Update: on Wednesday at 16:31, the New York Public Library tweeted a statement saying it would no longer be hosting the event

On 23 September the New York Public Library’s historic main branch – the iconic marble building guarded by stone lions – will host the inauguration of a new global youth forum. Timed to coincide with the United Nations general assembly and the climate summit, the invitation-only event has two sponsors. One is the UN’s Office of the Secretary General’s Envoy on Youth (OSGEY). The other is the Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Foundation, also known as the MiSK Foundation, of which Saudi Arabia’s crown prince is founder, namesake and chairman of the board.

Less than a year ago, the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and US resident, disappeared after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The US Central Intelligence Agency and a United Nations investigator have both concluded that he was murdered on orders from the highest level of the Saudi government – probably including Prince Mohammed himself, whose reputation has been in tatters ever since.

The crown prince has denied any involvement. But Khashoggi’s murder provoked enough outrage that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pulled its funding from MiSK, calling Khashoggi’s abduction and killing “extremely troubling”. And the Harvard University Extension School canceled its five-year agreement to reserve 100 of its 800 summer school slots for students sponsored by MiSK.

Prince Mohammed has been struggling to rebuild his global brand ever since Khashoggi’s murder. Hosting an event at a beloved institution like the New York Public Library (NYPL) – arguably the greatest research library in the world that is also open to the public – would help him launder his reputation at the expense of the library and the public it serves.

“I’m not going to help the Saudi crown prince whitewash his abysmal human rights record by attending his big event on Sept 23 at the New York Public Library during the opening of the UN General Assembly,” tweeted Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

According to its glowing announcement and splashy promotional videos – which prominently feature the library and the Statue of Liberty – the inaugural MiSK-OSGEY Youth Forum will offer a series of “hands-on” sessions to groom young leaders to “balance purpose with profit” and “create a better world for everyone”.

MiSK’s mission, according to its website, is “developing the human mind”. Its Institute for the Future promises to train a new generation to “Befriend the machines”, to “Make sense of loopy complex systems” and – most relevantly – to “Make yourself known with the art and science of reputation management.”

This naked boosterism is part of the crown prince’s two-pronged strategy: a public relations charm offensive abroad, coupled with a brutal crackdown on dissent and free thought at home, where writers and dissidents can be whipped, jailed and sometimes even sentenced to death for a variety of charges – including the possession of banned books, writing articles supporting protests, “insulting the King and the Kingdom”, “failing to obey the ruler” and “mocking the government’s achievements”.

The goal of the crown prince’s “reputation management” is to distract the public from multiple human rights catastrophes. These include Khashoggi’s murder last October; the jailing and torture of dozens of activists, including women’s rights activists who spent years pushing for the very “reforms” the crown prince is now touting as his own; and the Saudi government’s disastrous war in Yemen, in which the UN recently found the Saudi-led coalition and its western partners – including the US – committed widespread war crimes like bombing hospitals and other civilian targets.

“It’s no coincidence that the Saudi monarchy is pulling this PR stunt while Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would cut off US arms sales for Saudi Arabia’s bloody war in Yemen,” said Sunjeev Bery, executive director of Freedom Forward, a human rights organization that started an online petition calling on UN and business leaders to drop out of the forum. “When a dictator identifies and affiliates themselves with an American library, they are taking one step toward obscuring the fundamental nature of their tyranny.”

The crown prince’s forum takes place at a time when cultural institutions are facing heightened scrutiny of donors. The Metropolitan and the Guggenheim Museum have both stopped accepting money from Purdue Pharma’s Sackler family – formerly among their top donors – over the family’s link to the opioid crisis. Donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein led the head of the prestigious MIT Media Lab to resign; critics pointed out that allowing Epstein to associate himself with a marquee institution made a mockery of the Media Lab’s stated purpose of doing good.

In 2008, the NYPL accepted a $100m gift from the billionaire financier Stephen A Schwarzman, renaming the main branch after him. Schwarzman, a library trustee, has financial ties to the Saudi crown prince: his private equity firm, Blackstone Group, manages a $14bn infrastructure investment fund with a $20bn matching commitment from Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund. Schwarzman gushed about his relationship with the crown prince in a 2017 interview: “He’s a very smart, very energetic, very visionary person, and being involved with someone like that on a personal basis as well as institutionally is really fascinating.”

Technically, the NYPL is a private institution. But its flagship building, where the MiSK event will take place, was built on city land, with taxpayer money, and belongs to the city of New York. Over the mantel in the Trustees Room are inscribed the words: “The City of New York has erected this Building for the free Use of all the People.” MiSK’s youth forum is not open to the general public; registrants to the invitation-only event are required to provide their passports and photographs, presumably for vetting.

Using the library’s main branch to promote a despot’s private event betrays the NYPL’s founding mission of serving the public. “The NYPL was created and funded to provide a public benefit … to all citizens of New York and visitors from all over the world,” pointed out Michael S Hiller, counsel for the activist group Committee to Save the New York Public Library (of which one of us is president), in a recent letter accusing the NYPL of violating its founding charter by using library facilities for private functions. “It was not established to offer high-end catering and special event planning services to the wealthy and elite.”

But this is about more than just the creeping privatization of public space. With this event, the NYPL’s current leadership has gone from wedding rentals to a public relations extravaganza designed to gloss over torture, murder and war. As the former president of NYPL, Vartan Gregorian, pointed out, the library is “a treasured repository of civilization”. The Saudi crown prince, by contrast, jails people for expressing ideas and possessing banned books.

The NYPL has struggled to raise funds in the past. But today its endowment is at a record $1.2bn. Its board includes half a dozen billionaires, whose collective net worth, according to Forbes and other publications, is at least $37bn. Does it really need to sell its integrity to a dictator?

The NYPL should cancel the MiSK event. And its leadership should explain who approved this event, and why, to the public, which is surely a better judge of what company the library should keep. As library patrons and members of the public, we do not want to see a great institution – a sanctuary for ideas and a safe space for all people – hiring itself out to a killer of ideas and allegedly people.

Matthew Zadrozny is a data scientist and the president of The Committee to Save the New York Public Library, an all-volunteer organization