Law school students’ laptop messages included ‘Israel is burning people alive’
This past Wednesday, approximately two dozen Harvard faculty held a silent “study-in” protest at the campus Widener Library to protest the students disciplined for doing the same a month before.
That student “study-in” got participants a two-week ban from the library due to violating “guidelines on free expression and library use,” according to The Crimson.
Guards on the premises asked to check faculty members’ IDs upon entering the library, and at least 10 tenured professors had sent a letter to library officials asking if “the scholarly resources we need to do our jobs” would be denied them for engaging in the silent demonstration.
Faculty wore black scarves and “read texts on dissent, bureaucracy, and censorship” such as George Orwell’s “1984,” according to the report.
They also read from the University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities which Harvard had used to discipline the previous student activists.
Students involved with the “unrecognized” student group Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, donned in keffiyehs, sat at an adjacent table to the faculty.
Law School professor Andrew Crespo told The Crimson he gets that Harvard “has every interest in making sure that its libraries are quiet places,” but doesn’t believe “you can describe sitting quietly at a table reading a book as disruptive in a library.”
The following day, Harvard Law students held their own “study-in” at the Langdell Library where they displayed messages on the back of their laptops such as “Israel is burning people alive” and “Israel bombed a hospital, again.”
Participants at this (silent) protest also handed out flyers which claimed that security checking students’ IDs “is an intimidation tactic from the school to scare you out of your activism for Palestine,” and that “a silent study-in is not in violation of any existing university policy.”
Law student Irene Ameena noted in a press release she’d never before been asked to show ID for studying quietly. She added that “Harvard only resorts to threats when people on campus talk about Palestine.”
MORE: Harvard bars pro-Palestinian students from library over protest
IMAGE: The Crimson/X
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