N.Y.U. Parent Has an Idea: Deport Hamas Supporters on Campus
Ms. Rand posted the correspondence to her Facebook group, which meant that it was available to the university professors’ association at N.Y.U., which last week published an 18-page report that included some of the emails and demanded that “President Mills immediately desist from further official communications with Rand and MACA.” The group also called for an independent, external review of the university’s Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards and of President Mills’s “coordination” with MACA.
Whether that could actually happen is unclear. In an email, Mr. Beckman said that it had “become common for parents to reach out to university officials, including university presidents, about issues of concern or complaints involving their students, and for universities to try to be responsive.” N.Y.U., he maintained, does not “give differential treatment to students based on a parent’s politics.”
What we have seen clearly over the past few years is that universities do offer preferential treatment to wealthy donors, but Ms. Rand, a workaday lawyer, is neither. “I live in East Harlem,” she told me. “We have two scholarships. I’m paying this tuition myself and I am struggling. I’m not in any way rich.”
But she is an influencer of a kind. What disturbed her, in one sense, about the school’s handling of the December demonstrations is not altogether different from what has unnerved her detractors. It bothered her that footage of her son doing something ostensibly innocuous landed in the hands of campus security. Wasn’t there too much surveillance and policing all around?
How universities respond to this precarious political moment will determine how much faith their constituents maintain in them, faith that in many cases is already deeply fractured from the upheaval of last year. In his closing remarks at a conference on conservatism four years ago, JD Vance, then running for an Ohio Senate seat, said that in order to accomplish certain things “for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.”
On Wednesday, just after President Trump proposed taking over Gaza and developing it as the “Riviera of the Middle East,” Ms. Mills issued a letter to the N.Y.U. community addressing the current national “uncertainty.” Many in the community had hoped for something sooner and perhaps thunderously rebellious. “Whether we are issuing public comment or not, I want to reassure you that we remain keenly focused on sustaining and upholding our community’s values,” Ms. Mills wrote. She went on to report that applications for undergraduate admissions had never been higher.
