New tactic emerges in anti-Israel campus activism: Withholding students’ grades

Calls for professors and graduate teaching assistants to withhold assigning grades as a means to strong-arm university leaders into acquiescing to activists’ anti-Israel demands have emerged in recent weeks.

Pro-Palestinian activists at two major universities, New York University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, have launched campaigns advancing the strategy, and many instructors have said they would participate.

The tactic is called a “grade strike.”

“About 100 graduate student workers and faculty are threatening to withhold final grades until NYU agrees to remove New York City Police Department officers from campus, pardon pro-Palestinian ‘students, faculty, and graduate workers,’ facing disciplinary action and ‘substantively negotiate,’ with student protesters over their demands,” the NYU student newspaper the Washington Square News reported.