Earlier this year, John Leguizamo played a game of half-court basketball with a group of kids. A bidder won this chance to shoot hoops with the movie star through the Faculty Against Sexton Plan’s online auction, supported by a multitude of celebrities who call Greenwich Village home.
“I came to support the faculty of NYU,” said Leguizamo. “We don’t really have a lot of heroes in the modern world, and I found what they did so courageous and brave.”
The playful game took place on a basketball court in the Cole Sports Center, NYU’s gym that was built during the first year of the Reagan administration and to this day lacks air conditioning. On the other side of a thin divider, New York University’s basketball teams took on Washington University in St. Louis. Cheerleaders, pompoms and all, rushed into the court between plays, and a Bobcat, the school’s mascot named after it’s library catalog, danced and flailed its arms. On the side of the bleachers, a pep band performed appropriate pump-up songs throughout the game.
Putting down their instruments, the musicians returned to a quiet presence, often reading a textbook or scribbling in notebooks cast aside before the song. Other than the forced presence of the home school, the crowd’s loudest cheers and jeers came from the green-packed bleacher of fans who came to support the visiting school. NYU is not a sports school and never pretends to be so. Jokes about the football team, which seized to exist in 1953, seep into tours for prospective students and adorn the bookstore’s merchandize.
Back on the quieter court, Leguizamo, dressed in a red shirt with Greenwich Village written across the chest, spoke about his time attending NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Edged on by FASP members looking over his shoulder, he mentioned some 3,000 people who use the gym each day before calling out Sexton for not answering community outrage.
“I don’t know what he’s thinking. What are you thinking John? What are you thinking?” Leguizamo continued, “Come to my house. You know where I live. Look me up. I faxed you a letter a long time ago. You never responded.”
The theatrics satisfied Mark Crispin Miller and his comrades of Faculty Against Sexton Plan, who hoped the event would land some press attention.
Seizing the conversation by producing forceful allegations against the school’s administration has empowered FASP. Working alongside a number of community organizations, the group of professors have sought to halt and stall NYU’s expansion at every twist and turn. Their agenda has proven to be effective but at times presents only portions of facts.
Opposition to Sexton’s vision experienced a win when State Supreme Court Justice in Manhattan Donna Mills ruled the city did not have the right to appropriate three implied park-lands for the school’s expansion. Five other claims against the City and NYU were dismissed. Only the approval of the state legislature will allow NYU to work on this property in the future.
The ruling did not to protect the concrete dog park and decrepit, locked up playground in front of Coles. Therefore, the university claims it can move forward with the Working Group’s project. FASP and their fellow petitioners from the lawsuit called for NYU to go back to the drawing board, asserting that new city approval would be needed if only a portion of the plan were to be built.
To celebrate the judicial ruling, the petitioners held a press conference at the Greenwich Village Society For Historic Preservation, just before the start of the 2014 spring semester. Snow and ice still clung to the ground, and inside people crowded a small purple room. The mutual lawyer of the petitioners led the charge that day, calling up faculty members, community activists, celebrities and politicians to the podium.
When speaking, many skated over the specifics of the issues, relying on rhetoric sure to rouse a group of cynical New Yorkers. The idea of extending an olive branch to the university and working together, starting at square one, echoed throughout the conference.
“It is clear … that NYU itself is in serious crisis,” said Miller, “and it has everything to do with this disastrous, reckless, unnecessary plan, which is not an academic plan. It is not an academic plan. It is a real estate deal.”
Active members of FASP haven’t shied away from press coverage. Journalism seeks balance, but stories love a controversy, and using a quote from a FASP enthusiast injects needed suspense into stories about construction and space allocation. Bold statements, such as Miller claiming expansion lacks any academic merit, provides the color and embroilment every journalist desires. The words, opinion and ideas of FASP’s key member have shown up in the Post to the New York Times.
Their complaints, and oftentimes accusations, run far and wide, and while their words often seem outlandish, there is always an air of believability to what they say. These opponents are the teaching faculty of a major university, and thus are easily trusted, but critics of FASP question their credibility.
