New York University (NYU), the site of extensive protests related to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, updated its student code of conduct to include attacks against Zionists and Zionism as a violation of its nondiscrimination policies.
"NYU is fully committed to academic freedom, and free expression and dissent are bedrock principles; however, protests and demonstrations are and have long been subject to time, place, and manner rules,” NYU spokesperson John Beckman wrote to The Hill. “To that end, what we shared with NYU students yesterday - the Guidance and Expectations on Student Conduct - provides greater clarity about our standards, rules and policies, along the lines of what our community has requested of us.”
Universities have been updating policies tied to encampments and protests on campus, but NYU is the first major university to include Zionism within its nondiscrimination policies.
Under the new policy, NYU said, “using code words like ‘Zionist’ does not eliminate the possibility” that speech violates the university’s nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy.
The university explains that “for many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity,” thus making a speech against Zionism a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and university policy on religious discrimination.
The university adds that “excluding Zionists from an open event, calling for the death of Zionists, applying a “no Zionist” litmus test for participation in any NYU activity, using or disseminating tropes, stereotypes, and conspiracies about Zionists (e.g., “Zionists control the media”), demanding a person who is or is perceived to be Jewish or Israeli to state a position on Israel or Zionism, minimizing or denying the Holocaust, or invoking Holocaust imagery or symbols to harass or discriminate” would implicate Title VI.
Zionism is a movement that calls for the self-determination and statehood of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestine advocacy group that is anti-Zionist, believes Zionism is a movement designed to “deny the rights of Palestinians and the humanity of Palestinians.”
Pro-Palestine organizers on campus condemned the change, saying it was an “effort to chill pro-Palestine speech on campus” and a “deliberate attempt to dissolve student and faculty efforts to protest a genocide.”
“NYU ADMINS CHOOSE GENOCIDE,” the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter wrote in a statement. “They informed the student body that speech against Zionism may be deemed anti-semitic and a violation of civil rights law.
“This conflationary logic is not simply an effort to chill pro-Palestine speech on campus, not merely revanchist pushback for the spate of encampments and other actions that NYU students organized last spring, but a deliberate attempt to dissolve student and faculty efforts to protest a genocide that is approaching the one-year mark, with a death toll rising into the six-digit range,” the group continued.
Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, universities have been hotbeds of protest related to the conflict, with pro-Palestine students and activists protesting Israel’s actions before and after Hamas’s attack. During those protests, many pro-Palestine demonstrators chanted and organized against Zionism.
In the spring, students at NYU and across the nation set up encampments protesting Israel’s onslaught into Gaza, which has killed 40,000 people, and call on their universities to divest from weapon manufacturing. Police arrested more than 2,000 people across the nation tied to the encampment protests.
Many of those encampments had community guidelines that explicitly banned Zionists from their space. In its community guidelines, NYU’s encampment directed students to “not engage with Zionists” and that “leads will have them removed from our space.”
During the protests throughout the year, Jewish students also faced antisemitic chants and intimidation at times, and NYU settled a lawsuit with three Jewish students in July after the students filed a lawsuit in November alleging that the university had failed to protect them from harassment and antisemitism.
As part of the settlement, the university agreed to appoint a Title VI administrator to assist students facing harassment. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 defines the responsibilities of universities to protect students from identity-based discrimination.
