Professors move classes off campus as hundreds protest Trump crackdown on higher ed

Around 300 students, faculty and community advocates marched from Washington Square Park to Foley Square on Thursday afternoon in protest of the Trump administration’s student and faculty visa revocations, research grant terminations and widespread attack on higher education. That same day, dozens of NYU professors moved their classes off campus to demand the university commit to protecting its international community.

The protesters chanted “Hands off our students now,” “No more war on students’ lives” and “We need teachers, we need books, we need the money the billionaires took” as they marched south on Lafayette Street. The demonstration — organized by on-campus groups including NYU Researchers United, the American Association of University Professors and NYU’s graduate student workers union — also featured student groups from Rutgers University, Hunter College and other schools in the New York and New Jersey area.

“Higher education is under attack from a variety of directions, and our institutional leaders have not shown the willingness to step up and fight back,” Zachary Samalin, vice president of NYU’s AAUP chapter, said in an interview with WSN. “What we’re doing is stepping up to fight for ourselves, which is the only thing that we can do, as teachers, as students, as workers — and this is the first step.”

Samalin also told WSN that NYU leadership has not communicated with the university’s AAUP chapter for over a year. He was one of more than 450 professors who signed a March 17 petition demanding that NYU declare itself a sanctuary campus and affirm it will do everything in its power to protect noncitizen students from immigration authorities.

Faculty escalated the petition’s demands on Thursday, with more than 50 members participating in a “Sanctuary Picket” and moving their classes online or to in-person locations that have been declared sanctuary spaces. The picket is set to last for a week, and reiterates demands for the university to bolster its financial and legal resources for at-risk students and implement training programs to inform Campus Safety officers’ responses to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“NYU loves to trade on its status as a so-called global university,” Jonah Inserra, a member of NYU’s graduate student union, said at the rally. “However, they have stood idly by as dozens of F-1 and J-1 visas have been revoked. The administration refuses to publicize the total number, keeping students and the union in the dark while our colleagues and comrades are singled out and picked off without rhyme, reason or explanation.”

Speakers at the protest referenced international students who have been publicly subject to visa revocations and detainments, often for their participation in pro-Palestinian demonstrations — most recently including Mohsen Mahdawi, a student and organizer at Columbia University, and Georgetown University researcher Badar Khan Suri. Chantal, a Hunter College student who requested to be referred to by her first name due to safety concerns, said that the federal government revoked visas of 17 CUNY students and that international students are critical members of her school’s student body.

Speakers also discussed the Trump administration’s slashes hundreds of millions in funding across top U.S. universities, demanding that they eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs and crack down on protests against Israel’s siege in Gaza. Colleges have also seen millions in losses in grant funding — a critical part of many of their financial operations.

Denis Nash, an infectious disease epidemiologist at CUNY, shared that his National Institutes of Health grant studying COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among individuals with anxiety and depression was terminated without warning. Nash emphasized that these cuts disrupt critical public health research and eliminate research and mentors hip opportunities for doctoral and master’s students.

“We’ve had an unprecedented attack on our right to learn and our students’ right to exercise their own opinions,” Grant Miner, former leader of Columbia’s graduate student union, said in an interview with WSN. “You can’t fight that just at the university level — you have to bring in a lot of people and a wide coalition to fight this across universities.”

Amanda Chen contributed reporting.