NYU’s Independent Student Newspaper | est. 1973
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Monday, Febrary 12, 2018
Volume L, Issue 4
ARTS
FEATURES
OPINION
SPORTS
‘Black Panther’ Breaks Barriers On Screen and Off
Tech and Creativity Fuse in New Tisch Program
Liberate NYU Liberal Studies
Sporting Love: The Couples of NYU Athletics
ON PAGE 6
ON PAGE 10
ON PAGE 11
ON PAGE 5
NYU RECOGNIZES TODAY’S REVOLUTIONS at 50th MLK Week with Spike Lee
By ALESHA BRADFORD Staff Writer
During NYU’s 50th annual Martin Luther King Jr. week, social justice activists in fields ranging from journalism to comedy came together to emphasize a singular message — the revolution started by MLK is far from over. The campus-wide showcase, “The Revolution is Now,” drew a full house
Thursday night at the Skirball Center for Performing Arts. Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Diversity Initiatives Monroe France serves as chairperson for the MLK Week committee. He said that everyone has a role in making MLK’s dreams for social justice a reality. “Our hope [is] to inspire the whole university — and especially our students — to determine what their role is
in making a difference in the spirit of Martin Luther King and all the social justice trailblazers that have come before us and to continue the work to liberate all of us,” France said in an interview with WSN. “To engage in social change, to engage in our communities to make a difference through intersectional-intergenerational coalition of making a difference here in NYU and also more broadly in our world.”
The event began with a welcome and introduction by France before President Andrew Hamilton took the stage to award the 2018 NYU Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award to film director, Tisch School of the Arts professor and alumnus Spike Lee. “So often when our great people die, they try to sanitize them,” Lee said in his acceptance speech. “The radical stuff, they don’t want you to know
PHOTO BY ALESHA BRADFORD
about those speeches. They don’t talk about Dr. King being one of the first people to say the Vietnam War was immoral. They don’t focus on the poor people’s campaign. They don’t talk about why he was in Memphis when he got assassinated. He was there for the sanitation men, brothers who were on strike.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 2|
Hamilton Admits University Bungled NYUAD Visa Denials By MACK DEGEURIN News Editor
Nearly four months have passed since NYU Journalism Professor Mohamad Bazzi went public about his visa denial to teach at NYU Abu Dhabi — a denial, that he claims, was predicated by religious discrimination from the United Arab Emirates Government. Since then, another tenured professor has opened up about his own visa denial, multiple national news
outlets have reported on department boycotts of NYUAD and a swarm of educational and activist groups have written critical letters to NYU’s president. Nine NYU departments have also come out in defense of the two professors. In January, the Faculty Committee on NYU’s Global Network — which is made up of over 30 NYU professors, faculty member and student senators — drafted a statement addressed to NYU administrators summarizing the commu-
nity’s concerns and listed seven points of contention. Throughout the entirety of this process, the university has remained predominantly silence to the public. On Friday, that silence ended. In an email sent out to NYU faculty members, Hamilton acknowledged that NYU mishandled its internal communication with professors and laid out several new measures aimed at improving mobility within the global network. “In these two cases, we were
deficient in our communications to the individuals involved, and I regret that this exacerbated an already difficult situation.” Hamilton wrote in the email. “I am consequently committed to immediately improving how we deal with future cases.” Hamilton’s initiative was in direct response to the seven point requests laid out by the Faculty Committee on NYU’s Global Network. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2| COURTESY OF NYU.EDU