GSOC Responds to NYU’s Updated NDAH ‘Enforcement Guidelines’
On August 25th, the University issued new ‘guidance’ for the enforcement of its non-discrimination and anti-harassment (NDAH) policy which effectively codifies the political ideology of Zionism as a protected identity under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. In characterizing “‘Zionist’ as a substitute or codeword for Jew or Israeli,” the administration conflates Judaism and Zionism in a way that is itself anti-Semitic insofar as it erases the long history of Jewish anti-Zionism and reduces an ancient religious tradition to a nineteenth-century settler colonial project of European origin. The dubious nature of this advisory is testified to by the defensive and dissembling ‘clarification’ issued by University spokesperson John Beckman just two days after the original update.
Besides being a travesty of intellectual and moral reasoning, this step is an unprecedented assault by the University on the constitutional rights of students and student-workers to free speech. GSOC also strongly suspects that this new ‘guidance’ conflicts with the provisions of our Collective Bargaining Agreement proscribing unilateral changes in working conditions insofar as it seeks to censure speech heretofore permissible and, indeed, necessary in the classroom. We therefore join NYU students, faculty, and the wider media in condemning this dangerous and tendentious conflation of principled political speech with bigotry. We remain steadfast in our advocacy on behalf of students facing hostile campus work environments, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab sentiment, and anti-Semitism. So, too, do we stand by our commitment to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), made in response to a call by Palestinian trade unions to their international peers and affirmed overwhelmingly by a membership vote in 2016 and again in 2023. As always, we encourage any student experiencing harassment or persecution in the workplace to reach out to us at gsoc@2110uaw.org.
