NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Yale University students continued with the fifth straight day of pro-Palestinian protests on Tuesday, gathering in the lawn at Cross Campus.
“We’re just holding a space in community with each other. A lot of folks are gathered to study with each other, just hang out,” said Chisato Kimura, one of the organizers of the event and a Yale Law School student.
Kimura said some students slept on the lawn overnight, while hundreds of others joined back in on the movement during the day.
“We’re just having a really lovely morning in solidarity with each other. Recognizing what’s continued to happen in Gaza, and continuing to recognize Yale’s complicity in it,” Kimura said.
Kimura and her peers are demanding Yale’s Board of Trustees disclose their investments in any company dealing with weapons manufacturing, and then divest.
“Yale has refused to disclose their investments up until this point, and so that’s what we’re waiting for. I think it’s a pretty simple demand,” Kimura said.
In a statement Monday, University President Peter Salovey said in part, “Last night, we spent many hours in discussions with students, offering them opportunities to end the protest and to meet with trustees, including the chair of the Board of Trustees’ Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility. Students chose to end conversations with Yale College and graduate school deans and rejected this offer; they decided instead to remain on Beinecke Plaza with those who had joined them from outside the campus community.”
Monday morning, the university and Yale Police gave the protestors a warning to vacate Beinecke Plaza. Police said 48 students refused and were arrested and charged with trespassing. Some of those students will be facing disciplinary action from the university as well.
“Yesterday, the response to peaceful protestors, protesting and using their first amendment rights on this campus was to arrest 50 students. And so I think that seems to be the university’s response to a peaceful protest,” Kimura said.
Following the arrests on Monday, students moved off campus to a busy downtown intersection. They blocked Grove and Prospect streets for hours, before being asked by New Haven Police to leave at 5 p.m.
“As long as you are being nonviolent, you are free to express whatever opinion you want to, that’s covered under the first amendment,” said Kenneth Gray, a senior lecturer with the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven and a former FBI Special Agent.
That being said, Gray said Yale does have the discretion to ask protestors to leave when it goes against campus policy.
“It’s up to the university to decide at what level is acceptable and at what level is too much,” Gray said.
In his statement on Monday, Salovey said when the students and other community members refused to leave Monday morning, “We determined that the situation was no longer safe. Members of the Jewish, Muslim, Israeli, Arab, and Palestinian communities reported that the campus environment had become increasingly difficult. We then became aware of police reports identifying harmful acts and threatening language used against individuals at or near the protest sites. Some of the aggressors are believed to be members of the Yale community while others were outsiders. We will not tolerate such behavior nor any open violation of Yale policies that interrupts academic and campus operations. So, we acted consistently with the warnings we had given over several days and escorted the protesters from the plaza.”
So far on Tuesday, despite campus security surrounding the protestors and other officers stationed in other parts of campus, police have not made any more moves. And the students, don’t plan to either.
“I think we’ve made it pretty clear to them that if they did disclose we would start considering meeting with them. Once they’re ready to negotiate in good faith, we’re absolutely ready, and we’ve been ready for months to do that,” Kimura said.
FOX61 did reach out to the university for an updated comment Tuesday, but did not hear back.
In response to Monday’s protests, the Executive Director of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale Uri Cohen, said, “The last week has been more difficult for Jewish students than any week at Yale in recent memory for members of Yale and New Haven’s Jewish communities. We respect the rights of all to express their views, but this week the campus environment crossed the line into open antisemitism. Chants calling for the death of Jews worldwide is not acceptable anywhere, and certainly not at Yale. Violence should be intolerable, and yet these protests generated Yale’s first anti-Jewish violence. It’s an extremely disturbing and unacceptable development. We call on the entire campus community to return to our normal ways: listening, respecting, and learning from each other as a core methodology for making the world better. This weekend’s protests made the world worse, and continued millennia-long history of blaming Jews everywhere for world events they do not control, influence, or necessarily agree with. Our Jewish community is diverse in its views on all kinds of things, especially regarding the current conflict. However, no amount of internal disagreement can justify calls for violence or its being carried out. We look forward to continuing to work with the Yale administration and campus allies to restore the campus climate to once again being excellent for Jewish life as it was before these protests began.”
In response to concerns from the Jewish community, the protestors said they don’t want anyone to feel unsafe or uncomfortable and that those fears do need to be addressed. They also pointed out that many people from multiple different organizations are joining in on the movement, including some Jewish students.
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Julia LeBlanc is a reporter at FOX61 News. She can be reached at jleblanc@fox61.com. Follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram.
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