V. CUNY Must Condemn the Gaza Genocide

Additional comments:

We are not mad about this Dean's performance, just disappointed. We hoped that she would uplift the mission of CUNY in her time here: “Law in the Service of Human Needs.” As we watched videos of Palestinians mourning their children, searching frantically for their friends, and removing rubble with their bare hands to desperately search for their loved ones, a teary-eyed Dean Setty told us we were “interrupting” everyday school governance by centering the genocide at faculty meetings. When a Zionist doxxing van appeared at the law school, Dean Setty watched and did nothing while students put their bodies on the line to protect the identities of those that the Zionists sought to harass and target. When the NYPD brutalized and arrested CUNY students at the CUNY encampments in 2024 and 2025, Dean Setty stayed silent. Dean Setty's scholarship about the “national security” justification for politically targeted violence did nothing to prevent her from acting exactly like the politicians she critiques in her work—as someone who acts out of political self-interest and without the decency to uplift the political will for change.

Dean Setty, you are watching the genocide of an entire people, and you have done nothing. You have seen your students harassed, doxxed, and targeted by the public and the NYPD, and you remain silent. We will always remember you as the Dean who stood by and watched as your students upheld the mission of this school.

Suddha Setty, you failed this class.

We know that the report cards for Deans across the CUNY system are no different. The Deans at every CUNY campus are committed to enforcing the interests of the Board of Trustees. This is apparent by the student and the faculty representatives' merely symbolic presence on the Board—neither has a meaningful vote. These Trustees are all businesspeople with little to no experience or interest in education. For example, Robert Mujica serves as the Executive Director of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, which has devastated Puerto Ricans' living conditions. And they're all un-democratically appointed by various state actors.

We understand these failures exist within a larger trend of systemic degradation of academia. Public schools, like our own, have been especially vulnerable to the political whims of the state. Budget cuts, tuition hikes, lack of tenure tracks available for professors, the crumbling campus buildings, and the rise of austerity have all torn away at the fabric of what it means to provide access to education. This is particularly true for the programs built for New Yorkers: to bring poor, working-class, racialized, and underrepresented communities out of socioeconomic oppression. CUNY Law's Equity Line is one of many programs across the CUNY system that is constantly threatened with budget cuts. Some, such as the SEEK program, the Haywood Burns Chair, and the Black Male Initiative, have already faced significant cuts. Students attend CUNY School Law and faculty choose to work here because of its mission. We know that to be lawyers, and people, who serve in the public interest, we must hold our alma mater to the high standards to which we hold ourselves to provide our communities the attorneys they deserve.