NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Yale students built a 27-tent “Books Not Bombs” encampment outside of a Board of Trustees dinner on Friday night, occupying Beinecke Plaza to call for military weapons divestment.
The university administration announced to FOX61 that no arrests were made, and the occupation continued Saturday.
Student protestors launched the ongoing campaign to demand that Yale Corp., the university’s board of trustees, disclose their investments in and divest from military weapons manufacturers.
A release on Saturday morning from the “April Action” group and the @occupybeinecke Instagram page announced the development, citing the Yale Daily News.
On Friday, students encamped outside of the dinner honoring outgoing President Peter Salovey to express solidarity with recent protests at Columbia University. They successfully shut the dinner down early, the release said.
Police arrived with zip ties and riot gear and told the Yale Daily News they expected to clear the plaza, but over 400 people made their way to the location within an hour to support the protestors. The release estimated that about 75 students and community members slept overnight on the plaza.
The encampment comes after a weeklong daytime occupation of the plaza, where students hosted educational programming ranging from faculty teach-ins to zine-making sessions, according to the release, which said several hundred people attended the People’s Tribunal on Friday evening to protest Yale’s investment in weapons manufacturers.
The plaza has a long history of divestment activism, as students occupied the space in 1986 to call on the Yale Corp. to divest from South African apartheid, the release said.
The administration offered students an opportunity to meet with Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis if they cleared the plaza, and students declined the offer, according to the release.
“We are tired of the trustees hiding behind administrators and advisory committees. We would only begin to consider dispersal if the trustees themselves agreed to face us,” the release quoted a protestor as saying.
The meeting with the trustees had not yet been granted as of Saturday, and the Occupy Beinecke “Books not Bombs” encampment coincides with a wave of divestment, ceasefire, and pro-Palestine protests on university campuses throughout the United States.
The release said that recently “over 100 students at Columbia University were violently arrested by the NYPD for their own peaceful ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment.’”
Organizers have made it clear to attendees that the mobilization effort must remain peaceful and nonviolent, and the release said it has to this point.
“We are here to defend students’ right to peacefully protest, and we stand in solidarity with our peers who have been arrested and suspended at Columbia,” Lumisa Bista, a protestor from the Yale Class of ’25, said in the release. “We condemn the mobilization of police against students who were demonstrating for peace.”
On Wednesday, Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility stated that it would not recommend divestment to the trustees because it had “concluded that military weapons manufacture for authorized sales did not meet the threshold of grave social injury, a prerequisite for divestment.”
The ACIR said the manufacturing “supports socially necessary uses, such as law enforcement and national security.”
The students responded by saying they “refused to accept a decision from a body with no decision-making authority,” and that they would continue to occupy the plaza until trustees announced disclosure and divestment or publicly justified their failure to do so, according to the release.
The release said the university holds thousands of shares in index funds with exposure to defend contractors and weapons manufacturers that facilitate the ongoing bombardment of Palestine, and that protestors said the (exchange-traded funds) are the “tip of the iceberg.”
They said that 99% of the endowment is managed by Wall Street asset managers who invest in weapons.
“I am here because Palestinian life and all life is precious,” said Adam Nussbaum, a protester from the Yale Class of ’25, according to the release. “We know that the slaughter of 33,000 people in Giza, including over 13,000 children, constitutes ‘grave social injury,’ even if the trustees have convinced themselves otherwise.”
In less than six months, Yale students have sent more than 2,000 letters to the Yale president and the ACIR urging them to disclose and divest from military weapons. Student protestors have hosted weekly vigils mourning the lives lost to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the release said.
Students also rallied outside Yale Corp.’s last meeting. On April 15, they erected a “Books, not Bombs” library, which doubled as an apartheid wall, on Beinecke Plaza.
The release said the structure was taken down that same day by order of senior Yale administrators but noted that the Occupy Beinecke coalition hosted educational and spiritual events on the plaza throughout the week, including a talk by James Forman Jr., a poetry reading by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natalie Diaz, and a Friday prayer by the Muslim Students Alliance.
Three student groups who were scheduled to perform at the ongoing trustee dinner canceled their performances in solidarity upon hearing of the encampment, the release said. It also notes that local businesses and community members donated food, including 30 pizzas, water, and other supplies.
Wesleyan students drove down to deliver blankets, according to the release, which added that protestors pledged to stay in the encampment until the Yale Corp. commits to disclosure and divestment.
In a statement to FOX61 on Saturday, a Yale spokesperson acknowledged that around 400 people gathered in the plaza on Friday to protest and advocate for Yale’s divestment from military weapons manufacturers. The spokesperson said some voiced their intentions to stay overnight and continue occupying the plaza until the university divests from such companies.
“One individual was detained but not arrested. The university allowed an encampment to remain on Beinecke Plaza overnight. The safety and security of the Yale community is a top priority during protests and peaceful assemblies,” the spokesperson said.
The ACIR noted on Wednesday that one of its key tenets is “to provide a forum where the community can share input on issues of investor responsibility.”
The ACIR invites engagement with the community through open meetings and its website and said, “Engagement from the community helps sustain Yale’s longstanding commitment to ethical investing.”
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Dalton Zbierski is a digital content producer at FOX61 News. He can be reached at dzbierski@FOX61.com.
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