NYU Called Out For Inaction Following On Campus Assaults
All but one of the victims were API students, leading some to suggest the attacks were racially motivated.
SPS senior AJ Sun was walking toward the Stern School of Business on Tuesday, Feb. 15 when he was punched in the back of the head by a stranger.
“I was randomly attacked for no reasons at all by a white male,” Sun said. “I wasn’t looking at him, I wasn’t having any conversation with him. It just happened so fast and when I realized, he had already ran away.”
Immediately after the incident, which took place around 4:30 p.m., Sun contacted the Campus Safety Office with the help of witnesses. But when the Campus Safety officer arrived, Sun did not receive the reaction that he was expecting. “Throughout the whole process, [the campus safety officer] showed no concerns for my mental and physical health,” Sun said.
According to Sun, when he asked if he should contact the NYPD about the incident, the Campus Safety officer dismissed the idea. They suggested that since Sun suffered no serious injury, the NYPD probably wouldn’t do anything about it, he recalled.
Following the incident, Sun had hoped to see some public communication from the university to warn students about a potentially dangerous assaulter on campus. To his disappointment, there was no Campus Safety email immediately following the incident. The university-wide email came after a delay of two days, on Feb. 17, which noted two similar incidents in addition to Sun’s.
“At this point, we cannot say with certainty whether the three incidents involve the same assailant,” said Fountain Walker, Vice President for Campus Safety, in the email. “In two of the three incidents the victims were Asian; we don’t know at this point whether racial hate played a role.”
Walker continued, “…If it is the case that bigotry played a part in this, let me make clear that NYU rejects and condemns the rising tide of bias directed at members of the Asian community and is consistently working with partners to take proactive steps, as well as responding to particular incidents as they arise.”
However, before the email was sent and a day after his assault, Sun took to social media to share his experience with Campus Safety, and cautioned students about the possible danger on campus.
“No representative or faculty from NYU has reached out to me asking how I am feeling physically and emotionally after suffering from this horrific hate crime assault,” Sun wrote in an Instagram post. “Any Asian student walking on campus is still in danger of random, sporadic and yet detrimental hate-infused attacks, and NYU has not taken any action to even warn its Asian students about the danger in the surrounding neighborhood.”
According to Sun, on February 16, during a follow-up meeting with the Office of Campus Safety soon after the first post went public, an officer informed him that the incident “did not fit the requirement” to be communicated to the student body via email, because “[he] did not say anything racial to my face when he hit me in the head,” Sun said.
Sun’s incident is not the only attack on campus that has occurred recently. As communicated in the Feb. 17 Campus Safety email, two Asian students were near Stern’s Kaufman building on the evening of Feb. 7 when they were both struck in the head by a similar suspect at the same time, “who also yelled at them in a language other than English,” according to the email.
Sun spoke to one of the victims, who wished to remain anonymous, who told him that four Asian students were assaulted in the Kaufman incident instead of two, as claimed by Campus Safety.
Another student was struck on the arm by potentially the same suspect on Feb. 13 on Washington Place. The suspect described in all of these reported crimes have the same description, a man with light complexion and blonde hair. According to Sun, the student involved in the Feb. 13 incident reached out to him about her experience via social media after seeing his post, but when Sun brought it up to the Office of Campus Safety, he was told that the office was never informed of her report, even though she contacted the office immediately after the incident. Sun suspected that the officer who responded to the incident on Feb. 13 never filed a report to the office.
According to Sun, the university’s email to the student body came too little too late, as it was sent out 10 days after the first related incident on Feb. 7 and two days after Sun’s assault. Despite the email, Sun also thinks that the incidents should be taken more seriously by the university.
“[The victims] are all minorities,” Sun said. “If five Asian students and one Middle-Eastern student were assaulted on campus, it’s definitely a crime against minority people,” he concluded, although only two of the victims’ racial identities have been specified by university officials, who as of now have confirmed only five victims in total (as opposed to the six referenced by Sun).
Although three of these crimes occurred in the same week, in the same area on campus and potentially at the hands of the same suspect, the Office of Campus Safety has been notably silent. Despite the office’s emphasis on the Bias Response Reporting Line, Wellness Exchange, and API Student Support Space, there seems to be a lack of preventative measures and care for vulnerable groups of students, according to Sun.
The accessibility and effect of these services also remain questionable, as students have long complained of the Wellness Exchange program’s notoriously long wait times, which can prevent students from receiving the care they need. Many API students have argued, too, that the university’s virtual “support spaces,” held via Zoom, are merely performative and do nothing to help or protect students.
According to Sun, NYU needs to make effective improvements to its campus safety services in order to truly protect and support its minority students. This could mean re-training campus safety officers to better respond to hate crime reports, assisting victims who choose to report the crime further to the police, sending out public communications to the student body when such crimes occur, and/or following up with mental health support immediately after bias-related incidents.
“We need to rebuild the trust between students and Public Safety because now we know that they are not doing anything, students are not gonna trust them anymore,” Sun said. “We definitely need more support from school because right now we are not seeing any.”
