NYU Town Hall, Student Gov Resolution Shed Light on Islamophobia in Stern
“How do Stern students become successful and also create a community, particularly if you’re not the typical white male that succeeds at Wall Street? How can you still be successful as a Stern student?”
On Thursday afternoon, dozens of students and administrators gathered on Kimmel’s 8th floor to ask questions and voice concerns to NYU President Andrew Hamilton and Student Government Assembly (SGA) Chair Juan Calero in a town hall. Among those concerns was a pattern of Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry in NYU’s Stern School of Business.
“On several occasions this year alone, several Muslim students have been called terrorists to their faces,” said Essma Bengabsia, a senior and the co-founder and President of Stern’s Islamic Finance Group (IFG).
Bigotry at Stern, she said, was not only directed at Muslim students; Bengabsia said the use of the n-word is frequent at the school. Bengabsia referenced other incidents of bigotry toward Muslim students, including one member of Stern’s faculty who had advised a Muslim student that she would be wise to conceal her religion during the job application process.
“In a resume review session with a Muslim student a few semesters ago, she said that she wants to add Muslim Students Association to her resume because she’s interested in getting involved. The person who was reviewing it told her ‘don’t put that because they’ll know. And she was like ‘what do you mean?’ And the person said ‘they’ll know you’re Muslim.’” she recalled.
Professors and administrators had repeatedly responded to these sorts of episodes in an dismissive, flippant manner, Bengabsia said.
“This has been a problem since I was a freshman and since many of the other seniors were freshman. So what I want to know is what you’re doing to make students more comfortable and to push change in Stern?” she asked. “We’ve spoken on several occasions to administrators in Stern on many different levels and the responses we’ve gotten are things along the lines of, ‘Don’t take it too emotionally,’ ‘don’t take it personally,’ ‘it’s your job to educate people.”
In response, Hamilton told Bengabsia he had been made aware of these incidents and labeled them “deeply distressing.” “The incidents you described are completely unacceptable,” Hamilton said. “This is an opportunity and indeed Stern must take these concerns seriously.”
Vice Chancellor and Senior Vice Provost for Global Programs and University Life Linda Mills, seated beside Hamilton at the event, also addressed what Bengabsia said. “We left the conversation at a key moment thinking progress had been made,” said Mills. “The other thing I would say is that if you don’t feel safe, we need to know and we need to take action.”
“We don’t feel safe,” Bengabsia replied. “I’m telling you right now.”
Calero, for his part, said he agreed with Bengabsia that these concerns are not particularly new. “Everything that was asked for post listening session are things that have been asked for before the listening session,” Calero said, referring to the Diversity and Inclusion Listening Session in Fall 2015. Indeed, during the 2015 listening session, a Muslim student said she was told by a professor that she was “pretty enough” to not wear a hijab.
Last week’s town hall came on the heels of the Student Senators Council (SSC) finalizing a letter addressed to NYU Stern’s leadership on Thursday morning, sent to them Friday evening. In it, the body described the behavior minority students in Stern were subjected to and detailed what they said has been a lackluster response from professors and administrators.
“We are writing to you on behalf of the minority students who are facing discrimination and marginalization at NYU Stern Undergraduate College (“NYU Stern”). These students have expressed their concerns to you repeatedly, and you have failed to sufficiently address discrimination at NYU Stern,” the letter read in part.
The letter went on to request that Stern implement a number of measures, such as adding a code of conduct on discrimination, implementing diversity initiatives, including more minority students and professors in positions of leadership, hiring a full-time diversity officer, and diversifying the school’s professors and guest lecturers. In addition, the letter instructed the school to add MENA (Middle East and North Africa) to forms and to change course evaluations in order to include rating a professor “based on how inclusive and safe their classroom environment was.”
On Saturday, Dean of the Undergraduate College at Stern, Geeta Menon, responded to the letter. “NYU Stern takes equity, diversity, belonging, and inclusion in our community very seriously,” she wrote. “We will be back in touch as soon as we have had an opportunity to fully review the recommendations in the letter and talk further with students.”
While the situation as described in the letter been ongoing for years, five Stern students told NYU Local, the challenges students in IFG faced showed student leaders these problems need to be addressed in an official capacity.
“So much of this was highlighted since Essma and I started the Islamic Finance Group,” said Dena Samad a Stern junior and co-founder and vice president of IFG. IFG, cofounded by Bengabsia and Samad earlier this school year, “aims to create a body of students, faculty, and community members who are interested in Islamic finance and business in the Muslim world,” the club, which is currently a trial club, writes on its website.
