BU, Harvard students protest arrests of Columbia University pro-Palestinian demonstrators - The Boston Globe (2024)

“If we see [arrests] and we stop protesting things, they won. They don’t have to do anything, we’re self regulating,” Aaran said. “It’s not an option to let those arrests stop us from protesting.”

As a crowd of more than 50 BU students marched throughout campus beginning at Marsh Plaza, they raised signs reading “Free Palestine,” banged on plastic bins with wooden drumsticks, and shouted chants through megaphones. Demonstrators stopped briefly outside the university’s administrative center, whose doors were blocked by two police officers.

Later in the afternoon at Harvard, a few hundred students gathered outside the Science Center, then marched through Harvard Yard, making stops outside the University Hall, the Widener Library, and Massachusetts Hall, the administrative building that houses the office of Interim President Alan Garber.

Their voices resounded throughout the yard as they chanted, “Free Palestine” and “Shut it down,” among other mantras. Several students waved Palestinian flags while others held canvas banners painted with messages reading “Harvard out of occupied Palestine” and “Stop the genocide in Gaza.”

Addressing the students gathered outside the Science Center, Lea Kayali, a Harvard law student, commended the arrested students at Columbia for their commitment to the cause.

“We will take up the mantel that Columbia has given us, including here in Boston and Cambridge at Harvard,” Kayali said through a megaphone. “You cannot arrest the movement. You cannot suspend the movement.”

At BU, protesters attempted to enter the George Sherman Union building, a student hub with a food hall, but after talking with university police officers outside the building, they didn’t enter.

“Pro-Palestinian students are most heavily targeted by the administration,” said Eliana González, a BU senior studying psychology, as the rally marched down Commonwealth Avenue past swarms of students walking between classes.

“The point of these protests is to disrupt and to bring awareness,” González said.

To González, the attention from university officials and campus police on student activists is not the aim of the demonstrations, but shows that their protests are “working” to garner attention.

There were no known arrests from today’s protests at MIT, BU and Harvard.

While arrests and disciplinary actions against pro-Palestinian students on other campuses loom in the background of local activism, some students demonstrating Friday said they’re not intimidated away from continuing to protest.

“We know that they use it as a scare tactic — and it obviously is scary. Being doxxed is not fun — it’s terrifying, it sucks,” said Anjali Katta, a Harvard law student. Still, “I’m very certain that we’re on the right side of history.’

For Angela Li, another Harvard law student who attended the rally with Katta, the privilege of attending Harvard adds an extra layer of security — and motivation.

“Even if I do end up with a disciplinary thing on my record, I will just have to explain that in a future job interview,” Li said. “And if they have an issue with that, that might not be a place where I would thrive anyway.”

“Being at this institution grants me so much privilege and so much of a safety net that it would be a shame to not use that privilege to do a risky thing that maybe someone else wouldn’t be able to do.”

New York Mayor Eric Adams said the city was asked in writing by Columbia officials to remove the encampment.

“Students have a right to free speech, but do not have a right to violate university policies and disrupt learning on campus,” Adams said.

But some BU students on Friday condemned the response from some university and public officials to regulate when, where, and how students demonstrate.

“Protests are inherently disruptive,” said Kellie Finley-Call, a graduate student at BU’s school of theology. “That’s the point.”

Friday’s protest at BU also came amid a work stoppage from BU graduate student workers, who went on strike March 25. As the pro-Palestinian rally chanted outside the George Sherman Union building, a group of striking grad workers picketed just down the street, calling for a pay increase and other benefits in their new contract.

To Finley-Call, who said she supports the strike but has not withheld labor because she works in the university’s food pantry, the two movements on campus — for a ceasefire in Gaza and for the graduate workers union’s demands — are interrelated.

“Everybody’s liberation is tied up together,” Finley-Call said. “I think that both the push to get a fair contract for grad workers and the demand that BU divest ... are both moral demands that students are making. And BU needs to rise to the occasion.”

Madeline Khaw can be reached at maddie.khaw@globe.com. Follow her @maddiekhaw.