Around a dozen students gathered outside NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering on Monday, criticizing the school’s career fair collaborations with military manufacturers and tech companies with ties to Israel.
NYU’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society chanted slogans such as “No engineering for genocide” and held signs that read “MONEY FOR JOBS & EDUCATION NOT FOR BOMBS & OCCUPATION.” NYU campus safety officers and six New York City Police Department officers observed from around 20 feet away.
A student who spoke at the demonstration said it aimed to condemn Tandon’s career fair in October where General Dynamics, a military contractor that manufactures weapons used by Israel, was invited. The student, who requested to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, added that because Tandon doesn’t have demonstrations at the same scale as NYU’s Washington Square campus — its on-site organizations focus on more school-specific issues.
“Within the NYU structure, Tandon kind of functions as its own campus,” the student said. “There hasn’t been a lot of organizing within Tandon to push for divestment, or at least a push to get the military out of the campus — so that’s where SDS comes in.”
In response to previous student protests against Tandon’s recruitment programs, NYU spokesperson John Beckman told WSN that “the calls to deprive fellow students of their choice of where to work” are “deeply troubling.”
After 30 minutes and speeches from members of SDS and Jews Against Zionism, demonstrators marched for five minutes toward Wunsch Hall — a landmark in abolitionist history — and stopped to chant for another 10 minutes in front of its entryway staircase. NYPD officers followed as the group crossed the Brooklyn Commons.
Another demonstrator with SDS, Ebtesham, reiterated the group’s demands for NYU to divest from companies with ties to Israel and reallocate the money toward academic programming. He said the university “refuses to cooperate” with the group, and that administrators had offered to disclose its investments in negotiations with students last spring but have not communicated since. Beckman has previously told WSN that NYU is not considering divestment.
“We have to continue to organize,” Sham said in an interview with WSN. “We have to continue to learn from every single demonstration we do. We have to mobilize to maintain what we have now, and to win more rights and demands.”
Contact Kaitlyn Sze Tu at news@nyunews.com.
This story Students protest Tandon ties to Israeli military weapon manufacturers appeared first on Washington Square News.