Despite the threat of suspension, the pro-Palestinian camp at MIT remains intact

A pro-Palestinian camp remained in place on Kresge Lawn on MIT’s Cambridge campus Tuesday morning, although the university has told students they must vacate the tents by 2:30 p.m. Monday or face suspension and face other disciplinary measures from the school.

On Monday, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and other senior university leaders said they “still have a lot of work to do to resolve this situation.”

Earlier in the day, Kornbluth warned students who remained at the camp after 2:30 p.m. on Monday that they would be suspended. According to school officials, a written copy of that warning was given to students at the camp, prompting many to disperse, leaving only five people in the tents set up on the lawn. According to Kornbluth, many students remained in the area and gathered right outside the camp.

Around 2:30 p.m., according to MIT officials, numerous protesters from outside arrived in the area, in large part due to a call on social media by the MIT Coalition Against Apartheid, one of the groups that organized the encampment. Many other protesters came to the area for a “planned public protest,” Kornbluth said. MIT, Cambridge and Massachusetts State Police were present to manage the crowd.

Accordingly, demonstrators blocked Massachusetts Avenue for several hours on Monday Cambridge Police.

Later, around 6 p.m., a person jumped the fence that had been erected around the remaining tents, causing what school officials called a “flooding” and eventual entry into the area, according to Kornbluth.

There were no arrests during the protest, Kornbluth said.

Kornbluth said the decision to suspend students from the camp came after school officials met with student leaders from the camp earlier in the day when “it quickly became clear that their primary demand had not changed and we were unable to do so.” would be to reach an agreement.”

The student organizers’ main demand was that MIT stop accepting funding from the Israeli military for research projects Students said is “realistic, consistent with MIT values, and popular.”

Nationwide campus demonstrations began at Columbia on April 17 to protest Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which followed a deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7.

Militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 hostages. Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as part of its pledge to eradicate Hamas, according to the health ministry there, which does not distinguish between deaths of civilians and combatants.

More than 200 protesters were arrested at Emerson College and Northeastern University, while some encampments, such as at Tufts University, were voluntarily dispersed.

“No matter how peaceful student behavior may be, it is not right to unilaterally take over a central part of our campus for one side of a hotly contested issue and exclude its use by other members of our community. “This situation is inherently extremely unstable,” Kornbluth wrote earlier Monday.