanded policing — says the opposite. Increasing police presence on campus, especially during protests, introduces the very conditions that create fear and repeatedly lead to student harm. In the spring of 2024, the New York Police Department violently raided student-led encampments in the name of order, casting peaceful protesters as agitators and dismissing students’ humanitarian concerns about Palestine through procedural justifications of “time, place and manner.”

Universities are often imagined as insulated ivory towers, but it is society, particularly the political environment, that profoundly shapes our learning experience. We want to make it clear: Academic freedom cannot exist where speech and assembly are preemptively constrained. In the name of safety, the bill Intro 175-B prevents students from engaging with campus affairs, as well as the larger society — both of which are crucial to our education and to the future we collectively imagine. Intro 175-B seemingly focuses on educational facilities, but in its essence hinders us from participating in political and civic matters. 

Our right to academic freedom and to voice ourselves matters as much, if not more, in the context of New York City than within NYU. NYU strives to be a space where students can seriously ask: What could a different society look like? What forms of life might exist beyond exploitation, displacement and inequality? We engage with these questions in theories and practices, and we refuse to take “too radical” as an excuse for silence. From labor protections to universal suffrage to civil rights, it is exactly those ideas that were once deemed too radical that have significantly expanded rights and led to a better, more equitable society today. As the students we are now, and the members of society we will continue to be, it is crucial that we have the opportunities to engage in political life. If Intro 175-B prevents us from doing that, the habits we form in its absence — of disengagement, of silence — will carry forward. Not being accustomed to engaging with political and civic matters creates an inertia that will result in a stagnant public life.

This form of policing has the potential to extend beyond educational institutions. It is concerning that Intro 175-B might be the first step in the infiltration of other aspects of civic life. I have been closely following your administration’s response to the ongoing struggle of home care workers, many of whom are immigrant women, organizing against the 24-hour workday. These workers are demanding the passage of legislation, Intro 303, to end a system that forces them to remain on call for entire days without adequate rest or compensation. These workdays are so detrimental to their health that they turned to hunger strike to be heard. 

However, instead of support or a clear response, what we have seen is delay, obstruction and gestures that many in the community experience as dismissive. Combined with Intro 175-B, reports of City Hall Park police harassing protesting workers are especially disheartening. Whether symbolic or not, such actions reveal a deeply troubling disconnect between the rhetoric of representation and the lived realities of those affected by policy decisions.

We cannot defend intellectual freedom while tolerating the exploitation of the communities that sustain this city. Nor can we claim to value diversity and inclusion while ignoring immigrant women risking their health to demand basic rights.

We students do not attend school and live in New York City only to strive for a diploma or personal success, but to collectively study and communicate how to imagine and create a better society. If New York City is to be a place that values knowledge, dignity and justice, it should encourage the exercise of freedom of speech and assembly. It should listen to the voices of students and those most vulnerable, rather than seeking to silence them.

We urge you to veto Intro 175-B, which elicits greater fear in the name of protection, and to stop blocking Intro 303 and the No More 24 Act. We urge you to take immediate, concrete action to support workers, students and immigrants — everyone who makes up this city — and to bring New York the future we have been envisioning.

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