What’s the deal with the exclamation point after Take Back NYU?

Like Earth First!, the exclamation point is part of our name, meant to inspire and convey action. Pretend it’s attached the “U” at the end of “NYU” and never drop it, or else. At the end of sentences, it’s like this: Take Back NYU!.

What do you want budget disclosure for, anyway?

1. Tuition increases: tuition keeps rising above the rate of inflation. We need to know why.
2. Sustainability: how NYU spends its money matters to the environment.
3. Sexism and racism: secrecy protects discrimination in employee pay.
4. Genocide and war profiteering: we need to make sure NYU’s endowment doesn’t support companies that perpetuate war and genocide.
5. Fair wages: all NYU employees deserve a living wage. We need to make sure they get it
6. Animal research: students deserve to know if our tuition supports animal research many consider cruel.
7. Financial aid: it still sucks.
8. Expansion: our tuition dollars fund NYU’s rapid expansion. We deserve to know how our tuition is affecting the community around NYU.
9. Abu Dhabi: NYU-AD is a very risky investment, and is being constructed by a government known for its abuse of human rights
10. Corruption: secrecy protects people with something to hide.

Are there any precedents for budget disclosure?

Yes! Every public institution, including public universities, are required by law to fully disclose their operating budgets. Additionally, the trend in the global economic market has been towards full disclosure. Companies realize that transparency leads to good (i.e. profitable) business practices.

What about precedents for having a student on a university’s board of trustees?

Cornell, Washington University, Duke, Clarion University, Indiana University, California State Universities, Ohio University, University of Illinois, Western Washington University, University of New England, the State University of New York, American University, San Jose State University, Palo Verde, University of Massachusetts, Miami University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Ball State University, University System of New Hampshire, Millersville University, Kean University, and Rutgers all have at least one student on the board (and those are just the ones we know about).

Who will this student on the board of trustees be?

That’s for you to decide. We think this person should be democratically elected.

What exactly is the difference between Students Creating Radical Change and Take Back NYU!?

Students Creating Radical Change (SCRC; say it “skirk”) is a non-hierarchical student group committed to social justice, focused on NYU as an institution that embodies many of the broader social and economic issues confronting our world. The word “radical” in our name derives from “radix,” meaning “root” - we believe that true social change comes from addressing issues at their roots. We pursue this in a variety of ways: this year, SCRC produced the Disorientation Guide and has organized an event on the How’s and Why’s of Political Prisoner Support, along with a lecture by Dylcia Pagán. In previous years, SCRC led the successful Campaign to Stop Killer Coke and supported GSOC during their strike.

SCRC began the Take Back NYU! campaign in 2007 and has hosted many of the coalition’s events this year. Regardless, Take Back NYU! is now a coalition composed of nearly two dozen groups; many of the students who work on Take Back NYU! are not SCRC members and do not share the radical beliefs of SCRC - everyone likes it better this way.

How can I get in contact with you?

Shoot us an email at takebacknyu(AT)gmail(DOT)com.

What is your policy on comments?

• We do not approve comments that are racist, sexist, homophobic, violent, or otherwise fall under the banner of hate speech. While we take seriously criticism and appreciate thoughtful critique, we will not post your comment if you are passing judgment based on someone’s attractiveness, what you perceive someone’s religion to be, what genitals you think are between their legs, and to whom you think they’re sexually attracted. Threats of sexual or physical violence will also not be tolerated. These things are irrelevant to the matters at hand.
• We have a spam filter. Sometimes legitimate comments - especially if they have links in them - are caught by it. We get up to 500 comments a day, it sometimes takes time to go through spam filters.
• We have to approve all of our comments. While about six of us regularly sign in to approve comments, it might as well be a full-time job. Thus, sometimes, especially if you post at a bad time, it will take a few hours for your comment to get approved and appear on the website. Worry not, it will get posted so long as it isn’t hate speech nor mistakenly caught for spam.

“Asking for amnesty shows that these protesters are cowards. Real activists are willing to sacrifice and take risks for their beliefs.”

These students DID take enormous risks for this cause. No one who walked into that cafeteria said “I’m only doing this if I don’t get in trouble.” On the contrary, they took a risk for this cause and because the NYU administration refused to negotiate, may pay a big price.  At the same time, they didn’t set out to be martyrs, either. Asking for amnesty was a logical move for anyone who wished to continue to be an active part of the NYU community to continue to make this school a better place.

“Your demands are all over the board/What does Gaza have to do with NYU and transparency?”

The demands are all centered directly around Take Back NYU!’s primary demands of budget/endowment disclosure and student representation on the board of trustees.

