Pro-Palestine protesters at CUNY-Brooklyn College were punched, tased and arrested on May 8 after top CUNY leaders called in the NYPD to break up an on-campus demonstration. On Friday, May 16, 30-40 members of CUNY Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine as well as some students rallied in the pouring rain outside CUNY’s central offices in Midtown to demand students’ right to peacefully protest be respected.

“Decisions that Brooklyn College and CUNY made deeply interfered with the education of our students, and they need to be accountable to that,” said Jeanne Theoharis, a professor at Brooklyn College. 

“It tore a hole through the fabric of our community,” said another Brooklyn College faculty member who asked not to be identified. 

May 8 started out as a “beautiful day,” recalled Naomi Schiller, another Brooklyn College professor. At 12:30, adjuncts held a protest against the invisibilization of their labor. Later, a pro-Palestine demonstration of 30–50 protesters got underway that saw three tents — the symbol of last spring’s Gaza solidarity encampments — placed on Brooklyn College’s East Quad. The action was greeted by counter-protesters. 

 “It was a beautiful sight, exactly what college campuses should be, many voices articulated,” Schiller said. 

“They did not occupy a building. They didn’t impede access to any campus facilities,” said the same Brooklyn College faculty member who asked not to be identified. 

Schiller and other faculty circulated through adjacent campus buildings to gauge if the sounds from the protests were disrupting classes. “You really had to strain to be able to hear it, and I talked to many colleagues who taught who were not interrupted at all,” Schiller said. “There was a conference going on right in the building overlooking [the protest], not interrupted, they went on with their conference.”

The student protesters and their faculty allies were initially confronted by campus security but refused to end their demonstration. Over the course of the afternoon, off-campus CUNY security forces and members of the NYPD were deployed on campus, according to Brooklyn College’s Policing and Social Justice Project, though they did not appear in plain view. A larger contingent of 80–100 NYPD officers, including members of the NYPD’s notorious Strategic Response Group, entered the campus at 6 p.m. and forced the protesters to leave the campus. While on campus, the NYPD arrested a student journalist who was filming them. 

Once the students departed the campus, more arrests ensued. When they managed to resume their non-violent protest down the street outside the Tanger Hillel, a center of pro-Israel advocacy at Brooklyn College, police began wading into the crowd and grabbing protesters. One protester was tased.

“I personally saw police officers lunge at people, punch people. The CUNY administration, by introducing the NYPD to a peaceful protest situation, put us all in harm’s way,” Schiller said. 

A total of 14 people were arrested on May 8. 

Christopher Stone, a professor at CUNY-Hunter College, went to the 72nd precinct to do jail support for the arrestees. 

“I saw a young woman come out. She didn’t even seem to know many of the people there,” Stone said. “I don’t know if she had been protesting, but she had some family there waiting for her, and she came out in tears from the precinct, saying over and over again, ‘They punched me in the face; they punched me in the face; they punched me in the face,’ and it was just heartbreaking.”

Campus protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza have been met with massive repression nationwide over the past 19 months, often under the pretext of preventing the disruption of regular campus life. On May 8, the disruption was caused by high-ranking CUNY officials.

According to Theoharis, the Brooklyn College administration closed the library on May 8 even though it was unaffected by the protests. She said the NYPD also significantly restricted students and faculty from entering the campus to attend evening classes. And the administration canceled all in-person classes the following day after 2 p.m. 

“We’re in the second to last week of classes. We’re in the home stretch,” Theoharis said lamenting the timing of the administration’s heavy-handed response. 

In the aftermath of the crackdown, the Policing & Social Justice Project has demanded that CUNY explain who authorized the NYPD to come on campus and forcibly remove protesters and whether Gov. Kathy Hochul played a role in ordering the demonstration to be suppressed. 

CUNY has 11 senior colleges, seven community colleges and several graduate schools. The college presidents are appointed by CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez. The chancellor in turn is chosen by the CUNY Board of Trustees, whose majority is named by the governor. For Stone, who had a student arrested last spring when the NYPD violently shut down a Gaza encampment at City College, targeting the top administrators at CUNY makes sense. 

“It’s just the Palestine exception, over and over again,” he said. “As far as we’re concerned, the responsibility leads here, 42nd street, CUNY Central, and so we’re here to protest the Palestine exception.” 

Rebecca Vaughan contributed reporting to this article. 

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