First Faculty-Led Anti-Israel Encampment Established at New School

The first faculty-led anti-Israel encampment was established on Wednesday at The New School in New York City.

Faculty from the college set up tents in the lobby and established the Refaat Alareer Faculty Solidarity Encampment, days after officers from the New York Police Department (NYPD) cleared encampments at The New School and New York University.

The NYPD ended up arresting 45 students involved in the encampment, according to the New School Free Press.

Fewer than a dozen tents could be seen set up in the lobby.

“On Wednesday afternoon, autonomous faculty members at The New School launched the first faculty-led encampment in the nation,” New School’s Students for Justice in Palestine (TNS-SJP) said in a statement. “The action follows the mass arrests and violence that took place last week across New York City’s campuses when university leadership called in the New York Police Department to sweep and shutter the Gaza solidarity encampments.”

Students were also seen protesting outside of the building where the faculty-led encampment was located and could be heard chanting, “40,000 people dead! New School your hands are red! 40,000 people dead! Columbia your hands are red!”

TNS-SJP continued to write that “the students do not stand alone,” adding that “their demands for immediate divestment in companies complicit in Israel’s genocidal war” were the demands of the faculty.

“We call on the Investment Committee of The New School’s Board of Trustees to vote immediately to divest from companies that benefit directly or indirectly from the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine,” the statement continued.

The faculty-led encampment is named after Refaat Alareer, a writer and professor from the Gaza Strip who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza in December 2023.

“Students nationwide have shown extraordinary courage, risking arrest, loss of future opportunities, suspensions and expulsions, not to mention ferocious harassment and physical violence,” the statement continued. “They have been demonized in the establishment media, by university leaders, and at the highest levels of government for an unequivocally moral act – standing against genocide, apartheid and oppression.”

In response to the arrests of students involved in the encampment, between 270 and 300 members of the faculty from The New School took part in a vote in which almost 95 percent expressed no confidence in New School Interim President Donna E. Shalala and the Board of Trustees.