Police dismantled protest camps and arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian activists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Pennsylvania yesterday, in the latest crackdowns on demonstrations roiling US campuses.
Philadelphia officers in riot gear pushed reporters away from the encampment at the University of Pennsylvania before tearing down tents and tossing the belongings of protesters in a trash truck, the student newspaper reported. About 33 people were arrested on the Ivy League campus, Penn’s public safety department said.
A similar scene unfolded simultaneously at MIT near Boston, where student journalists reported that riot police arrested at least 10 student protesters before flattening the encampment and discarding their belongings.
The dawn raids were the latest efforts by school and local authorities to end such demonstrations at dozens of universities around the country.
Many university leaders have called the encampments safety hazards and sought to end them ahead of May commencement ceremonies, which draw large crowds of outside visitors to campuses.
Officials at Harvard University yesterday began issuing suspensions to students who were involved in an encampment on the Ivy League school’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, according to an Instagram post by the school’s Palestine Solidarity Committee.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth said that the 10 individuals arrested yesterday peacefully had submitted to police, but that the arrests came after escalating clashes between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters.
“It was not heading in a direction anyone could call peaceful,” she said in a statement, adding that “the cost and disruption for the community overall made the situation increasingly untenable.”
Since the first mass arrests at Columbia on April 18, at least 2,600 demonstrators have been detained at more than 100 protests in 39 states and Washington, according to The Appeal, a non-profit news organisation.
Similar protests have sprung up at campuses in other countries. In western Canada, police removed protesters from an encampment at the University of Calgary on Thursday, using “non-lethal munitions,” according to a statement from the city, which said the number of arrests would be made public today.