As seen in the Washington Square News.
Members of the Tuition Reform Action Coalition spray-painted snow in Washington Square Park yesterday afternoon in protest of NYU President John Sexton’s Jan. 31 letter rejecting the coalition’s call to align the rate of tuition hikes with the rate of inflation.
The message, which said, “Make NYU affordable and stop tuition hikes,” was sprayed on the east side of the park by four student coalition members between 2 and 3 p.m. Messages also appeared in front of Gould Plaza, Weinstein residence hall and West 4th Street, CAS junior and group founder Asaf Shtull-Trauring said.
“We wanted to send our message in a visual medium and get the message out as much as possible to students,” Shtull-Trauring said.
In his response letter, Sexton said that though the university shares the coalition’s vision in making NYU more affordable, the tuition hikes are based on the “cost of education,” and is partly the result of NYU’s small endowment relative to leading universities like Harvard and Princeton, which have endowments nearly 30 times the size of NYU’s.
The group’s original plan was to use chalk to write messages on the sidewalk, but it instead took advantage of snow on the ground, Shtull-Trauring said.
“This is one step in many actions that the coalition is planning on doing in order to both get our message out and actually put more and more pressure on the university to get student voices heard and to be taken seriously,” he said.
–with Liz Skalka