This article provides a comprehensive summary of the origin and escalation of the April 2024 pro-Palestine protests seen on Yale’s campus and calls Yale’s administration to protect the interests of their students in the face of disruptive protests.
Jacob Tyler
Assistant Editor, The Beacon
When freshly-admitted Yalies begin to rush the campus for Bulldog Days, it’s normal to hear the jubilant cries of triumphant high school seniors whose life-long dream of being admitted to Yale has finally become a reality, the sounds of music played to liven up the campus atmosphere, and the celebrations of family and friends.
What is not normal is to hear the cries of students decrying Yale’s investment in “the genocide of the Palestinian people.” However, this year has been abnormal, and there have been several major protests on Yale’s campus, the most recent of which began on April 13th.
Rising tensions on campus over the war in the Middle East officially boiled over last Saturday, April 13, when a group of approximately a dozen Yale students, known as the Hunger Strikers for Palestine, began a hunger strike to protest Yale’s “investment in genocide.”
On its own, this ended up being a relatively minor event, as only about a dozen students were occupying a tent that they had pitched in front of the historic Sterling Memorial Library. However, tensions ramped up as the week progressed.
On Sunday, the Hunger Strikers joined another group of protesters in occupying Beinecke Plaza. When Bulldog Days began on April 15th, protestors erected a “Books Not Bombs” bookshelf. This was dismantled by Yale Facilities workers at about 1 PM that same day at the request of the Assistant Vice President for University Life, Pilar Montalvo.
The University Spokesperson wrote that the dismantling of the bookshelf was required “to allow free and unfettered access, [to and from the Schwarzman Center].” The protestors countered this by moving their books to the very steps leading up to the Schwarzman Center and blocking them off with books and flags.
The protest escalated even as Bulldog Days concluded on April 17th, and tents were erected directly in front of the Schwarzman Center as a gesture of solidarity with the Columbia students who were arrested earlier last week for erecting a “pro-Palestinian encampment” on the main plaza of their campus.
Two days later, the Yale protestors tore down the American flag that flies high and proud above the Schwarzman Center, which includes the Memorial Rotunda and Memorial Hall. Together, these two buildings are “best known for its engraved remembrances of Yale alums who died in wars throughout U.S. history.”
On Saturday, the Yale Board of Trustees met to discuss a variety of university matters, and they needed to be escorted from the Schwarzman Center by the Yale and New Haven police forces to ensure that they were protected from any potential repercussions that could have come from their April 17th decision to not divest their “approximately 6,500 shares in an ETF that is invested in Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and other defense contractors.”
According to Yale News, “the university also spent several hours in discussion with student protestors on Sunday, April 21st, offering them the opportunity to meet with trustees, including the chair of the Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility (CCIR), and to avoid arrest if they left the plaza by the end of the weekend. They declined this offer and continued to occupy the plaza by the end of the weekend.”
In a major incident, forty-seven students were arrested Monday morning for refusing to leave the plaza and may be subject to additional academic disciplinary action. In an act of resistance, the protestors moved to the intersection of Grove and College Streets.
They blocked this intersection with their bodies, chalked the center of the intersection, and had speakers rally the participating students and citizens with a megaphone in the center of the intersection. The New Haven police department blocked these intersections ahead of the protestors, and their occupation of these intersections continued until Monday evening.
By obstructing the way to the Schwarzman Center and occupying Beinecke Plaza, the protestors have caused the University to shut down Commons, the largest student dining hall, and Yale has been forced to keep two of the residential college dining halls open later to compensate for this closure.
This has been a burden on both the Yale Hospitality team and the larger university community. Additionally, the blockade of a major intersection for an entire day affected the ability of many New Haven citizens to get to and from work.
These protestors, despite their claims to have been “peaceful,” have violated several laws and Yale’s free speech policies by occupying and continuing to occupy a plaza owned by the Yale Corporation even after the University asked them to leave several times, forcefully tearing down a Yale-owned American flag on Yale property, and, perhaps most egregiously, taking over a public intersection and forcing a halt to all traffic in that intersection.
The actions of the protestors would patently be classified as a disturbance of the peace because these protestors have created “a public and hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which they are not licensed or privileged to do.”
These protestors are not “licensed” to occupy the city’s intersection and to obstruct the flow of traffic in the early morning and, therefore, massively disrupt the lives of hundreds of students and civilians.
These obstructive demonstrations violate university policies, and the Yale Corporation is unfortunately complicit in the continuation of these protests. Although they have issued multiple ultimatums to these protestors, they have ultimately done very little to put an end to this “peaceful demonstration.”
Yale as a university has a duty to maintain campus order and protect the interests and livelihoods of students, and its student body must hold it accountable for doing so.