When a group of NYU students discussed where to set up their Gaza protest encampment last week, they knew it had to be at Gould Plaza in front of the university’s business school on West 4th Street. “That area was chosen because it’s one of the only outdoor spaces that is private property on NYU’s campus,” said a member of the NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition who asked to be identified only as a Jewish NYU undergraduate because of an ongoing university investigation.
Etta, another student organizer, said they had gotten advice from Columbia’s student organizers about picking the right location. Columbia’s encampment was effective, they thought, because it was centrally located, out in the open, and therefore impossible to ignore. While Washington Square Park is NYU’s de facto quad, the students didn’t think that demonstrating on public property sent a message to the university itself. Students at other schools, like the New School and the Fashion Institute of Technology, had occupied campus buildings, but the NYU students wanted their encampment to be outdoors. “We wanted to make sure that it was somewhere that didn’t put up a wall between the community and NYU,” Etta said.
What happened after they set up their tents at Gould was familiar — NYU demanded students clear out the camp that day, and when they didn’t, administrators requested police intervention. “At this point we consider all protesters occupying Gould Plaza to be trespassers,” the school’s letter to the NYPD stated. That evening, the police showed up in riot gear, tore down the tents, and made 120 arrests. The next day, the school enclosed the plaza with a seven-foot-high plywood wall and plastic traffic barriers. Metal police barricades blocked off the stairs.
Recent coverage of campus occupations like the one at NYU has framed them as spontaneous actions that have strained the relationship between administrations and students. But barricading Gould Plaza wasn’t NYU’s first move to head off protests. Since October, the school has increasingly, even preemptively, shut down access to its once-open spaces. The university that describes itself as “a campus without walls” is now closer to a fortress.
Just days after October 7, NYU roped off the grand staircase in the Kimmel Center for Student Life, historically one of the primary protest locations on campus. The school did not provide any explanation for the closure for months, but administrators later cited “safety concerns” related to unspecified nearby “protest activity.” Students and faculty criticized the move (“’Bring Back Kimmel Stairs’ Movement Unsure Where to Hold Protest,” wrote a campus satire page). Local historian Asad Dandia, who graduated from NYU in 2016, remembered that students regularly protested the rise of Donald Trump on those steps. This was also where students camped to protest NYU’s ties to prisons, hosted a vigil after Russia invaded Ukraine, demanded more abortion coverage, and mourned those killed in the ongoing conflict in Sudan. As one student posted on Reddit, “I don’t like going into Kimmel anymore because we don’t get treated as students … The issue they’re trying to solve is nonexistent.”
In January, NYU restricted access to Bobst, its main library, after students held a pro-Palestinian poetry reading in its lobby; students are now prohibited from checking in guests. The same month, the school also closed off a ground-floor atrium in the Paulson Center, a massive glass structure that contains dorms, classrooms, a gym, and performance spaces. Unlike the Bobst library or the Kimmel student center, Paulson’s atrium is governed by two paragraphs of a 2012 agreement that designates the lobby as open to the public, which NYU conceded in order to appease neighbors disgruntled by the school’s expansion plan. However, the university, citing security concerns, now requires an NYU ID to enter. “The closure of the Paulson Center’s atrium to the public in the name of undefined ‘security issues’ has certainly not created a less prejudiced campus,” a group of Jewish faculty wrote in a letter to university leadership. But the school has told students that the closure is temporary but indefinite, and that the 2012 agreement allows the university to “close the atrium on a temporary basis for maintenance and repair or for security reasons.”
After the April 22 encampment, NYU has added more barriers and checkpoints around campus buildings. But many see the plywood walls at Gould as a particularly blunt symbol of the administration’s response. Within hours of being erected, the barricades were covered with messages and stickers critical of NYU and slogans related to Gaza and Palestine. Jonathan Randall was passing by the wall on Wednesday when he decided to join another man putting up pro-Palestine stickers on what he called NYU’s “apartheid wall” on Wednesday. “Putting up a wall didn’t really do anything,” said a freshman inside the Paulson Center who requested anonymity. “People are still going to protest.”
This reflects the prevailing sentiment on campus, which is critical of the administration’s response — last week, faculty of one of NYU’s colleges passed a vote of no confidence in university president Linda Mills by an overwhelming margin (though the university’s board of trustees reaffirmed their support for Mills). The student paper also published a letter from parents and loved ones of NYU students condemning the school’s response to protesters.
The university recently reversed one of these closures. In late March, it reopened a narrow section of the Kimmel staircase (“It’s Better Than Nothing,” read the student newspaper headline). In an email to students, Martin Dorph, NYU’s executive vice-president, acknowledged that there were “a variety of views about the use of the steps” and said the university had unilaterally decided to grant the demands of, as Dorph put it, “others in our community who, for their own sense of safety, prefer the stairs remain closed.” But he also said that the majority of the staircase had to remain closed for safety reasons, stating that the Kimmel staircase as designed was too steep, didn’t have enough handrails, and was inaccessible (even though there are four elevators just around the corner from the stairs).
However, in response to the students in the encampment, who, like their peers at campuses across the country, are demanding that the school disclose and divest any holdings in funds associated with Israel, as well as close its Tel Aviv program, the university has doubled down; on Thursday, school representatives announced it would not divest and reiterated its commitment to the Tel Aviv site.
Shut out of Gould Plaza, student protesters have simply moved on. On Friday, the NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition set up another encampment, this time on a public walkway between Houston and Bleecker Streets outside NYU’s Paulson Center. Riot police were briefly mobilized, but organizers negotiated with NYU to take down their tents — sleeping instead under tarps and blankets — in order to stay. Although the new encampment is smaller and less visible than the one at Gould Plaza, up to 100 students remain inside days later, and hundreds more gather for occasional rallies. The school now threatens those remaining overnight with unspecified “disciplinary processes.”
“We have fought the battle for public space over and over and over again,” said Ryna Workman, a coalition organizer and law student, on the first night of the new encampment. “As NYU continues to close down open outdoor spaces for protests, this is the last space left.”