Last week in Washington Square Park, New York University learned that its students were no longer content with forming Facebook groups and holding discussions to enumerate their complaints with the university. NYU students took hold of Kimmel Student Center, engaging the campus in a protest that included, at times, roughly 70 demonstrators, to promote the idea of socially responsible investment.

According to endowmentethics.org, “Socially responsible investing (SRI) empowers shareholders to use their assets for positive change. SRI encourages investors to consider the social and environmental consequences of a given investment, as a factor equally important to, and reflective of, the investment’s financial performance.”

Large universities such as NYU and Cornell own billions in corporate stock, and can reallocate these assets to send a pointed message to companies that they will not tolerate socially and environmentally irresponsible practices.

At Cornell, President Skorton has demonstrated the potential of SRI. One of his first actions as president was to divest Cornell from Darfur companies.

NYU’s students were asking for a student member of their Board of Trustees with voting privileges, public release of NYU’s operating budget with full release of university expenditures and disclosure of the university’s endowment holdings.

The specific demands of the demonstrators also included a Socially Responsible Finance Committee, tuition stabilization, fair labor contracts for university employees, 13 scholarships to NYU for citizens of the Gaza Strip and logistical support for the University of Gaza.

For reference, the Cornell University Board of Trustees features two student members with full voting privileges. Public universities are required to disclose their operating budgets.

Instead of being met with discourse and a table full of administrators, 18 of the students were met with letters that stated, “You are suspended from, and classified as a persona non grata at New York University.”

Cornell has a history of civil disobedience, with a notable parallel incident in 1969 where black students took charge of the Straight with demands for an Africana studies program. In 1985, a shantytown was erected between Sage Chapel and Barnes Hall in protest of the University’s investments in apartheid-era South Africa — part of a campus wide effort representing the longest sustained protest in Cornell history. For both incidents, the administration obliged. When the University announced plans to destroy Redbud Woods and replace it with a parking lot, eight students took hold of Day Hall to block the effort. Their demands were not met, but the University now understood that Cornell students would not tolerate such reckless development.

In contrast, NYU’s administration has sent the message that organized protest and passion for a moral cause will be met with force and expulsion. In effect, they are telling us, the college students of America, to avoid the next Kent State massacre and stick to Facebook. This publication disagrees.