Protest Tents Return To Yale’s Campus

(Updated with comment from Yale) Forty tents have popped up on Yale’s Cross Campus as a group of pro-Palestinian protesters have set up another encampment — one week after Yale police made arrests and cleared a previous one that stood on Beinecke Plaza.

That new encampment emerged Sunday afternoon, after more than 1,500 protesters from across the state marched through the Green and the streets of downtown to express their outrage about Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

On Yale’s campus, more than 250 people formed a human chain around the tents to prevent the university from removing them and the police from arresting the occupants. (As of 6 p.m., the human chain around the new encampment was gone, as protesters moved to occupy the upper courtyard of Cross Campus.)

The new encampment comes roughly a week after 48 people, including 44 Yale students, were arrested by Yale police for refusing to move out of the now-cleared Beinecke encampment.

This new tent encampment at Yale was put up by a group called OccupyYale. Organizers put up a sign with demands for the university. Those demands include that the university ​“disclose all financial investments” in Israel, ​“divest from genocide and war profiteering and reinvest in New Haven.”

Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell told the Independent as of 5 p.m. that there are currently no plans to clear the encampment or make arrests. Campbell said that he is waiting for a decision from senior administrators on what to do.

At around 11 p.m. Sunday, a university spokesperson told the Independent that the student protesters have been asked to remove their tents because they ​“violate the university’s policy, and they have been reminded of the university’s policies on the use of outdoor space, postering and chalking, and the use of amplified sound.”

The Yale spokesperson continued: ​“Students who continue to occupy Cross Campus without regard for university policies risk university discipline, arrest, or re-arrest. Discipline could include suspension.

Craig Birckhead-Morton, a senior at Yale involved with the OccupyYale movement, was one of the 44 students arrested at Beinecke Plaza last Monday. He said this new encampment has been set up because the university is not willing to disclose or divest from investments in Israel, and because it’s unwilling to drop disciplinary action and criminal trespassing charges against the 44 students who were arrested on Monday.

“They have been taking down our art, they have been preventing us from holding teach-ins, they have prevented us from having speakers,” Birckhead-Morton said. ​“So the encampment is back, and we’re not leaving.”

All 48 people who were arrested last Monday during the clearing of the Beinecke encampment were released and given summons to appear in state court on May 8 at 9 a.m.

Last Monday night, most of the core organizers of Occupy Beinecke, which was the group that organized the original Beinecke encampment, stepped down from their leadership role and handed the baton to Occupy Yale.

The core organizers of the Occupy Beinecke movement were largely students at the university. The new group of organizers includes graduate students at the school as well as members of New Haven and Connecticut pro-Palestinian organizing groups.

“While acknowledging the success of this mobilization, it is important to broaden it — especially in light of the prejudice Yale administration has demonstrated toward New Haven and Connecticut community members. Our movement is bigger than Beinecke Plaza now,” the organizers of Occupy Beinecke wrote to the Independent and posted online.

Protesters had been sleeping throughout the past week week in sleeping bags on Cross Campus. The university had made clear that they would remove anything that resembled a structure, like tents. University officials removed artwork and speakers throughout the week.

At 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, organizers of the new encampment asked reporters from the New Haven Independent and Yale Daily News to leave the inside of the ​“Liberated Zone” because ​“reporters have made people participating in the new zone feel unsafe.”

Around 8:30 pm, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis hand-delivered a letter to student marshals asking them to end the encampment on Cross Campus.

“I expect you to adhere to our university’s policies and expectations,” Lewis wrote in the letter. ​“Many of your fellow students are preparing for finals, and your unauthorized use of Cross Campus impedes their ability to study. Students are also reporting concerns about chants and other behavior of those currently occupying Cross Campus, including the exclusion of students from using parts of Cross Campus, a public space, unless they declare political agreement with the protesters.”

For a period of time, marshals of the protest had set up checkpoints on the entrances of the ​“Liberated Zone,” preventing people from entering if they did not adhere to the community standards of the protest. Marshals subsequently stopped doing this.

Also on Sunday evening, Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, the Jewish chaplain at Yale, sent out an email to Yale’s Slifka Center email listserv saying that the center has conveyed its concerns over the protests to university administration.

“All of us together are confronting the shocking reality that a group of Yale students has declared the center of Yale off-limits to those who do not share their political views — particularly since their intent and effect is to rid parts of Yale of Zionist Jews, among others,” Rubenstein wrote. ​“This is, and ought to be, a concern for every member of our community, regardless of politics or theology regarding Israel or the current war. We have conveyed this strenuously to the administration, and hope that they will act in this moment with a full grasp of its profound implications for our community.”