AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We end today’s show here in New York, where last night students and workers at CUNY, the City University of New York, peacefully occupied the school’s Graduate Center in solidarity with Palestine, renamed its library “The Al Aqsa University Library.”

PROTESTERS: We are louder than your lies! CUNY, we’re outside! CUNY, we’re outside! We are louder than your lies!

AMY GOODMAN: Al-Aqsa was Gaza’s oldest public university, destroyed by Israel’s bombardment. The students ended their occupation after a few hours, when they said they reached an agreement with the interim president at CUNY Grad Center to share their demands with upper administrators, including calls to divest from all financial ties to the Israeli military, remove New York police from campus and drop all the charges against the protesters, including those arrested last month, when NYPD violently raided a peaceful Gaza solidarity encampment on the City College campus in Harlem.

Over 500 faculty and staff at CUNY have signed a letter to the chancellor, Félix Matos Rodríguez, demanding that the charges be dropped against at least 173 people who were detained at City College, compared to 109 at Columbia, quote, “a predominantly white, private institution,” the letter says.

For more, we’re joined by a signatory to this letter. Alex Vitale is professor of sociology, coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, author of The End of Policing, his piece for The Nation, “Campus Police Are Among the Armed Heavies Cracking Down on Students.” And we’re joined by Musabika Nabiha, a CUNY alum and Palestine organizer, took part in the Gaza encampment at City College. We’re keeping her location private for security reasons.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s talk about the disparity in the treatment of the much more diverse CUNY university campus. Alex Vitale, you’ve looked at this.

ALEX VITALE: Yes. I think, on the one hand, you have very restrictive protest rules put in place by the CUNY administration, which just harbors a deep fear and kind of disregard of its own students, faculty and staff. And then you have CUNY putting forward much more serious charges towards their students than the Columbia administration or the NYU administrations did towards their own students. And this really raises some questions about CUNY’s views about their own students and their deep intolerance of student dissent on campus.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to ask Musabika Nabiha — you took part in the Gaza encampment at CCNY. Your thoughts on the administration’s refusal to negotiate on divesting from companies complicit in the Israeli apartheid state?

MUSABIKA NABIHA: Yes. The administrations, both the CCNY administration and the CUNY administration, which includes Chancellor Matos, have refused to negotiate with us, and instead chose to send in armed policemen to brutalize and violently arrest our protesters. And we know that the reason for this is that the demands that the students and workers are making are a threat to the university’s profit motive.

So, the encampment put forward five demands. The first one was for CUNY to divest its $8.5 million from weapons and surveillance technology that perpetuates the colonization of Palestine. The second demand was for CUNY to institute an academic boycott of Israeli universities that are complicit in this genocide and in the broader colonization of Palestine. The third demand was for CUNY to express solidarity with the Palestinian resistance struggle. So, this includes both uplifting and affirming the Palestinian people’s moral and legal right to resist their colonization by any means necessary, as well as ending the repression and retaliation of pro-Palestine CUNY students and workers. The fourth demand was for CUNY to demilitarize its campuses, so to get IOF members, cops, policemen and the U.S. military off of our campuses. And finally, the fifth demand was for CUNY to return to being a fully funded, tuition-free people’s CUNY that offers a fair contract to all of its workers.

And we know that the violent repression that we saw, you know, was not because of the tents or the flags or the banners or just because of the political education, the free food that we had at our encampment. It wasn’t because of that. It was because the encampment’s demands themselves proved a threat to the constant accumulation of profit and profiting off of genocide that CUNY is engaged in.

AMY GOODMAN: And are the charges being dropped? Is there any discussion of the charges being dropped against those who were involved in the encampment, Musabika?

MUSABIKA NABIHA: Mm-hmm, yes. So, we know that some of the misdemeanors and summons have been dropped thus far by the DA. None of the felony charges have been dropped so far from the encampment itself. And we know that the DA cannot prosecute, or would have a really hard time, you know, upholding these charges, if CUNY administration refused to meaningfully participate in the prosecution. So we’re calling on the administration to refuse to participate in the prosecution. And this is, again, why one of our demands is that CUNY stop retaliating and repressing its pro-Palestine students and workers. I mean, this is really the most egregious example we’ve seen of violent repression of pro-Palestinian organizing and views.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Vitale, we only have about 30 seconds, but could you talk about the Cops Off Campus Coalition and the significance, for instance, of Portland State students successfully getting a disarmament of their campus police?

ALEX VITALE: CUNY is spending millions of dollars for a security apparatus that fails to address the real security needs of students and is really there in moments like this to be a tool, a kind of private army, for the administration to suppress student dissent. Campuses should quit wasting educational dollars on producing their own police forces that just reproduce the same violence and the same kinds of overt control of protest activity that we see from the NYPD and other local police departments around the country. So, this is part of a national movement of young people saying, “We don’t feel safe just because you put a bunch of armed police officers on our campus. We want real services that meet our real needs.”

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us, Alex Vitale, professor of sociology, coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, author of The End of Policing, and Musabika Nabiha, a CUNY alum and Palestine organizer. We’ill link to the 500-professor letter at democracynow.org. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, for another edition of Democracy Now!