IEC Occupies Bobst to Protest NYU Dining Services
The students want NYU to divest from Aramark, which has faced backlash for its inadequate dining services to prisons.
A little after one in the morning, students began to congregate on the first lower level of NYU’s Elmer Bobst Library. Sleeping bags, pillows, suitcases, clothes, and signs were strewn everywhere. These students from the Incarceration to Education Coalition (IEC) were occupying Bobst to protest the use of Aramark dining services on campus and “the box” on NYU applications that forces you to disclose criminal offenses.
“We’re just all going to get to know each other,” Mia Wong, an IEC organizer, said to her lethargic peers. Their conversations twist and turn from a vicious line of questioning about who snores to the possible consequences, ranging from calls to parents to threats of suspension from the university.
The IEC’s “Occupy Bobst, Teach-In, Act Out” campaign has been in the works for months, but it is being launched now in an effort to disrupt the next five-year cycle of dining services being presented to NYU in December.
Hunter Major, an IEC organizer and GLS sophomore, said that the main focus of their activism was to get NYU to divest from Aramark.
“We not only want NYU to divest from Aramark, and not choose similar dining service providers like Compass which we found was invested in immigration detention centers and international prisons,” Major said, “but I think actually the second tier goal of our demands is just to emphasize that we be part of the process of transitioning to self-provision and uplift student voices through the creation of an advisory board that represents groups like IEC and others.”
Major said that IEC wanted their initiative to be visible to a larger demographic, a larger student body, and a have a “larger incubatory nature.”
“We wanted to make our presence known.”
Wong, a Gallatin senior, said that most of IEC’s work during the spring semester and summer was learning about Aramark’s investment in the prison industrial complex. IEC has also collected studies on self-operated dining services working in other universities.
“I think it’s the responsibility of everyone to address the fucked system that is the prison industrial complex and our own complicity within it,” Wong said.
Dylan Brown, another IEC organizer and Gallatin sophomore, said that their next steps involve a possible meeting with Marc Wais, Senior Vice President for Student Affairs.
“We’ve been occupying, he knows where to find us, and really, we’re refusing to leave Bobst, until our demands are met,” Brown said.
In a letter written as a response to an IEC email, Wais said that there is a member of IEC on the review committee for dining, cited previous meetings between administration and IEC on this issue, and said that IEC’s concerns lie “more to do with us declining to say ‘yes’ to all that you have asked for.”
“The dining operation at NYU is a large, complex, and demanding — some 3 million meals served per year, plus thousands of events at which food is provided,” Wais’ response read. “Virtually every university you cited as an example of being self-operating has costlier meal plans than NYU. We estimate that to self-operate would increase costs by at least 20%, costs that would be borne by students and their families. It is not self-evident that thousands of students on meal plans would wish to pay for a 20% increase, in spite of how strongly the IEC may feel about this issue. Moreover, we have a process underway, and it should be permitted to carry on.”
Brown said that the university is failing its student body with its investment in Aramark, especially given the controversy over racially insensitive meals served during this year’s Black History Month.
“As a black person at this university I find it extremely problematic that we’re going to claim to be so diverse and uplift all these values but our investments are not aligned with our diversity statement and that ripples across so many channels,” he said. “Yet, we’re still finding resistance and they don’t see the problem.”
Major said that their occupation of Bobst will make the students’ activism even stronger.
“Sustainable activism implies forging dynamic personal connections. So with that being said not only do we work together, the overnight component of our week of action speaks to our commitment to exist together and to uplift the fullness of one another’s humanity as we each individually key into this movement.”
This is a developing story.