For example, we demanded divestment from war profiteers, because many students are concerned (with good cause, given the what we know about investments at similar schools that disclose parts of the endowment) that our endowment funds companies that profit from the war in Iraq, support genocide in Darfur, and propagate violence and oppression across the globe and here in New York.

We asked for a reassessment of the Coke ban based on first-hand knowledge (namely, presence in the senate proceedings) that the decision to life the ban was not made democratically. A lot of students don’t realize that in the University Senate, only 22 of the 80 or so voting senators are students. In other all-student bodies, like the Gallatin and CAS student councils, elected student representatives overwhelmingly voted to maintain the ban. In the University Senate, despite a lot of misinformation churned out by opponents to the ban, most of the students voted to keep the ban in place.

We asked for public access to Bobst because NYU is not a truly private university. We are one of the largest real estate owners in New York City and we don’t pay taxes on any of it.  We receive federal grants for research and financial aid and special projects. We have enormous impact on the city, and anyone who has talked to the hundreds of angry Greenwich Village residents who show up to our few open forums or families in the Lower East Side and Brooklyn who fear displacement due to our constant expansion, knows that we are not a well-liked neighbor. Some of Bobst is already open to the public (the Tamiment library) because NYU and the city recognize that unique resources such as this should not be reserved exclusively for those who can afford $50,000 a year. Granting access to Bobst would be a great way for us to give a little back to those from whom we’re constantly taking, and to build better relations with the community around us.

As for the Palestine demands, I’m going to speak just for myself here, because although all of Take Back NYU! shares similar principles, I’m not sure that everyone is thinking about it the same way I am. I demanded that our surpluses be donated to the Islamic University of Gaza (as opposed to any other impoverished school) because our school very likely helped destroy it. Although we obviously can’t say for certain where our money is invested while the endowment holdings remain secret, it’s a fair bet that some of it is invested in companies that support the Israeli military. The chairman of the investment committee on NYU’s board of trustees, Michael Steinhardt, is an avid supporter of pro-zionist causes that condone and perpetuate Israeli violence and oppression. Our school is about to embark on an abroad site with a school that has been academically sanctioned by institutions around the globe for its complicacy in Israel’s violence. Some people were commenting that we were being too one-sided on this issue, but my school didn’t pay for Hamas’s rockets. I read about the violence in Gaza with absolute horror, and there is no way I want my school, this school that I love so dearly, to sacrifice its principles for the sake of a better investment return. I want to see all of our endowment investments, because I want to know if I am complicit in the deaths of children, the destruction of schools, and the brutal blockade. We can’t undo the damage that’s been done to Palestine, but if NYU’s money in the smallest way contributed to the destruction, the least we can do is to help repair it.

“You should have gone through the proper channels and tried to get support from other students before you took this sort of confrontational, illegal action.”

Occupation was NOT the first thing TBNYU! did to try and get budget disclosure and student empowerment. In fact, it wasn’t the second or third or eightieth thing we did. The fact that after two years of relentlessly trying to be heard through “proper channels”, TBNYU! Was forced to resort to occupation, exemplifies all of the things we fight against. We gathered petitions and student group support. We sent emails and hand delivered letters to the administration. We engaged students in constructive dialogue about democracy, transparency, and accountability with creative events. We were active participants in all of the President’s town halls. We even elected a Senator (from the largest NYU college) to the University Senate on a Take Back NYU! Platform. We were at best, ignored, and at worst, belittled and mocked by President Sexton and other administrators.

After two years of really hard work, it took 40 hours of occupation to finally get a (possible) meeting with anyone in the administration. Trying to work through the system these past years proved exactly what we had all suspected: our system is broken. Take Back NYU! exists because we want to fix it. If NYU open democratic channels for concerned students to make their voices heard, this occupation would have been entirely unnecessary. But electing 22 students to a restrictively bureaucratic body that can only make recommendations is NOT democracy. Town hall meetings where students are lectured instead of listened to is NOT democracy. An administration that for two years, ignores requests by a coalition of over 20 student groups to sit down for a dialogue about serious concerns is NOT democracy. And responding to a peaceful protest with suspensions and evictions from housing before any judicial proceedings is definitely NOT democracy. Take Back NYU! exists because of this. We believe that what NYU needs is real democracy, and that it will be a much better place to learn and teach and work when students have reclaimed power over our University.

If you all hate NYU so much, why don’t you just transfer?

Don’t be silly. For myriad reasons, we all love this school. Haven’t you ever heard the phrase “dissent is patriotic”? Same thing applies. The students who occupied Kimmel cared so much about NYU that they risked their records and futures to make it a better place. Most students sacrifice a great deal to be at NYU, but the occupiers have sacrificed further to make NYU even better, so that other kids might have an opportunity to learn here, and so we all have to sacrifice a little less. Who would do that for a school they hate?