Students and demonstrators marching for National Students for Justice in Palestine’s Day of Action were met by 35-40 security guards and New York Police Department (NYPD) officers outside Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall at 66 W. 12th St.
Yesterday, as New School students and other march members listened to speakers outside the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts building, five NYPD officers formed a line and stood directly in front of the building’s entrance.
The day prior, an email was sent to students alerting them to the possible demonstration on campus and changes to the security measures that would be taken at several buildings, including New School ID checks, possible police presence, no-guest policy, and the requirement that students show their faces to match their IDs.
Guards were positioned at every door on the 12th Street side of the building, which was not originally on the list of buildings with additional security, checking the IDs of students who attempted to enter the buildings and monitoring that students were not loitering in the lobby, including students who were taking pictures of the security measures and ongoing demonstration outside.
NYPD officers line West 12th street opposite the Eugene Lang building.
As some members of the crowd arrived in front of the entrance on 12th Street, footage posted to Instagram stories by a demonstrator showed a TNS student being arrested on the other side of the Lang building at 65 W. 11th St.
The same footage shows New School President Joel Towers walking out of the building behind the arrested student and NYPD officers, saying, “There’s nothing I can do,” in response to students asking him to intervene and stop the arrest.
Later in the evening, President Towers sent a school-wide email claiming that “[He] arrived there after the arrest, and despite efforts to de-escalate the situation, [he] was unable to prevent the student from being taken to the precinct.” Towers emphasized that the protest was largely peaceful after the arrest.
After the arrest, the 11th Street entrance was closed to students trying to enter and exit the building for any reason.
“[Police presence] makes me feel deeply unsafe,” Natalie Makhijani said, a student at Lang, “Am I paying to have teachers, or am I paying to have a bunch of cops and rent-a-cops just all around me all the time for no reason, glaring at me as I go into class?”
Another Lang student, Francesca Levine, added that the police presence was “very uncomfortable and unnecessary.”
In an official statement, The New School said they had no involvement in the decision of the NYPD to be present outside of school buildings and were not involved in any NYPD decision-making.
However, some NYPD officers were seen inside the 11th St. Lang building yesterday, and since the building is considered private property, NYPD officers must be given permission by university administrators to enter it.
Prior to arriving at The New School, the march had originally started at the Fashion Institute of Technology, meeting with other schools such as the School of Visual Arts and New York University along the way. The group ended their march at Lang.
Members of the march chanted, “We demand that the New School publicly acknowledge Israel as a settler colony…That The New School uphold the agreement to drop all charges, which was a condition for ending last year’s Gaza solidarity encampment … That The New School fully divest its endowment from thirteen arms and surveillance manufacturers with ties to the Israeli military!”
Rabbi Dovid Feldman from Neturei Karta, an Orthodox Jewish group that opposes Zionism, gave a speech: “Myself as a Jewish rabbi, my colleagues attending here, and many Jewish people, here in the United States and the world, and in occupied Palestine, are embarrassed when all of this is being done supposedly in our name.”
Once the protest had ended, students decided to go to One Police Plaza to show support for the arrested student. The officers dispersed around 5 p.m., and the student was released at around 6 p.m., according to a story post published on the TNS SJP Instagram.
This is a developing story.