On the heels of student protests at New York University, a group of graduate students is asking University President Amy Gutmann to make a public statement on the events and clarify Penn's position on the use of force against students.
The student activist group "Take Back NYU!" - who recently occupied a student center for two days over concerns including tuition costs and the school's investments - accuses NYU of using "excessive force" against them, according to the group's Web site. No official evidence of such force has been cited in other news sources.
Graduate student Leif Weatherby created the Facebook group "UPenn Grads in Solidarity with NYU Civil Disobedience" to serve as a platform on which to write and share the letter to Gutmann.
A statement on the group's page says the students "deplore the use of state-level force in dealing with intra-university negotiations."
Weatherby said in an online message that his group has invited Gutmann to "join more than 170 professors at NYU asking that an independent commission be set up to determine whether unnecessary force was used in breaking up the protest."
On Feb. 18, members of "Take Back NYU!" occupied NYU's Kimmel Center with a list of demands of the administration. Security guards ended the protest after two days.
"We're going to be remembered as having won," said NYU sophomore and TBNYU member Maria Lewis. "We've got people talking about these issues, and the campus is really riled up right now."
But some criticized TBNYU for its disorganization and ineffectiveness.
"We at [Washington Square News] are among the many who feel that through their failure to organize effectively, TBNYU has delegitimized the power of the student voice while making a mockery of the very democratic ideals that they claim to defend," expressed a staff editorial in the Washington Square News, NYU's student newspaper.
TBNYU's demands included the public release of NYU's budget, the ability for student workers to collectively bargain, a fair labor contract for all NYU employees and tuition stabilization for all students.
"The issues the NYU group was addressing are ones we deal with at any university: transparency, investment practices, etc," Weatherby said. "I hope we can start up a more serious conversation about these things here at Penn."
Lewis expressed appreciation for Weatherby's group.
"We're in solidarity with UPenn grads," she said. "The student movement is not fragmented and isolated."
