BY REBECCA E. KARL

This post is part of a blog series, organized by Annelise Orleck, that will focus on recent crackdowns on protests at US college and university campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza. You can read the first post and an introduction to the series here.

The first spring 2024 encampment at NYU’s Gould Plaza. Photo by author.

The NYU administration dissimulates and even prevaricates. Our provost, our deans, and our spokesman have each proclaimed, publicly and behind closed doors, that the newly issued guidance on student speech, sprung upon the university on August 22, “changes nothing.” (Our president has gone AWOL, apparently remaining only in her own echo chamber.) Despite the protestations, all signs are that things have changed fundamentally. In addition to the walling off of swathes of what used to be public gathering spaces on and near our campus, as well as the newly severe proscriptions on permitted assembly in or around university buildings, this new guidance doubles down on specific conflations. It broadly equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism and specifically names Zionism a “code word” for probable racist intent.

The guidance thus legitimizes the newly built environment (assembled in the aftermath of the spring 2024 student encampments for Gaza) that features any number of checkpoints, cameras, and areas that render our “university without walls” into walled zones of exception and surveillance. It also turns into potentially criminalized behavior all speech acts, inside and outside the classroom, that critically examine Zionism as a twentieth-century European political ideology, as the founding theory of the Israeli state, as a form of colonial-settler apartheid practice, and as the ideological and historical basis for the expulsion of Palestinians from their own land. Specific language in the guidance that equates “Zionism” with “Jewish identity” is particularly pernicious and implicates all, including myself, who do identify as Jews but certainly not as Zionists.

The current wall at NYU’s Gould Plaza, former site of the first encampment. Photo by the author.

The lawyers who wrote the guidance (as confirmed in a meeting the NYU-AAUP Executive Committee had with them and the provost on September 11) repeatedly said that it was not “their intention” to chill speech on campus. As they and we all know, however, legal standards do not consider “intention” as a defense against criminal findings. In our case at the university, they assured us, if a complaint is filed with the hugely empowered Title VI Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO)—its new director yet to be hired—intent will be subject to a rigorous investigation. For those of us who witnessed last year how OEO was immediately weaponized— predominantly against students of color and precarious faculty who had participated in protests against Israeli aggression in Gaza—through bias hotlines and doxing apparatuses working in high gear to shut down pro-Palestinian activism, the prospect of depending on the OEO for any form of fair hearing is a threat, not a reassurance. Already, at the end of spring term, students who found themselves on the wrong side of a complaint were forced to write self-incriminating apologies and “essays” reflecting on their own failings. Some were then further disciplined, declared persona non grata, while others were barred from graduation ceremonies or, at the Abu Dhabi campus, were summarily disappeared from view and deported. Indeed, as one of our NYU-AAUP colleagues instructed the clueless lawyers and our seemingly mute provost—our absent president is beyond reach—the tragic irony is that OEO was originally federally mandated to protect students and faculty of color who have historically been subjected to racism and bias, while now it is being used as a primary form of hunting down and disciplining students of color for their activism in support of the Palestinian people’s humanity, their right to resist colonization and genocide, and their very existence.

The second encampment, located on NYU’s Greene Street walkway. Photo by author.

The new “guidance” is a disaster for academic freedom and the academic community at large. It has promoted, already in the first weeks of the semester at NYU, antagonisms between and among classmates, students and professors, and colleagues, many of whom now side-eye each other with suspicion, perhaps ready to click on that OEO complaint link. Graduate student instructors and other precarious faculty are in the crosshairs of this new guidance, with few protections other than those from their union, which is being called upon to contest the new labor environment. The academic and social atmosphere on campus is chilling and repressive. Walls and swipe-surveilled security corridors prevent “outsiders”—whether scholars, classmates from other universities, or anyone who even lives in the neighborhood—from accessing the university’s imagined perimeters, just as rent-a-cops are on every corner and at every doorway, ready to follow activists intrepid enough to engage in protest, taking pictures and recording their chanted slogans. Alleged anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic or anti-Arab bias reported to the hotlines is usually rerouted to the Department of Campus Safety and dropped without further action, whereas alleged antisemitic speech is routed directly to OEO or the Office of Student Conduct to be investigated with alacrity and pursued with purpose.

Police amass under NYU faculty housing before storming the second encampment. Photo by author.

So, beyond the boondoggle of semantics and imputed intentions, what this new guidance does is take focus off the disingenuous practices and deeds of our university leadership last spring, when the historically racist NYPD was called onto campus two times, to arrest peacefully protesting students and faculty and then to destroy the communities of learning and living these protesters had painstakingly constructed and theorized. What it does is inaugurate and enable a snitch-culture on campus and beyond. The new guidance reflects neither on what rules our leadership might follow to ensure academic freedom and labor rights on our campus nor on how the securitization of the university goes against every intellectual and social rubric of openness that might characterize a private institution of higher learning in service of the public (as NYU’s empty slogan goes). The intent to shut things down and shut activists up, to shut the public out rather than let it in, to wall off rather than to open up is clear.

This is, of course, not the first attempt at muzzling pro-Palestinian speech at NYU or anywhere in the United States, for that matter. The “Palestine exception” to speech has been operative for quite some time. It is openly enforced by shadowy organizations such as Canary Mission that threaten with violence, and long implicitly and explicitly sustained by universities like mine, which have singled out Palestinian advocacy for unique forms of censure. (For those who may not be aware, Canary Mission assembles and promotes lists of professors and students, many of whom are Jewish, labeling them as antisemitic for their pro-Palestinian activism. Often occupying a relatively sleepy corner of right-wing agitation funded and maintained by the Israeli state, the makers of this list have been newly empowered in recent months.)

NYU has dense entanglements with Tel Aviv University—including its study abroad site in Tel Aviv; it maintains huge investments in weapons manufacturers who profit massively off the death and destruction of Palestine; and the university has a large number of trustees with political, economic, and cultural interests in the Israeli state propaganda machine. One prominent trustee is Birthright founder Michael Steinhardt, who has been indicted repeatedly for trading in stolen antiquities and whose name sullies several NYU schools and buildings. These entanglements, along with NYU’s partnership with such entities as the Academic Engagement Network (another Israeli state front), have constrained and structured how Palestine can and cannot be addressed as a political or educational principle on campus and beyond.

Despite the longevity of the “Palestine exception,” things have changed and intensified this semester. We are operating now under an overt and publicized speech regime with rules crafted by and through a legal team enabled by our university leaders and dictated by external forces we do not know and cannot name. This configuration seems to care for little other than constraining the study of peoples, politics, cultures, and economies whose histories discomfit a powerful few. In protecting the dominance of these few through force, repression, and threat, NYU has capitulated to a dangerous principle while sacrificing the academic mission it proclaims to be upholding.

Rebecca E. Karl is professor of history at New York University and president of the NYU-AAUP chapter.