Student protest at Johns Hopkins celebrates May Day as encampment enters third night
Student protesters at the Johns Hopkins University hammered stakes into the ground so they could celebrate May Day in the shade.
Well over 200 people gathered on campus in North Baltimore on Wednesday evening for a rally commemorating International Workers Day and to continue to pressure the school to cut financial and operational ties with Israel.
For the first time, protesters left tents up by the light of day Wednesday, lending the encampment, which has been continuously occupied since Monday afternoon, an aura of apparent establishment. University administrators previously tried to limit demonstrations to between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m., threatening academic discipline and potential police intervention for trespassing. Protesters on Tuesday night waited until the cover of darkness to set up tents.
Speakers Wednesday honored the victims of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, who were all immigrant workers, and cheered accounts of successful union drives at local Starbucks. Protesters traded poems and songs while lamenting mass arrests at Columbia University on Tuesday night, when hundreds of police officers stormed campus to make around 100 arrests, according to The Associated Press.
The student protesters received a show of support from their professors Wednesday when the school’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors sent a letter to President Ronald Daniels and the board of trustees that references a 2015 statement on academic freedom adopted by the board that protects the right “to speak and create, to question and dissent, to participate in debate on and off campus, and to invite others to do the same, all without fear of restraint or penalty.”
“We are alarmed by recent administration statements that still threaten disciplinary and even police action against students who are allegedly “trespassing” on their own campus,” the letter reads.
A few miles north Wednesday afternoon around a dozen students from Goucher College and Towson University held a pro-Palestine protest on Towson’s campus in a “designated demonstration area” on a field by the Towsontown Garage.
Students at Johns Hopkins are demanding that the university, which has 5,253 undergraduates enrolled, divest its endowment from companies that support Israel, including Elbit Systems, BlackRock, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Google. Students also demand that the school reveal all financial ties to Israel, lobbying efforts to increase militarized spending, and an account of the use of weapons and military technology developed at Hopkins, protest organizer the Hopkins Justice Collective said in a news release.
In addition, the students demand the university disband a cooperative degree program with Tel Aviv University and stop accepting U.S. Department of Defense funding to develop weapons through the applied physics lab.
Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry, and put over a million people at risk of starvation during widespread famine, according to the United Nations. Israel’s strikes have been in response to an attack Oct. 7 by Hamas-led terrorists embedded in Gaza that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 others hostage, according to The Associated Press.