Police Arrest M.I.T. Protesters After Suspensions Ramp Up Tension
Officers entered an encampment at the university early Friday after a 15-minute warning. About a dozen people were arrested.
Matthew Eadie and
The police cleared a pro-Palestinian encampment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology early on Friday and arrested 10 demonstrators, after days of escalating tensions on the Cambridge campus.
About 4 a.m., police officers gave demonstrators a 15-minute warning to leave the tent encampment, then began loading people into police vehicles. The arrests, which occurred while about a dozen other protesters chanted from a nearby sidewalk, appeared largely peaceful.
In a letter to the M.I.T. community Friday morning, the university’s president, Sally Kornbluth, called the encampment’s removal by police “a last resort” and said the ongoing disruption had made its continuing presence “increasingly untenable.”
“We did not believe we could responsibly allow the encampment to persist,” Dr. Kornbluth wrote. “We did not take this step suddenly. We offered warnings. We telegraphed clearly what was coming. At each point, the students made their own choices. And finally, choosing among several bad options, we chose the path we followed this morning — where each student again had a choice.”
The move to end the encampment came after several protesters were arrested on Thursday afternoon while blocking access to a parking garage.
The university had set a Monday deadline for protesters to vacate the encampment or face suspension, and tensions had increased in recent days after some students who the university said defied the deadline received notices of suspension.
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