AAUP-NYU Report: NYU’s President Mills Interfered With Student Disciplinary Process at Request of Islamophobic Anti-Palestinian Group
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NEW YORK, January 31, 2025 – AAUP-NYU has issued a report regarding correspondence between NYU President Linda Mills and Elizabeth Rand, the founder of a controversial anti-Palestinian group, Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism (MACA). The report concludes that this correspondence gravely threatens faculty governance, academic freedom, and freedom of speech on NYU’s campus, and reflects a gross corruption of the disciplinary process at NYU and other institutions that MACA regularly pressures. Among the report’s findings are:
- President Mills interfered with NYU’s disciplinary process specifically at Rand’s request, having a conduct hearing for a particular NYU student preemptively dropped.
- Inappropriate coordination and collusion between Rand, Mills, and senior members of the NYU administration continued over a period of months, regarding matters of student discipline, faculty arrest, and campus protest more generally.
- After the arrest of NYU faculty and other community members at a pro-Palestine protest at Bobst Library on December 12, Ariel Ennis, a senior advisor to Mills, wrote personally to Rand to assure her that “we have cleared the disruption and arrests were made,” adding, “never hesitate to reach out in the future.”
- In stark contrast to NYU leadership’s treatment of Rand, student activists have been requesting to meet with President Mills since the fall of 2023 and Mills has refused even to acknowledge their requests. They have instead been subjected to disciplinary action and arrest, including the mass arrests at Gould Plaza.
- For over a year, Mills has also refused to meet or even to communicate with AAUP-NYU about vital issues of academic freedom, campus protest, faculty governance, and freedom of speech.
- Following the Trump administration’s Islamophobic executive order targeting foreign students and faculty, Rand has called for the deportation of non-US citizen student and faculty pro-Palestine protesters, whom she asserts are supporters of terrorism. In a recent online post, Rand encouraged her 60,000+ social media followers to report students to ICE.
- The collusion between Rand and top NYU leadership epitomizes a broader pattern and practice of anti-Palestinian discrimination and disparate treatment on NYU’s campus, including in the approach of the Office of Student Conduct to student protest.
In light of these revelations, the executive committee of AAUP-NYU is demanding that President Mills immediately desist from further communications with Rand and MACA, and is calling for an independent, external review of the Office of Student Conduct and of Mills’s coordination with MACA.
AAUP-NYU also reiterates its previous demand that the administration rescind all student suspensions for the December 2024 student protests at Bobst.
Press Inquiries: Zachary Samalin, AAUP Member-At Large, aaup.nyu@gmail.com
