New York University (NYU)

NYU has faced controversy over campus politics and antisemitism, including a federal lawsuit brought by Jewish students that the university settled in July 2024 after the students alleged that NYU had failed to adequately address antisemitism following the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks on the state of Israel. ⁵

Background

New York University (NYU) was incorporated by the New York State Legislature in 1831 as the University of the City of New York and adopted the name NYU in 1896. ⁶ The university initially operated in lower Manhattan before establishing a permanent building near Washington Square in 1835 and later opening its University Heights campus in the Bronx in the 1890s. ^{7  8}

NYU experienced several financial difficulties during the late 1960s and early 1970s as enrollment declined and operating deficits increased. ⁹ In 1973, the university sold its University Heights campus to the City University of New York for use by Bronx Community College and transferred its engineering school to the Polytechnic Institute of New York. ¹⁰ NYU later reestablished an engineering school through an affiliation with Polytechnic University beginning in 2008, followed by a full merger in 2014. ¹¹

Beginning in the 2000s, NYU also expanded its international presence through degree-granting campuses outside the United States. The university announced a partnership with the government of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, in 2007 and enrolled the first class at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2010. It later announced a partnership in Shanghai, China, in 2011 and began enrolling students at NYU Shanghai in 2013. ^{12  13}

Advocacy

Elections and Democracy

New York University’s (NYU) William J. Brennan Center for Justice has operated as an independent law and policy organization affiliated with NYU School of Law since its establishment in 1995. ¹⁴ NYU Law faculty have served on the Brennan Center’s board, students have worked for the center through internships and the Brennan Center Public Policy Advocacy Clinic, and the organization has held events and other programming at the law school. ³

The Brennan Center has advocated left-of-center voting laws, campaign-finance restrictions, redistricting methods, criminal justice policies, executive power regulations, and changes to the federal judiciary. ¹⁵ Its NYU Law clinic trained students in strategies including coalition organizing, lobbying, drafting legislation and regulations, media campaigns, fundraising, and litigation while requiring students to perform fieldwork on Brennan Center projects. ¹⁶

In 2021, Brennan Center president Michael Waldman testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee regarding voting laws and redistricting, while in 2022 the center’s senior director of the elections and government program Daniel Weiner testified in favor of the DISCLOSE Act, legislation intended to expand disclosure requirements for spending related to federal elections. ^{17  18} In May 2024, Waldman testified before the U.S. House Administration Committee during a hearing concerning legislation requiring documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, where he opposed claims that noncitizen voting represented a significant threat to federal election integrity. ¹⁹

NYU itself has also operated NYU Votes, a university-wide voter-registration and turnout initiative initially established for the 2018 midterm elections. ²⁰ During the 2024 presidential election, the university recruited faculty, administrators, and students to serve as NYU Votes Ambassadors, distributed voter-registration information, organized tabling and other outreach, and partnered with the left-of-center voter outreach platform Motivote platform to encourage students to register and vote. ²¹

Environmental Policy and the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center

NYU School of Law established the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center (State Impact Center) in 2017 with initial support from the Bloomberg Family Foundation (Bloomberg Philanthropies) to assist state attorneys general pursuing environmental, climate, and clean-energy policies. ⁴ The center was launched shortly after the beginning of the first Trump administration and was structured to provide state attorneys general with legal, analytical, and communications assistance related to federal environmental regulations and other energy-policy disputes. ²²

The state impact center has operated a fellowship program, through which participating state attorneys general hired NYU-funded lawyers as special assistant attorneys general to work on environmental and energy matters. ²³ NYU paid the fellows’ salaries and benefits, while the attorneys general offices selected and supervised them and the fellows owed their legal duty of loyalty to the government offices in which they served. ²⁴ As of 2026, the center reported that NYU fellows had served in the offices of the attorneys general of Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C. ²⁵ Critics of the arrangement claimed that privately funded attorneys were performing government legal work advancing policies supported by the program’s donor. In 2019, CommonWealth Beacon reported that Bloomberg-funded NYU fellows were working in Democratic attorneys general offices and that critics had also questioned whether private organizations should finance attorneys exercising state law-enforcement authority. ²⁶ In 2017, the Washington Post previously reported that Bloomberg Philanthropies provided nearly $6 million to establish the center and that the program was intended in part to bolster state challenges to the first Trump administration’s efforts to undo certain environmental regulations. ²²

In 2025, the center tracked and publicized litigation brought by 18 Democratic attorneys general challenging the second Trump administration’s halt on federal approvals for wind-energy projects, and center executive director Bethany Davis Noll publicly criticized the administration’s policy while supporting the states’ litigation. ²⁷ As of 2026, the center maintained a database tracking hundreds of state-attorney-general actions involving climate, energy, environmental regulation, and litigation against or in defense of federal administrations. ²⁸

NYU Law also expanded its environmental advocacy through the Environmental and Climate Justice Initiative, a joint project of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law (CRIL) and the Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy and Land Use Law. ²⁹ During 2025 and 2026, the initiative submitted comments opposing environmental and civil-rights regulatory changes by the second Trump administration, provided legal assistance to environmental organizations facing terminated federal grants, and pursued administrative and court filings involving Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policies. ³⁰

