In the final weeks of the school year, what is often a celebratory time for the City University of New York’s (CUNY) 275,000 students looked far from familiar.
“It’s a tense climate,” one faculty member at Brooklyn College who asked to remain anonymous warned about the sharp increase in public safety officers “all over campus.”
The increased security presence across CUNY campuses marks the aftermath of the April 30 police raid on the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment, where NYPD arrested more than 170 protesters and severely brutalized, pepper sprayed, and injured many others.
Hundreds of police officers descended onto CUNY campuses for a 24/7 area monitor of the campus after the encampment was first erected on April 25. A “doxxing truck” displaying pro-Israeli messages was seen parading across Brooklyn College and Hunter College campuses. Meanwhile, students at City College of New York (CCNY)—the encampment site—have faced routine threats of suspension at nearly every turn.
“There’s a sense of impending doom almost, that people just are worried that we’re turning into a fascist government in which we’re not able to voice our opinions and where we might get punished if we do voice opinions that don’t match what the people in power believe in,” said Kevin Nadal, a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Despite the growing surveillance, students and faculty have escalated their demands to the CUNY administration. Since NYPD’s raid, organizers have staged sit-ins, faculty meeting takeovers, building “de-occupations,” and silent protests across CUNY campuses.
Protesters at the encampment made five demands of the CUNY administration: divest CUNY’s $8.5 million of investments in weaponry, technology, and manufacturing aiding Israel’s genocide in Gaza, boycott all academic trips to Israel, release a solidarity statement affirming the rights of Palestinians, ban NYPD and Israeli military from all 25 CUNY campuses, and return to a tuition-free CUNY.
“This encampment was a testament to the power of resistance, so I want the world to hear us loud and clear. Our resistance does not end here,” said Sara, a student organizer and president of the Palestine Solidarity Alliance at Hunter College, who asked to withhold her last name for privacy.
“In fact, we’re just getting started.”
Years of repression, administrative silence, and a $4 million security contract
Home to a majority BIPOC and first-generation student population, CUNY is often touted as the “people’s university,” but organizers fear the university’s plans to militarize its campuses further could jeopardize the very students they claim to protect.
Since the encampment launched, the university has spent millions to beef up its security measures. CUNY’s board of trustees recently authorized a $4 million emergency procurement contract with Strategic Security Corp, a private surveillance firm with business ties to Israel, that will bring an additional 100 security officers to the City College campus. The resolution also accounts for an additional $2 million for “security equipment, fencing, emergency support materials, and other related products” as needed.
This multi-million dollar cash injection comes on the heels of heavy criticism of the administration to fund and repair the university’s notoriously crumbling infrastructure. The hashtag #CrumblingCUNY on X yields countless tweets about leaking ceilings, mice poop and dead rats, and destroyed bathroom stalls.
Pro-Palestine protesters planned to express their outrage during the May 13 board of trustees public hearing, but at the last minute, it was moved online and closed to registrants already signed up to testify. The meeting was the final public meeting where students and faculty could testify before the board met again on May 20.
Several dozen protesters held a “people’s hearing” that afternoon just minutes from where the board of trustees meeting was set to occur. Roughly 20 NYPD officers were seen on standby, circling the hearing for hours from a distance.
“The board of trustees is mistaken if they think that we will let them continue spending our wages, our pensions, our tuition on the Israeli settler-colonial genocide,” testified Corinna Mullin, an adjunct professor of political science at John Jay College who was arrested alongside students at the encampment. “We will not stop until our demands are met.”
While media coverage of student encampments has exploded in recent weeks, organizers insist that CUNY’s repressive tactics are nothing new.
“We’ve been rallying, sitting in, doing direct actions, attending senate meetings, emailing, meeting for over 200 days, and we’ve been getting ignored nonstop,” Sara said about her group’s efforts at Hunter College.
