NYPD Assault on CUNY Gaza Encampment Shows Why We Need Sanctuary Universities

On May 13, UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher delivered a harrowing account of the genocide in Gaza. Before he started, he asked the audience “to reflect for a moment on what action we will tell future generations we each took to stop the 21st-century atrocity to which we bear daily witness in Gaza.”

As has been the case before, students across the world are leading the way. For over a year, from California to New York, college students have resorted to different forms of protest — encampments, walkouts, calls to sanction, boycott and divest, even hunger strikes — to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza and rightly express their anger and horror in the face of these human rights violations. Encampments, walkouts, boycott campaigns and hunger strikes — these are all popular nonviolent protest tactics that civil society has used before.

I was born in Chile during Augusto Pinochet’s infamous civic-military dictatorship. I have written elsewhere about the inventive practices Chilean civil society conceived to denounce the dictatorship’s forced disappearances, acts of torture, and other human rights violations. One strategy devised in the late 1970s by the Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared to make their plight more visible was to chain themselves to the fences of prominent institutional buildings in downtown Santiago (the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean headquarters building, the Courts of Justice, and others) with photographs of their beloved ones pinned to their chests. Chained, they shouted, chanted and posed for the cameras — freelance photojournalists were always alerted about these planned actions. I thought about this last month, when I read that a group of Jewish students had chained themselves to the fence of Columbia University to protest the illegal arrest of graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who was kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on March 8, right outside his university housing.

On May 8, City University of New York (CUNY) students and members of the CUNY community staged a demonstration at Brooklyn College to protest against the genocide in Gaza, which has been ongoing for over 600 days now and where, according to reports by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification System, over 71,000 children below the age of 5 are experiencing acute malnutrition, half a million people are being starved to death and the whole population is on the brink of famine. As part of the demonstration, students erected an encampment on the East Quad of the campus.

I did not personally witness what happened at Brooklyn College, but in the last few days, I have viewed dozens of videos and photographs, read written accounts by participants in the encampment and talked to colleagues who were present that day and witnessed the police repression in the evening. I also read an email that Brooklyn College President Michelle J. Anderson sent to the Brooklyn College community on May 9. As a CUNY worker and tenured faculty, I feel compelled to respond to the draconian measures the CUNY administration has adopted to suppress our students’ constitutional rights in this moment.

In her May 9 letter, President Anderson indicates that CUNY “has a zero-tolerance policy for encampments” and quotes the Brooklyn College Events Protocol, which states, “semi-permanent, or permanent structures – such as stages, booths, canopies, tents, bouncy houses or other party rentals, or any constructions – are prohibited unless an organization obtains explicit permission.” She then adds, “protesters here had no permission to erect tents on the East Quad.” This same argument was rehearsed by college administrators to justify the violent clearing of students’ Gaza solidarity encampments a year ago.

This kind of reasoning raises the question: What are the costs, the material consequences for our students, of so-called “zero-tolerance policies”? Last spring, fellow colleagues argued that the prosecution of the CUNY community members who participated in the City College (CCNY) Gaza solidarity encampment last spring could set a dangerous “legal precedent for prosecuting pro-Palestinian activism across the U.S.” Given the current context, when immigration laws are being weaponized and a simple arrest can lead to being caged indefinitely, and even deported with no due process, the criminalization of college encampments becomes even more dangerous.

The “Henderson Rules” are a body of university regulations adopted by the CUNY Board of Trustees in 1969, partly in response to the students protests at CCNY, and they have been amended twice since then. The first two paragraphs mention the word “sanctuary” repeatedly to describe the university as a space where academic freedom has been traditionally honored and vigilantly guarded. Henderson Rules also state that this principle “cannot be invoked by those who would subordinate intellectual freedom to political ends, or who violate the norms of conduct established to protect that freedom.”

“Sanctuary” is a capacious concept, an aspirational principle that even today “remains unbounded by a legal definition,” as author A. Naomi Paik suggests in Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary. This means, among other things, that sanctuary is not a given; it must be enacted and practiced. One of the principles of sanctuary is “do no harm.” I wonder, then, who inflicted harm on whom on May 8? I do not think we can say CUNY is a sanctuary of academic freedom if college administrators think it is justified to call on agents of the NYPD Strategic Response Group to violently crash a student-led protest comprising a few tents, Palestinian flags, posters and chants denouncing a heinous genocide. While watching a video of a protestor holding a Palestinian flag being punched in the face and shoved to the ground by several agents, I wondered, who is subordinating intellectual freedom to political ends here? Who is violating the norms of conduct?

In the past few months, activists, scholars and media outlets have been drawing parallels between the forced disappearances carried out by civic-military dictatorships in Latin America during the ‘70s and ‘80s and the kidnappings and deportations ICE is carrying out under the current Trump administration. This is not the only parallel to be drawn. As some readers may know, under Pinochet’s dictatorship, the armed forces took control of all universities — military officials were appointed rectors and university administrators; university faculty and staff were suspended or dismissed; and scores of students were expelled, kidnapped, tortured, and, in some cases, disappeared or executed. This is a cautionary tale. The last thing we need is for universities to become the police force or the armed extension of an administration that does not seem concerned with hiding its authoritarian and fascist traits.

After the Trump administration stated that it would ignore the sanctuary status of sensitive locations (including hospitals, houses of worship, courts, schools and universities), workers organized to demand that their administrators put clear procedures in place to prevent ICE agents from entering buildings and sensitive premises without judicial warrants. I was involved in the efforts to make sure my campus adopted such measures. But, of course, this is not enough. Pledges to not let ICE agents inside a college campus mean nothing if the next minute the police can be called onto campus to suppress students demonstrating.

In this moment, what we need is a sanctuary university that is willing to defend its community members’ constitutional rights, including their right to free assembly. A sanctuary university that is ready to protect them against any authoritarian measure, not a university that exposes its students to more danger by enabling the presence of immigration enforcement agents or local police on campus, as happened at Brooklyn College.