Dear Parents, Guardians, and Loved Ones of NYU Students,
We are looking forward to welcoming your student—and many of you, we hope—to campus for academic year 2024-25. I’d like to offer an especially warm welcome to our first-year students and those families who will be visiting our community for the first time to drop off their students.
New York City is the greatest city in the world, and NYU provides your student an outstanding education from faculty who are recipients of the highest scholarly recognitions—the Nobel Prize, the Abel Prize, membership in the National Academies, and many other honors—and who have catapulted NYU to rank among the National Science Foundation’s top 15 US universities in terms of research and development. Your child is part of a learning community that draws students from across the country and all over the world.
Last year was a challenging one in higher education. I understand that many of you will want to know what the University will be doing in response to ensure your child’s safety and academic progress.
At NYU, we believe that everyone has a role to play in creating a community where each of us and all of us may thrive.
We embrace free expression and dissent as precepts; however, for 2024-25, we are setting a new tone, one that emphasizes inclusiveness; our highest tradition of reasoned and reasonable discourse. In other words, to make our dialogue, even on topics of extreme disagreement, more constructive and less disruptive.
We’ve spent the summer preparing for the new year. In line with that, earlier today we wrote to our students about our
expectations and guidelines for the coming year. These are not new rules; the document is meant to provide clarity about our existing policies—direction that everyone in the community is expected to follow—and our intention to enforce them. We have zero tolerance for violence or threats of violence. Discrimination and harassment have no place at NYU.
We’ve also spent the summer enhancing our How We Engage initiative to help our community develop essential skills for productive engagement. As part of this effort, we will offer students a range of programs, resources, and trainings designed to provide concrete tools for meaningful dialogue and fostering understanding across our differences. A focus on our non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies will equip our students with the tools they need to engage productively with others. As we’ve shared with our students, while we may not always agree, we remain committed to choosing dialogue and interaction over division.
The vast majority of our community is drawn here to study, learn, conduct research, and pursue their degrees. For the safety of our community and for the sake of the majority who are focused on their academic pursuits, we will act decisively to minimize disruption and to prevent anyone from being made to feel unwelcome.
We appreciate the trust you place in NYU when you send your loved one here to be educated. Rest assured that we will be working every day to earn that trust.
Sincerely,