Race and Criminal Justice

NYU School of Law established the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law (CRIL) in 2017, and the center has subsequently engaged in policy advocacy, litigation, research, and organizing concerning policing, incarceration, parole, surveillance, housing, transportation, and environmental policy. ³¹ Its materials have argued that racism was embedded in American legal institutions and have endorsed dismantling or abolishing laws and systems that the center claims perpetuate racial inequality. ³²

CRIL became a steering-committee member of the People’s Campaign for Parole Justice, a New York coalition advocating legislation intended to increase parole eligibility and release, particularly for older prisoners. ³³ CRIL also operated a Pretrial Abolition Lab whose work included developing litigation and policy strategies and studying alternatives intended to replace pretrial incarceration. ³⁴

A 2025 New York State Senate bill concerning parole decisions cited a November 2024 CRIL report alleging racial disparities in parole-release rates as support for changing the standards applied by the state parole board. ³⁵

In 2020, the New York City Police Department identified the NYU center among organizations that submitted comments regarding proposed revisions to the NYPD disciplinary system, noting that many comments received from advocacy organizations were highly critical of existing policing practices. ³⁶ The center later supported policy proposals addressing crime surveillance and automated technology, including a model “Data Justice Act” intended to restrict government collection and use of crime information and a legislative tracker monitoring state and federal bills regulating surveillance and law-enforcement technology. ³⁷

In 2019, CRIL and an NYU Law civil-rights clinic submitted testimony to New York legislators regarding the reconstruction of Interstate 81 in Syracuse, calling for state policymakers to make racial considerations part of transportation planning, while other center projects addressed what it characterized as discriminatory housing and infrastructure policies. ³⁸

Abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

NYU School of Law has also supported abortion-rights and Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) advocacy through its Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center and Reproductive Justice Clinic. The law school stated that the clinic and Birnbaum Center worked together on legal projects, policy advocacy, scholarship, and public communications concerning abortion and other reproductive issues. ³⁹

In 2025, the Birnbaum Center became the institutional home of the ERA Project, later renamed the Marcy Syms Equality Initiative, which had previously operated at Columbia Law School. ⁴⁰ The initiative advocated adding the ERA to the U.S. Constitution, supported state ERA campaigns, and developed legal arguments seeking to use certain alleged constitutional protections to advance abortion rights following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. ⁴¹

The law school’s Reproductive Justice Clinic, established in 2013, has worked with outside abortion-rights organizations on litigation and advocacy projects. ⁴² NYU Law has also hosted programming criticizing abortion restrictions after Dobbs, including a 2024 event featuring abortion-rights writer Jessica Valenti, Pregnancy Justice, and New Yorkers for Equal Rights, the coalition supporting New York’s 2024 Equal Rights Amendment ballot measure. ⁴³

Controversies

Antisemitism Lawsuit and Commencement Controversy

In November 2023, three Jewish New York University (NYU) students filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the university had failed to address antisemitism on campus following the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on the state of Israel. The students accused NYU of violating federal civil-rights law by unevenly enforcing its anti-discrimination policies, while NYU denied the allegations and argued that it had taken measures to address antisemitic incidents on campus. ^{44  5} NYU settled the lawsuit in July 2024 for undisclosed monetary terms and agreed to establish a Title VI coordinator to oversee discrimination and harassment complaints. ⁴⁵

In May 2025, the university temporarily withheld the diploma of Gallatin School graduate Logan Rozos after he used his graduation speech to accuse the United States of supporting genocide alongside Israel against Palestinians. NYU claimed Rozos had misrepresented the speech he intended to deliver and pursued disciplinary action, while faculty and free-speech advocates criticized the university’s response. ^{46  47}

NYU Abu Dhabi Migrant-Worker Abuses

NYU was criticized over its alleged treatment of migrant laborers involved in constructing its Abu Dhabi campus after reports alleged that some workers had paid recruitment fees, surrendered passports, received lower wages than promised, and lived in substandard housing despite labor protections established for the project. In 2014, NYU and its Abu Dhabi partner, Tamkeen, subsequently commissioned Nardello and Company to review the allegations. ⁴⁸

The investigation conducted in 2015 found that flaws in the compliance system left approximately one-third of the roughly 30,000 workers involved in construction outside the project’s labor protections and corroborated several allegations involving wages, passport retention, housing, and recruitment fees. NYU and Tamkeen later agreed to provide payments to workers who had been excluded from the monitoring program or had not received wages required under the project’s standards. ^{49  50}

Financials

According to New York University’s (NYU) 2024 tax filing, the university reported approximately $11.62 billion in revenue, $11.11 billion in expenses, and over $8.7 billion in net assets. The university reported approximately $9.021 billion in program-service revenue, including tuition, medical, and other university-related revenue, as well as $1.72 billion in contributions and grants.  ⁵¹

NYU also administered federal funding, as according to its 2024 federal awards audit, the university reported approximately $1.57 billion in federal-award expenditures, including approximately $805.3 million through federally supported research and development programs and approximately $699.3 million through federal student-aid programs. The student-aid total included approximately $603.2 million in federal direct student loans, while the university’s research funding included support from agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and Department of Energy.  ⁵²

Leadership

As of 2026, Linda G. Mills is the president of New York University (NYU). Mills assumed this position in July 2023 after previously working as the university’s vice chancellor and senior vice provost for global programs and university life and founding NYU’s Center on Violence and Recovery. ⁵³

As of 2026, Georgina Dopico is NYU’s provost. Dopico assumed this position after being appointed to the position in June 2024 following nearly two years as interim provost. ⁵⁴