Like many other campuses around the world, New York University has seen its students protest the university’s ties to weapon manufacturers and other institutions that are profiting off the slaughter in Gaza or enabling it. Like many other campuses, NYU has been doing its best to curtail these protests and punish the students involved.
Unlike many other campuses, however, punishments include being told to watch The Simpsons and write what the NYU law professor Liam Murphy recently described in an open letter to leadership as “coerced confessions of wrongdoing”.
Before The Simpsons, however, some background: there have been protests at NYU for several months but things came to a head on 22 April, when the NYPD removed the Gaza Solidarity encampment at NYU’s Gould Plaza and arrested more than 100 people. Sixty-five of them were students, faculty, or staff.
Ola Galal, of NYU’s Kevorkian Center, was one of the faculty members arrested. Galal told me that, from the start, NYU seems to have been uninterested in having a dialogue with students. “Other universities have formed taskforces or committees to look into the demands of students. But NYU hasn’t,” Galal says.
Eventually, NYU decided to drop criminal charges. Instead, the university decided that a certain number of students (it won’t clarify how many) would be required to write a “Reflection Paper”, which includes a discussion of why they were naughty and what they can do to make it right. Students are also asked to consider a similar future scenario and reflect on how their decision-making would change based on what they’ve learned.
What students can’t include in this paper is anything that justifies their actions. Only a limited amount of reflection is allowed. “[B]e advised that your paper cannot serve to justify your actions, evaluate the actions of others, or challenge a conduct regulation,” the Reflection Paper instructions state.
The paper assumes from the start, in other words, that what the students did – protest against what the United Nations human rights council has termed a genocide – is morally wrong. It forces students to “confess” to wrongdoing, which, Murphy writes in his open letter protesting the disciplinary assignments, “might expose students to downstream legal liability”.
Along with the Reflection Paper, some students are being required to complete seven modules in a 49-page “Ethos Integrity Series”, a bizarre document that explains to students that they’ve engaged in wrongthink. “When one doesn’t know their own values, it becomes difficult to live by their own values and easy to adopt other people’s values without realizing it,” the series helpfully explains.
The modules include various exercises that students need to complete: in module 3, for example, are instructed to watch season 10, episode 7 of The Simpsons, Lisa Gets an A, in which Lisa cheats on a test. They are then instructed to answer 12 questions about the episode, including an analysis of whether Principal Skinner makes ethical decisions.
In another module, they are instructed to think about the “Continental Congress of the 13 Colonies in the days before and after the Revolutionary War” and reflect on the “first ethical standards for the United States of America”. (Funnily enough, they’re not instructed to reflect on the ethics of colonization in the first place.)
The NYU spokesperson John Beckman said in a statement to the Guardian that the “reflection paper assignment – and the reading assignments – are a widespread and common practice in higher ed”. But many faculty and students at NYU have stressed they have never seen anything like this. “This isn’t normal and we’ve never heard of it before,” Rebecca Karl, a professor of history, told me bluntly. “We do know that our business school and our law school have contracts with Symplicity [the software platform that hosts the Reflection Papers and Ethos Integrity Series] for student discipline but we’ve never seen NYU use [these papers] before in this manner.”
In an email to faculty, Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies and an expert in student protests, said that he couldn’t think of another example of a university administration forcing students to write that their protests were wrong. The closest thing he could come up with was the action of the judge in the mass trial of the hundreds of students arrested during the occupation of the University of California, Berkeley’s Administration Hall in 1964 during the free speech movement. The superior court judge Rupert J Crittenden asked students to write letters explaining their decision to break the law, hoping that they would explain why their decision had been wrong. Instead they explained why the sit-in was justified. Their letters angered the judge but are now being held up as valuable historical sources for student perspectives on the Berkeley free speech crisis.
What’s different here, Karl stresses, is that NYU is “mandating a confession that refuses to allow the students to honestly state their views about their protest activity … what the judge asked the 1964 students to do doesn’t hold a candle to what NYU is asking of our students right now”.
There are other historical parallels. Karl specializes in Chinese history and notes that these papers “resemble, in so many ways, forms of re-education, forms of self-criticism that were used repeatedly during various periods of political turmoil”. Xi Jinping’s government, for example, is fond of televising forced confessions from human rights activists in order to pre-empt international criticism and help shape a narrative.
“These confessions resonate very clearly with people like myself and others who study histories and contemporary societies that use these kinds of coercive measures to get people back in line, as it were, to get people to conform to certain forms of thinking,” Karl notes.
In a statement, NYU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine noted that both punitive assignments were hosted on the website of Symplicity corporation, which seems to have a few ethical issues of its own. Nothing as terrible as protesting a genocide, mind you, just a little bit of hacking and fraud. In 2014, Ariel Manuel Friedler, the founder of Symplicity Corporation, pleaded guilty to conspiring to hack into the computer systems of two competitors to improve his company’s software development and sales strategy. That doesn’t seem to have affected his life too badly, because, in 2016, according to Friedler’s website, he “orchestrated the sale of Symplicity to HIG Capital, a prominent global private equity investment firm managing over $20bn in equity capital”. HIG Capital has had its own issues. Reuters reports that, in 2021, it agreed to pay “nearly $20m to resolve claims a mental health company it owned billed Massachusetts’ Medicaid program for services provided by unlicensed and unqualified staff”.
Isn’t it a little bit odd to contract with such a company in order to teach your students about “ethics” and “integrity”? NYU insists there is nothing to see here. “The reflection paper assignment was created by staff in NYU’s office of student conduct, not by [the digital platform] Advocate (or its parent company, Symplicity),” Beckman said in a statement. “The only people determining the sanctions that NYU students receive from disciplinary proceedings are the professional staff of NYU’s Office of Student Conduct.”
But more than 300 faculty members feel strongly enough to have signed on to Murphy’s open letter describing the disciplinary assignments as reminiscent of “authoritarian regimes” and “contrary to what we as faculty believe to be NYU’s ethical and intellectual standards”.
Why did NYU, an institute that prides itself on research and critical thinking, not anticipate this backlash? Did it not reflect on the fact that what it is asking students to do is, in the words of Murphy’s letter, “an intellectual embarrassment”?
Some of the students I spoke to (who wished to remain anonymous) questioned whether NYU has faced pressure from its donors, board of trustees, or pro-Israel groups to censor pro-Palestinian speech. I posed that question to NYU three times and it chose not to answer.
While the university might have declined to clarify the matter, it’s certainly not a stretch to think that this might be the case. Last week, for example, the Washington Post reported that “a group of billionaires and business titans working to shape US public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University”. These business executives started a WhatsApp chat where they discussed paying for private investigators to assist New York police in handling pro-Palestine protests. In one of the first messages sent in the group, the group members were told the goal of the group was to “change the narrative” in favor of Israel.
While it’s not clear whether NYU is facing any pressure from its donors or board to crack down on pro-Palestinian speech, it certainly doesn’t seem to be facing much internal pressure to listen to its students. The dystopian Reflection Papers, Galal notes, seem to be part of a “long and ongoing dismissal of students and a … lack of support for pro-Palestinian voices on campus”. Perhaps NYU’s head honchos ought to turn to The Simpsons for some guidance. I suggest season 17, episode 11: We’re on the Road to D’owhere.
