IEC Protests NYU’s Ties to Aramark
“You’re funding the mass incarceration of the same groups that you’re trying to bring to school”
Members of the Incarceration to Education Coalition (IEC) flocked to the Kimmel Center steps on Wednesday afternoon with signs in hand to protest NYU’s involvement with Aramark, the university’s food services provider. Aramark gained notoriety on campus this February when it served a racially insensitive Black History Month meal at Downstein and subsequently fired the head chef and operations manager at that dining hall.
The IEC organized the protest to raise awareness of the upcoming renegotiation of NYU’s contract with Aramark and the possibility of divesting from the company altogether because of its connections with private prisons. It happened in tandem with another protest attended by IEC organizer Amanda Lawson, at a food conference in Fort Worth, Texas.
April Lin, a senior in CAS and IEC member, explained that if diversity and progressive values are important to the university, “it should make this a priority.”
She specified that NYU’s administration received four bids for food-service contracts — including Aramark, Sodexo, AVI and Compass Group — each of which are invested in prisons. For IEC, that meant NYU should “cut out the middleman” and follow schools such as UCLA, the University of Chicago and Yale, all of which have divested from Aramark and switched to self-provision.
Lin pointed out reports of Aramark serving people in prisons food infested with maggots, food that’s been recently taken out of the trash, food that has been eaten by rats, undercooked food, food that’s been purposefully under-portioned, “and at the same time they’re serving us Palladium brunch.”
“While this originally started as an Aramark campaign, it’s important to know that … yes, it’s about Aramark, but the other bids are from dining providers who are also heavily involved in the prison-industrial complex, meaning investment in private prisons,” one of the five campus organizers of IEC, Dylan Brown, said.
He explained that this was essential to remind people of. “We see that as a tactic that NYU admin could use and say, ‘oh, we’re not going to take Aramark,’ to try and divert student focus when all of the other bids that they’re considering are still heavily invested.”
Brown elaborated that because of the IEC’s previous work in removing the criminal background question from the CommonApp, as well as the potential for change during these food provider negotiations, “this is a momentous year for IEC.”
When contacted for comment, Amanda Lawson, an IEC organizer, stated, “it’s appalling that NYU gives our money to corporations like that, the kind that make deals where incarcerated people’s and farmers’ lives are at stake, in private meetings that come at a price.”
In the next few months she hopes “to pressure NYU to get serious about its students’ dietary needs and to do our own in-house dining rather than contracting it out to another third party like Aramark.”
“NYU is a school that talks a lot about diversity but how can we be diverse if you’re also funding private prisons on the back end?” Nia Harris, a junior in CAS who participated in the demonstration, said. “You’re funding the mass incarceration of the same groups that you’re trying to bring to school and it’s very contradictory.”