“They are perfectly entitled to a political agenda, but as you know Daniel Moynihan [former New York State Senator] said everyone is entitled to their own opinion; people are not entitled to their own facts,” said Maslon. “And I think there is a willful parsing of information that comes out — even yesterday.”
Maslon referred to one of the three emails FASP sent out in recent weeks attacking the Working Group’s final report. “Despite its professional authorship,” read the email, “we doubt it would survive peer review at any academic journal – or that its authors would accept such work from their students.” Mentions of the Zipper Building, a volatile term within the university, came up throughout the email. Yet, the Working Group did not recommend moving forward with the university’s previous plans for a supposed “Zipper Building,” as an architect has yet to be identified.
“If NYU needs academic space, and — at most – only 23.8% of that huge 899,000-square-foot building will be used for teaching, why build the rest of it?” the email continued. “This lack of an academic rationale for the Zipper building fatally undercuts the Working Group’s attempts to justify the vast scale and expense of the project.” The statement takes a limited scope on what qualifies as academic space. The auditoriums and performance spaces allocated for the performing arts did not calculate into FASP’s calculations; nor did student study or life space.
“I think that’s deeply offensive and misguided and shows a ruthless ignorance of facts,” said Maslon, offended by the ignorance of the theatrical art’s legitimacy and needs. “I would understand that if some community group in Alabama came up with that idea, but the fact that university professors at NYU in 2014 would take that view point is distasteful to the extreme.”
These emails are not the first time the two groups butted heads. A throng of FASP members crashed the Working Group’s first meeting to deliver their “Alternative Green Plan.” The short document falls 56 pages short of the working group’s final report but brings up the idea of the university expanding within different neighborhoods of the city, rather than the Village.
The idea of moving outside of the village, among a number of alternatives, earned the consideration of the Work Group but were deemed unsound financially, even if zoning regulation allowed it. The next meaningful communication between the groups came when FASP sent in a short email, posing seven questions.
“Not incredibly profound questions, but exactly the questions that we were asking ourselves and that we would work through,” said Madger. “But they wrote it as if we should already know the answers.”
“It was October. We had been meeting for a month,” said Madger, who believed the final report answered and expanded upon these questions. “We wanted answers to those questions also, but we needed data.”
Seeing the Working Group as a reinforcement of the administration’s desires, FASP chose to avoid communication. “Moreover, it seemed likely that our coming in to chat would then be spun as our ‘participation’ in a top down process whose outcome was foreordained,” Miller told NYU Local. “Just as our refusal to come in is now being spun as non-cooperation.”
“That’s not a cover-up,” said Madger, answering allegations that his Working Group administered its final report to defend the university’s former expansion plans. “That’s a completely rational conclusion to reach.”
The continued standstill between FASP and the Working Group exemplifies the unwillingness to communicate that burdens Sexton’s university. Willful, intelligent academics constitute both sides of the argument, and therefore every voice develops the thoughtful rhetoric needed to defend their stance on expansion.
During the months of deliberation, Madger would look out his home window and use his hands to estimate the size of the Working Group’s proposed building. Such construction would change the landscape of the block – perhaps even the neighborhood.
This construction would not be the first major change to the Village in recent years. Franchises moved in, local businesses closed down, and power players, including but not limited to NYU, erected high rises throughout the area.
It was in NYU’s Global Center for Academic and Spritual Life, the school’s latest building of metal and glass standing next to Washington Square, where Sexton held his Town Hall meeting. Only two years lie between Sexton and the end of his presidential reign. He plans to take a short sabbatical before returning to the university as a professor, but for now, Sexton continues to push his vision forward, securing his legacy.
Yet, the current contentious atmosphere of the university could threaten his greatest hopes for NYU’s future.
“I think 20 years from now what I would hope for NYU is that it would be — and I’m not going to say the best university in the world,” Sexton remarked, at the same Town Hall where he chatted with his global student from Abu Dhabi. “But I do hope in 20 years, NYU will be the most powerful magnet of talent at the university level.”
[Images and video courtesy of the author]