JVP Academic Council Condemns Brooklyn College’s Violent Response to Peaceful Student Protests

2 June 2025

President Michelle Anderson, Brooklyn College
Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Brooklyn College
Board of Trustees Chair, Evan Silverstein, Brooklyn College

NY State Governor Kathy Hochul
NYC Mayor Eric Adams

cc: Committee A of the American Association of University Professors

Dear President Michelle Anderson and Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez:

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) joins the CUNY Professional Staff Congress (PSC) in condemning the CUNY administration’s decision to bring the NYPD Strategic Response Group (SRG) to Brooklyn College on May 8, 2025 to forcefully break up a non-violent student led protest against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. 

This resort to state violence exposes CUNY’s support for the ongoing genocide.  It disregards the serious lesson of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail: “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” and rules. Brooklyn College Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Jeanne Theoharis, speaks eloquently about the connections between King, civil rights, protest, and freedom in her new book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South (The New Press, 2025): any university that calls in police violence to bar students from telling the truth or from bearing honest witness to immoral conduct is necessarily unjust. 

The JVP Academic Council fully supports the PSC’s demand for answers to these key questions: What steps were taken by the administration to engage protestors to diffuse the situation? What specific violations of college or university policy are alleged? Do the allegations involve disruption of educational activities? What disciplinary charges, if any, are being brought? And what steps will be taken towards restorative justice? The PSC letter further challenges the new time, place, and manner restrictions on freedom of speech on CUNY campuses. 

Brooklyn College’s very own Policing and Social Justice Project, led by Professor of Sociology, Alex Vitale, also issued a scathing rebuke, condemning:

 “The decision by Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson and the CUNY Central Administration for bringing the NYPD onto the Brooklyn College campus for the purposes of suppressing a peaceful student demonstration. We further condemn the excessive force and unnecessary arrests carried out by the NYPD. The actions of the administration were unnecessarily provocative, endangered members of the college community, and denied them the right to express their views.”  

The actions of CUNY and Brooklyn College are clearly aimed at students protesting the Israeli genocide against Palestinians. Criticizing Israel for conducting genocide is in no sense an attack on Jews or Judaism. This crackdown on student protest neither fights antisemitism nor contributes to Jewish safety. Instead, it supports the genocide and undermines the struggle against actually existing antisemitism by refusing to listen to student demands for university divestment. 

JVP fully supports the students’ demands from a Jewish perspective: that CUNY disclose and divest from companies that aid Israeli war crimes; institute an academic boycott of all academic trips to Israel; protect students and workers expressing solidarity with the Palestine Liberation Struggle; demilitarize CUNY and demilitarize Harlem by getting all Israeli military and NYPD officers off all CUNY campuses; make CUNY open and free for all. 

The unacceptable conduct by BC and CUNY administrations, on the other hand, is antithetical to and an attack on our Jewish values of standing against injustice and oppression in all cases.  Education and free speech are Jewish values dismissed by closing down public and non-violent protest. 

Unfortunately, the BC and CUNY administration’s bad conduct in support of the Israeli state and its genocide is anything but unusual in U.S. higher education today.  It is, to the contrary, but one more case in an epidemic of intellectual and moral failure by higher education administrators in this time of genocide in Gaza and emergent fascism in the U.S, one CUNY administrators have been directly complicit in. This academic year, CUNY not only ignored the democratic voice of its students who voted to endorse a cultural and economic boycott of Israel, but also launched an unwarranted disciplinary investigation against student government leaders for endorsing the boycott.

In a semester’s final flourish of draconian acts of repression unaligned with Jewish values, President Anderson chose to keep Brooklyn College faculty off stage during the celebration of their students’ graduation at Barclays Center: a fitting end to 18 months of academic censoring and social disruption there and elsewhere in the name of “Jewish safety.” 

Sincerely,

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace.

JVP is a national, grassroots organization working towards Palestinian freedom and Judaism beyond Zionism. With roughly 750,000 members, supporters, and participants in the last year, JVP is the largest such organization in the world. The Academic Council is a network of scholars within JVP with a shared commitment to JVP’s core values.

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