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University of Chicago joins Ivy League peers in clearing pro-Palestine protestors amid student defiance
KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)
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Summary
The University has probably taken a leaf out of its peers in the Universities of California (as Los Angeles) and at MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Texas-Austin and others where police have moved in to remove encampments by protestors in the Universities’ premises.
After what seemed like backing off over the weekend, the University of Chicago, like those at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Columbia University called in the police and cleared pro-Palestine protestors at 4.40 AM Tuesday morning (May 7).
In an e-mail, the University’s dean Michele Rasmussen claimed, “The protestors left without incident and there were no arrests.” However by 8:00 AM, as the word spread, student protestors re-grouped and shouted slogans saying, “We will be back.”
The University has probably taken a leaf out of its peers in the Universities of California (as Los Angeles) and at MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Texas-Austin and others where police have moved in to remove encampments by protestors in the Universities’ premises.
Last week US President Joe Biden broke days of silence and finally spoke out on the wave of protests on American college campuses against Israel’s war in Gaza “There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos,” Biden said into cameras.
Also Read: New York police arrests over 300 protesters in crackdown on college campuses
“People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked. Anti-semitism,” he added, “has no place” in America.
At least in Chicago University, the demonstrations were by no means anti-Semitic, since several groups of Jewish students were also part of the protest as they have been in several universities. Nor have there been any violent incidents in the Chicago campus, nor any destruction of property.
The police action this week is unlikely to be the last page of the current unrest as defiant students have regrouped everywhere, especially at Columbia where, the University, after a show of force has allowed the return of the protestors’ encampments.
The students and faculty sympathetic to the Palestinian cause across the US have been demanding that their respective universities end all connections with Israeli Institutes and divest their investments from funds that invest in companies like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing that make military equipment being used in Gaza by Israel.
Also Read: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge shut by protest over Gaza
In Chicago, yesterday, a group of over 120 University of Chicago Faculty members held a press conference at the university’s main quad to express their support for the protesting students and to criticise the University management’s alleged threat of police action against the protestors.
Responding to a press release by the faculty group, the University issued a response saying, “It had not sent any communication regarding a midnight deadline for the (Gaza solidarity) encampment to end.” After this response, the early morning swoop today certainly came as a surprise.
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