Why Is N.Y.U. Forcing Protesters to Write Apology Letters?

While the university eventually moved to have the criminal charges against the students dropped, it initiated a disciplinary process against some of them (the university will not disclose how many) that seemed as if it had been conjured in the writers’ room of a dystopian sci-fi series. In order to return to the university, some students would be required to complete a 49-page set of readings and tasks — “modules” — known as the Ethos Integrity Series, geared at helping participants “make gains” in “moral reasoning” and “ethical decision making.” In a letter to the administration, Liam Murphy, a professor at the law school, called it “an intellectual embarrassment,” betraying the university’s mission as a training ground for independent thought and forcing students merely “to consume pages and pages of pablum.”

The Ethos Integrity Series was not the only command. Some students would be assigned a “reflection paper,” the details of which were laid out by the Office of Student Conduct. In it they would address several questions, among them: What are your values? Did the decision you made align with your personal values? What have you done or need still to do to make things right? Explicitly instructed not to “justify” their actions, the students were told to turn their papers in by May 29 in “12-point Times New Roman or similar font.”

In an email, John Beckman, a spokesman for N.Y.U., defended the protocols, explaining that these papers have been a common sanction at the university for at least eight years, part of an approach to discipline that relies on “restorative practices.” In this instance, though, the exercise cannibalizes the mission, favoring a will to dishonesty — inviting a charade of guilt. Anyone driven to protest is marching and chanting precisely as an expression of a certain set of fiercely held moral beliefs and values — not in deviation from them. Someone leaving her dorm room with a sign that says “Free Palestine” probably believes she is already doing what she needs to do “to make things right.”

As Ms. Garey put it, “I’m not going to apologize for opposing genocide.” The risk to her — someone who has finished her Ph.D. work — is the threat of a mark on her transcript, she said, for a failure to comply.

She and her cohort have had the support of various members of the faculty, who have condemned the approach as punitive and infantilizing, a capitulation to a corporate management style steeped in the art of reprisal and delivered in the name of personal growth. In a faculty listserv, this week, Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at N.Y.U. whose scholarship focuses on 20th-century protest movements, said that he could think of no instance from the campus demonstrations in the ’60s in which a university had so “coerced” students to declare that their dissent was “wrong.”