An Open Letter to Tisch Dean Allyson Green: Please Stop

What are you doing???

Graphic by author.

All of us here at NYU are handling the pandemic differently. Some of us are using the time away to rest, catch up on personal projects, and grow as people. Some of us are becoming increasingly angry at the establishment for their failure to adequately address the problems we’re facing. Some of us are making TikToks. And some of us are NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Dean Allyson Green.

Over the past week or so, the student body of Tisch (particularly the Drama students) has engaged in a back and forth with the administration regarding tuition and Zoom classes. Aggrieved students argue that remote classes cannot possibly serve as an adequate replacement for classes that necessitate a physical presence in the room (like acting classes, or dance classes, or film projects, or etcetera), and there have been various calls for a partial refund of tuition, including a Change.org petition that at publication had approximately 1,700 signatures, and calls to strike by sitting out of virtual classes.

In turn, Tisch administration has responded with a number of emails stating categorically that no tuition will be refunded, and explanations of varying degrees of empathy and detail as to why that is. In the most recent email, in addition to doubling down on the message “we are not refunding your tuition,” Dean Allyson Green included a Vimeo link to a two minute and 16 second video in which the self-described choreographer and visual artist awkwardly dances and lip-syncs to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.”

We here at NYU Local would just like to say: what the fuck is this.

I mean,

Allyson.

What the fuck.

We get it. You’re stressed. It’s a stressful time. People are mad, a lot of them at you. But what the fuck are you doing???

We get that the financials of a private university are complicated. We get that you can’t just wave a wand and give people their tuition. It might even be the case that those students are in the wrong. Let’s talk about it! But even if they are, how could you possibly think this would do anything but piss everyone off? Like, did you think about this for even a second?

The video is not cute. It’s uncomfortable to watch, it goes on for too long, you end it by staring at the camera for a good eight seconds, none of it is working in the way you think it’s working. Maybe you’re a dancer, and the way you work through stress is by dancing, but the number of steps between that and filming and uploading this video to the internet is SIMPLY TOO MANY. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!

The TL;DR of it all is this: this pandemic is stupid, NYU administration is stupid, Tisch administration is stupid, and this video is supremely, supremely stupid. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch it 12 more times.