III. Protect Students and Faculty

CUNY is Complicit in Doxxing and Censorship

Rather than protecting students and faculty who support Palestinians' right to life, CUNY refuses to defend our rights to speech and protest. The administration has decided that our protest, our refusal to accept genocide, is worse than the genocide itself. They have thrown us to the wolves.

When a doxxing truck—a vehicle that drives around with pictures of students and faculty calling them antisemites for advocating for Palestinian life—came to CUNY School of Law, the administration did nothing. Along with the truck came aggressive photographers who took pictures of students just trying to enter the school or just trying to go to the subway station. One of those photographers attempted to physically assault a student, and yet again, nothing from our school. We organized to block the truck and photographers. We formed rapid response teams to help our peers who were being doxxed and harassed. We reassured students who were concerned for their safety.

CUNY's dereliction of duty has created a massive rift in trust between students and administration. Where we should have been able to rely on them to have our backs, we instead know that we only have ourselves. CUNY also refuses to support academic freedom. The administration suppresses the speech of professors by subjecting them to surveillance, administrative hurdles, and firing for simply affirming that Palestinians have a right to life and liberation. CUNY allowed Governor Hochul to cancel a job posting for a professor of Palestinian studies—a blatant authoritarian overreach and a Trumpian maneuver. CUNY has shown us that they are happy to allow their students and faculty to be thrown under the wheels of imperialism simply because of their opposition to genocide and their insistence on Palestinian life and liberation. We demand that CUNY protect students and faculty and stand strong in the face of bigoted intimidation tactics and false accusations of antisemitism. We demand that our professors not be fired and that our students not be harassed and intimidated.

CUNY is Complicit in Detainment and Deportation

CUNY must protect its students from detainment and deportation. As organizations like Canary Mission and Betar hand over lists of students' names to the current administration, CUNY must work to shield students and provide them with resources to remain free to continue their studies. CUNY prides itself on being a safe place for immigrants of all immigration statuses, but fails to protect us from the deportation machine.

For all we know, CUNY may be literally invested in its students' detainment and deportation. Private imprisonment and detention companies like the GEO Group run private detention centers to profit from human suffering. People like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Öztürk, students just like us, are detained in these centers. CUNY refuses to disclose its investment ties—could it be that they, too, are profiting off the suffering of their own students?

We demand that CUNY stand up to the regime and provide robust protections for students and work to uphold their rights to speech, protest, and civil engagement without fear of being kidnapped and disappeared.