Today, more than four hundred faculty from across the country wrote to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, adding theirs to a multitude of voices calling for Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Brown to step down. A response to the NYPD’s over-reaching and indiscriminate surveillance of Muslim student associations along the Northeast seaboard, this is the first nationwide faculty response to the Associated Press’s reporting of the NYPD’s extensive surveillance of Muslim communities in New York and beyond. The call for resignation is based on a number of rights-abusing practices under Commissioner Kelly including the widespread, invasive surveillance of Muslim life, particularly on college campuses, and the skyrocketing numbers of stop-and-frisks by police over the decade. Signatories include Muneer Ahmad, Meena Alexander, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Moustafa Bayoumi, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Erwin Chemerinsky, Kathleen Cleaver, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Todd Gitlin, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Amy Kaplan, Rashid Khalidi, David Luban, Vijay Prashad, Bill Qugley, Bruce Robbins, Andrew Ross, Saskia Sassen, Joan Scott, Richard Sennett, Chris Tilly, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Howard Winant, John Womack, and more. Many of the signatories come from schools the NYPD spied on.
Read the full text of this letter here.
