Over 300 Cooper Union alumni are threatening to cut donations to the university over its response to a pro-Palestinian demonstration that left a group of Jewish students cornered inside a campus library in fear for their safety.
The graduates made the funding threat in a scathing Nov. 2 letter to Cooper Union that accused the school of being “more concerned with avoiding a scandal than protecting its Jewish students.”
The letter alleged Cooper Union’s director of campus safety of advising the NYPD not to enter the school library during the Oct. 25 protest, even as students made repeated 911 calls as pro-Palestinian demonstrators banged on the closed doors and yelled anti-Israeli chants in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack on the Jewish nation.
“It’s unbelievable that a rowdy mob intimidating Jews was not the scandal you feared, nor took action against. Instead, you put students in harm’s way to prevent the PR nightmare of uniformed officers escorting the protesters away from the building,” the letter read.
Video from inside the library during the protest showed Jewish students holed up behind metal doors rattling from the banging fists and chants of protestors marching through the hallway.
The demonstration had started on the sidewalk outside the library, but when the group entered the building campus security guards decided to secure the library doors.
“If it was truly peaceful, campus security would not have deemed it necessary to secure the students inside,” the letter read.
The letter said another message about the incident, sent by Cooper Union President Laura Sparks, “merely announced that antisemitism is bad.”
“Please try to imagine for a moment that it was any other minority group placed in the position of your Jewish students on October 25th. Your condemnation would have rang clear as a bell.”
Signers of the letter demanded the school condemn the October 25 protest, admit it had responded poorly and called for an investigation into antisemitism at Cooper Union.
“You can rest assured that alumni through the years will hear of your reaction to this letter. And should we deem it insubstantial, we shall speak even louder. We shall stop donating funds to the school. And we shall stop encouraging the application of young Jews to Cooper,” the letter reads.
“We know what happened the last time good people stayed silent. It is not too late to do the right thing,” the letter concluded.
Representatives for Cooper Union denied the library doors were ever locked during the demonstration, and disputed the letter’s characterization that the protest ever became dangerous while saying it “reached an unacceptable level.”
“There was no direct threat, there was no damage and there was no danger to any students in the school. The students were not barricaded, a school administrator thought it was prudent to close the doors,” a spokesperson told The Post.
“While we support our students’ right to peacefully protest and express themselves, a walkout on Wednesday reached an unacceptable level when protesting students entered a campus building and disrupted the learning environment.”
The school has previously insisted it was in close contact with the NYPD throughout the protest, and that the library was closed for about 20 of the 50 minutes demonstrators were inside.
The NYPD said they were present for the duration of the protest, and demonstrators did nothing more than bang on library windows for about 10 minutes.
Representatives for some of the Jewish students who were in the library dispute those timelines, saying the library was on lockdown for at least 40 minutes as students made repeated 911 calls.
Those students called for the firing of Cooper Union’s president during a press conference at the Cooper Union campus Thursday.