NYU Tours Harassed & Pelted with Eggs Amid Big Apple Homeless Crisis

By: Hellen Zaboulani

Prospective students and parents touring New York University got a very unfriendly welcome from the deteriorating Greenwich Village neighborhood.

As reported by the NY Post, last week several tour groups visiting NYU were harassed by beggars from the growing homeless population.  The college campus is located near Washington Square Park, the landmark which has become infamous for its rowdy homeless population and for drug use.   On Monday afternoon one student-led group was even pelted with eggs while standing outside the Goddard Hall dorm on Washington Square East.

In another appalling display, several groups witnessed a homeless person lie down in the middle the street, at West Fourth Street, in what the guide said might have been an attempted suicide.  “Every single day something is happening,” the guide told the Post. “Our duty is to sell the school, to showcase our campus and obviously being harassed is not something you want to deal with on a daily basis.”  The guide added that he has personally been been grabbed by a vagrant demanding cash.  The tours cleverly avoid the park and its famed arches, but to little avail.

Visitors to the historically prestigious private school, where tuition with boarding costs over $75,000 next year are understandably unimpressed.  “You can see them visibly disgusted and say ‘I don’t want to apply here, I don’t want to apply here because I feel unsafe,’” the guide said. He noted that, people shouldn’t dismiss the school “just because a homeless person asks for money on the tour.”

It’s not only the begging that is the problem, however.  Despite attempts to impose curfews and close off sections of the park, it has become home to out of control parties, unsanctioned boxing matches, drug dealing, and violence over the past year. In mid-March a teenager was stabbed in the head at the park at 2:30 a.m., after refusing to give his pot over to a vagrant.

Notwithstanding, last week NYU announced that it received a record 105,000 applications for the upcoming Fall and looks forward to an admission rate of just 12.2 percent for 2022/2023 applicants.

An NYU spokesman said tour guides are given walkie-talkies, receive de-escalation training and go out on tours two at a time in order to deflect “disruptive individuals.”  “NYU, in conjunction with other universities, has been surfacing safety concerns to the new city administration, and these incidents involving admissions tours will be among the issues we’ll raise,” said spokesman John Beckman.