Two and a half weeks after swastikas were graffitied on doors at the Kerrey Hall residence, The New School and law enforcement officials are still unable to provide answers, leaving the students who were directly affected feeling angry and afraid.
“You don’t even need to be Jewish, you just have to be a decent human being to know a swastika is offensive,” said Jess Williams, a Kerrey Hall resident whose door was hit.
“We went into this knowing the school was going to try and bury it… We are prepared to not shut up about it until something gets done,” she added.
On Nov. 12, students from four dorm room suites on Kerrey Hall’s 15th floor woke up to swastikas drawn on their doors. The students are all women and either Jewish, LGBTQ, or people of color.
The NYPD’s Hate Crime Task Force has been investigating the case, but no arrests have been made, a spokesman said on Dec 2.
University spokesman Scott Gargan said the head of security, Tom Illiceto, is handling the internal investigation, but that he had no updates on it as of Dec. 2. Instead, he referred a New School Free Press reporter to an email sent to the entire New School on Nov. 16. In that email, the school officials promised to increase security around campus, but didn’t describe how they were investigating the vandalism.
“There has been radio-silence for two weeks since it occurred,” Nina Houghton, another resident whose dorm was vandalized, told the NSFP.
University officials’ relative silence on the anti-Semitic vandalism stands in contrast to their vocal outrage on the day of the incident.
That day, New School President David Van Zandt sent a university-wide email and condemned the hate crime in a tweet, “This is against every value of @TheNewSchool. We are taking immediate and appropriate action.”
From the looks of it, not much has come from those “immediate and appropriate actions” he tweeted about.
Right after the incident, Williams and her two roommates, a photography junior, Sam Lichtenstein and a fashion design junior, Lizzie Katz, met with Van Zandt.
The only conversation Williams has had with a representative of the university since then was with Gene Puno-Deleon from the school’s office of student conduct on Nov 15.
Recently, Williams had a conversation with her floor’s RA, who stopped by her room to see how she and her roommates were doing.
“It was nice. It sort of, maybe, seems like someone cares,” Williams said.
However, because of the relative silence from school leaders, students are becoming increasingly worried. Williams said she speaks for her and her roommates when she says they don’t feel safe in their own living space.
“One of my roommates carries a knife with her now,” Houghton said, expressing similar feelings of unsafety after being targeted.
As a result, they would like to see more than a promise of increased security, such as concrete measures like cameras in hallways and more training for guards.
“We will not feel safe until there are cameras in these hallways,” Williams said.
“Cameras a must, I think,” agreed Houghton.
But after speaking with her RA, Williams believes the school won’t be able to install any cameras until the summer, if at all.
“That’s not acceptable. The school has the money,” she said.
The students also politely demanded security across campus be retrained. “It’s pretty evident by the way this was handled that RAs or security aren’t really trained in how to proficiently handle a hate crime,” Williams said.
Williams said another student, Snezhana Paderina, reported the swastikas to a security guard about 2 a.m. on Nov. 12, but they didn’t do anything until it was reported again at 11am.
“I don’t think they ever thought something would happen here.”
Williams also spoke about the school´s weak security in general. She explained that on Saturday Nov. 26, when she came back from the break, her dad was let into the building without having to show an ID. “I was always appreciative of that, but now that this has happened to me I think ‘No, you need to be signing everyone in,’” she said. It didn’t help that she went into Lang the other day and noticed the security desk vacant. “It’s really not comforting.”
If the school doesn’t know who did this yet, the girls at least demand a message from the university letting them know that nothing has come up. The school’s lack of response has made the past weeks feel longer and more painful for the students, they said.
“The feeling of waking up every morning and checking the door, or looking after me to see if someone is watching, that’s gone away, [but] not fully,” Williams said. “The feeling of not having your questions answered, not knowing what’s going on is like the worst feeling in the world.”