On one occasion, Bengabsia told Local, a student at the January club fair asked if the IFG representatives were recruiting for ISIS. Another suggested Samad is not authentically Muslim because she chooses not to wear a hijab.
In recent weeks, Bengabsia has begun to organize students to push the administration outside of Stern to advocate for change in it. To that end, she joined forces with SSC in drafting the letter in the SSC on the matter.
In an interview, Student Senator representing Stern undergraduate students Pedro Tenreiro told Local that Stern has work to do to ensure that Muslims students feel comfortable in the school and to be able to discipline people that are hostile toward them. Tenreiro has thus far been unimpressed by how Stern has reacted to complaints that Muslim and other minority students have brought to administrators. “It’s nothing good,” said Tenreiro.
“It isn’t because the administration is specifically targeting the Muslim students; It’s because we don’t currently have the systems in place to refer to specific guidelines on discrimination,” he explained.
In Tenreiro’s telling, much of the problem stems from the fact that Stern does not have an efficient mechanism in place that can both field reports of bias from students and confront the relevant student or faculty member under one umbrella.
“There isn’t a specific office that deals with instances like this. There’s the Office of Student Engagement, which is the office that is closest to any sort of circumstance that involves student life here at Stern,” he said. “They essentially govern all student life and club activity. But, they aren’t part of the judiciary process. That falls down to the dean.”
“You can’t prosecute the trial because we don’t have the laws in place. We don’t have a code of conduct that is extensive enough that it covers instances of discrimination,” he said.
He went on to suggest that Stern, and other schools at NYU, should have their own diversity offices to handle situations such as those the Muslim students have encountered, as described in the SSC’s letter.
In an interview with Local, Bengabsia explained the experiences that led her to believe change was needed and to work with the student government to craft the letter.
“One time I think this was the week before [the 2016] elections, there were these two white kids and they just kept cracking jokes about how it would be hilarious if Trump won. And one of them said ‘It wouldn’t affect us anyway, so who cares?’ We should just go ahead and vote for him anyway.’ They were right in front of me,” she said. “That was a slap in the face.”
Along these lines, she said one Stern professor several times dismissed people who protested President Trump’s immigration policies, such as the travel ban. “Every time there was a protest against the Muslim ban in Washington Square Park, he’d be like ‘they don’t know what they’re talking about. They have nothing to do with their lives and go to the park and scream at the top of their lungs,” Bengabsia recalled. “The kids in class would laugh all the time.”
“At one point, I just started crying in class. I was like ‘You can’t say these kind of things, professor,” she said.
And during an event about terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11, Bengabsia said the guest speaker cast Muslims as especially prone to terrorism. “He pretty much was saying ‘listen I know racially profiling is politically incorrect but in order for us to be able to identify terrorists in America we need to start somewhere and that somewhere is identifying Muslims,” she said. “And I was sitting there like ‘okay this is ridiculous’ and so we started going back and forth in the Q & A session.”
“What got me was that a lot of people in the class were just nodding their heads,” she added.
But when these examples were brought to the various professors and administrators, according to the five Stern students who spoke with Local, they were not met with sympathetic responses, as also detailed in the SSC letter. Bengabsia said this was evidence of Stern faculty members not paying heed to the concerns of the school’s Muslim students.
“If someone said that to a white girl who walked in and called her a derogatory name,” she said, “I highly doubt she would be told ‘don’t take it emotionally and go educate them on why you’re not that derogatory name.’”
Additionally, Bengabsia said that Stern and the university is too eager to pat themselves on the back, and unwilling to have the difficult conversations and confront the problem head-on.
“You can hold all the diversity days you want. Clearly it’s not working. Stop only expecting celebratory moments of our diversity. In order to set up an environment that’s inclusive in Stern, they need to be willing to address them,” she said. “It’s not all pretty talk and fun and flowers.”
During her time at NYU, Bengabsia said she has not felt welcome at Stern. “When I first came to Stern freshman year, a lot of people wouldn’t want to sit around me. It was very obvious in the class. Whenever we have group projects, I have a hard time finding people to work with,” she said.
Bengabsia said this unwelcoming environment is unique to Stern and students and faculty in other schools, have been more welcoming to her. “Whenever I took politics classes in CAS, I got along with everyone. I loved the classes,” she said. “It was so much fun.”
“I realized the problem is not me,” she said. “I started seeing a difference in the culture across the different schools at NYU.”