“We’ve sent countless emails which receive no response or receive bullshit responses.”
harnoor singh, a student organizer at CUNY School of Law, agrees. He urged that the university’s most dangerous response has been not saying anything at all.
“We’re watching students in Palestine be massacred, to see not a single university left there … and to see that CUNY is complicit,” he said.
“It’s hard not to draw these parallels of being a student and seeing students in Palestine not able to go to school, not even be able to have the next moment promised to them, and not able to have the same basic dignity that every human is owed.”
Last fall, singh watched his own school quietly ban student speakers from the 2024 commencement agenda after two Muslim women spoke about the liberation of Palestinians during previous commencements.
Alumni have expressed that they, too, were met with silence as students years ago. In an op-ed in Al Jazeera, CUNY alumni Hebh Jamal, Jihad Karajah, and Musabika Nabiha reflected on years of negligence and betrayal from their own administration dating back to 2018.
“As alumni and organisers,” they wrote in the op-ed, “we can share with students our experiences of past demands being ignored; of the Israeli Occupation Forces being welcomed on campus long before October 7; of exploratory committees and meetings with administration wasting organisers’ time while Palestinians die.”
A promise to “keep escalating”
Still, organizers have kept all eyes on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, a death toll experts argue is grossly underestimated.
On May 14, protesters “de-occupied” the CUNY Graduate Center building for more than three hours until they negotiated with the school’s interim president to send their demands to Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez. Protesters renamed the school’s library the “Al-Aqsa University Library” during their sit-in in honor of the Gaza City university destroyed by the Israeli military.
“We will keep escalating. We will make their lives hell,” shouted Miriam, a CUNY organizer who requested to only use her first name, to a sea of supporters outside the building.
Students have also lawyered up.
In the last two months, students at three different campuses—Hunter College, Queens College, and CUNY Law—filed Title VI civil rights complaints against their own schools for anti-Palestinian discrimination, alleging that CUNY systematically canceled Palestine-related events and speakers due to “safety concerns,” sent campus officers to monitor Muslim Student Association spaces, including prayer rooms, and refused to take appropriate action to protect students and faculty from doxxing and harassment.
When asked if Brooklyn College had taken any action against the doxxing truck sighted outside campus during finals week, a CUNY spokesperson told Prism that “[the truck] was on public streets where the college has no jurisdiction.”
Many argue that CUNY’s response is shifting public opinion, not only on the university but also on the role of higher education more broadly.
“This has radically changed how we think about education … we need to rethink how universities engage and teach and create dialogue,” said Michelle Fine, a distinguished professor of critical psychology at the Graduate Center. “If universities don’t do that, who’s gonna do it? We have to keep fighting for those difficult dialogues for what could be.”
As graduation ceremonies kick off, notable speakers, including Deborah Archer, the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, have pulled out of speaking arrangements with CUNY in light of recent events.
“I cannot, as a leader of the nation’s oldest guardian of free expression, participate in an event in which students believe that their voices are being excluded,” said Archer, who was slated to speak at CUNY Law’s commencement ceremony this year.
Thousands of people have signed a statement in solidarity with the encampment’s five demands and urged that all charges against protesters be dropped, along with more than 800 CUNY alumni making similar demands to the administration. Of the 170 protesters arrested at City College, 28 still face class D felony charges, whereas those arrested at Columbia University were handed far less serious charges.
Despite these critiques, the university’s administration has stood by its response to the encampment, calling it “a difficult decision.”
As summer looms, CUNY organizers have made it clear they have no plans to slow down.
“You will hear our voices. You will find us in these streets and educational institutions and workplaces, in the media, in the halls of power. You will find us in your face,” said Sara. “We are no longer asking for your meetings or your acknowledgment. We are demanding that you divest, or we will not rest until every inch of Palestine is liberated from the river to the sea under any means necessary.”
‘We will keep escalating’: The aftermath of CUNY’s pro-Palestine crackdown is a story from Prism, a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our work today.