Saraah Mengual, a junior and board member of Stern for Excellence and Diversity (SEAD), as well as a member of the Student Advocacy Committee on STUCO (Stern’s student government), had a similar impression of the environment in other schools compared to that of Stern. Specifically, she said the professors in Stern were particularly unequipped to respond to bias incidents. “I feel like teachers outside Stern are more empathetic. When it comes to certain situations, they’re more empathetic to it and they’re ready to have a conversation about it no matter what they’re teaching,” she said.
“Professors in Stern make fun of the idea of microaggressions,” Mengual added.
Nana Apraku, President of SEAD, explained why the environment in Stern is difficult for many minority students to navigate. “Because Stern’s a business school, and because we have so many alumni who work at Wall Street, they internalize that,” she said. “And I think sometimes there are occasions where people don’t really want to be your friend because they’re not genuinely interested in who you are, [and] they’re talking to you for a business connection.”
“It’s always just this shallow way of looking at how we engage with one another,” she went on. “There’s definitely work to be done there.”
“How do Stern students become successful and also create a community, particularly if you’re not the typical white male that succeeds at Wall Street? How can you still be successful as a Stern student?” Apraku wondered.
Raneen Khalil, a freshman and Treasurer of IFG, described how she struggled with feeling unwanted in Stern.
“From the very first day, I felt very uncomfortable around friends, especially Welcome Week,” she told Local. “I walk into classes in Stern and students get up and change their seat. They’re grabbing their bags like I’m going to steal something.”
She said there should be a lot more dialogue between students on this issue. “When students find out what I’ve been through, they’re shocked.”
Asked what should be done to solve these problems, Khalil echoed many of the recommendations in the letter. “I think there should be a code of conduct. There should be a rule saying that racism or anything like that will not be tolerated,” she said.
Currently, there are measures in place aimed at combating racism in Stern. The school, for example, holds optional diversity training for faculty and mandatory Diversity Day for freshman.
But for some, Stern’s efforts on this front miss the mark. “I’d like to make it mandatory for any professor or any faculty that deals with students,” said Tenreiro of diversity training for professors.
Mengual, for her part, said the diversity training was insufficient. “To be honest, I think it’s very passive,” she said of the freshman Diversity Day. “I don’t think it does much change. Part of it is because they have to do it, but once they leave that room, their mindset hasn’t changed because they didn’t teach them anything.”
She added, “Everyone knows you shouldn’t stereotype, but people still do it anyway.”
According to Mengual, the diversity training does not force uncomfortable yet necessary conversations and is too safe. “They didn’t talk about controversial topics. They would ask very vague questions and have very vague conversations where they didn’t go deep into the topic of racism. They didn’t go deep into sexism or Islamophobia,” said Mengual. “They weren’t specific enough for me I feel. And I felt they were kind of just saying ‘we should treat each other nice’ or ‘we shouldn’t say this.’ I guess that’s important, but that doesn’t solve anything.”
It remains to be seen what, if anything, Stern will do in response. According to Tenreiro, Stern has in the past acted independent from the rest of the university.
“Stern is completely separated,” said Tenreiro. “And it’s good and bad. It’s bad in that our culture is many ways separate from NYU.”
The school’s autonomy, however, also has its advantages, he said. “I think it’s good in that we can react to institutional change faster than the broader NYU,” Tenreiro said. “It allows us to be a little bit more flexible and faster when it comes to dealing with things like this.”
Still, Samad, the Stern IFG co-founder and vice president, was skeptical change would come quickly. “If there was a away to solve this immediately, it would have already been done. I can only go as far as educating people who want to extend their hands to me,” she said. “What I’m really looking for is a specific call to action.”
Samad said an administrator notifying a student that their behavior was not acceptable via email would be a good way to reprimand students who contribute to the Islamophobic environment in Stern. “Something like that I think would go a long way, [and] would be one step in the whole process.”
“And I’m not trying to say ‘expel a student, suspend a student,’ but I do think an email — just an email — would go a long way,” she said.
Samad said new policies should emphasize ensuring Muslims students feel comfortable in Stern and no longer consider leaving the school because they are left out of the fold.
“I don’t want a freshman to come up to me and tell me that she doesn’t feel part of Stern now, that she’s considering changing schools or transferring out because she doesn’t see a place for her in this university being a person of color and someone who wears a hijab,” she said. “For me, I want to make sure I’m leaving Stern knowing that freshman students feel safe, and that they don’t have the same experiences that me and my friends have had.”
