Words of support for peaceful campus protesters and for the administrators who have avoided violent crackdowns on them were heard from the Cambridge City Council on Monday, but a policy order to keep city police from taking part in protests bowed to a reality: The city must answer if an appeal for help comes from MIT or Harvard police forces.
City policies “call out specific mutual aid obligations,” City Manager Yi-An Huang said when the order was first presented April 30. “Whenever the Harvard or MIT university police request the assistance of the Cambridge police, officers will be dispatched.”
That’s a good thing, Huang said, because Cambridge officers will show restraint that outside forces may not. “Our officers are the people most familiar with Cambridge, with our community,” he said. “In the case where supportive action is needed, I strongly believe that we would want Cambridge police who are part of our community involved, rather than police from other communities or from the state.”
In a test of that happening at the same time as the council met, Huang may have been borne out.
Not long before the councillors deliberated, MIT students tore down a fence at the Kresge Oval to regain access to the tent camp they’d been ordered out of as of 2:30 p.m. Campus, city and state police were on the scene, which deescalated without arrests. Harvard students also marched down city streets to the home of their interim president without incident. Students so far face only administrative discipline.
Meanwhile, the council’s order wound up just asking for administrators to respect the rights of students to protest.
Changes in language
After councillor Paul Toner stopped a vote the previous week with use of his “charter right,” author of the original order Ayesha Wilson and her co-sponsors brought in a replacement that reflected Huang’s notes, the words of U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley and new guidance from the ACLU that “schools must recognize that armed police on campus can endanger students and are a measure of last resort.”
Pressley has noted that peaceful protest is a tenet of U.S. democracy, and “students standing for justice have often been a catalyst for much-needed change,” Wilson said. “Many of the rights we’re taught today are earned things from the sweat equity of students demonstrating on college campuses,” whose free speech should not be met with criminalization.
The ACLU guidance also showed up in an alternate order introduced by Toner and co-sponsors Patty Nolan and Mayor E. Denise Simmons that was never debated. Instead, the substitute from Wilson and co-sponsors Sumbul Siddiqui and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler was tweaked. References to “peaceful” protests across the country became “largely peaceful,” though a reference to “atrocities” in Gaza stayed, with a 5-4 bloc resisting calls to change it to “horrific injustices” or “tremendous suffering.”
The biggest change was from Nolan. She suggested adding the police obligation for mutual aid onto language about the city’s obligation “by law and conscience to uphold the freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly” safeguarded by state and U.S. constitutions.
The addition about mutual aid was adopted unanimously, and the final order with the changes passed with all but two councillors in favor: Toner was a no; Simmons voted “present.”
Public comment
The meeting began with an announcement from Simmons that more than 40 people had signed up to give public comment, and around 35 of those wanted to talk about the protests. At least a dozen – most identifying themselves as Jewish people, some with children attending MIT or Harvard – were upset by the protests, which they said made them or their kids feel unsafe because of what they felt was antisemitic language heard in chants or seen on posters.
There were also people identifying themselves as Jewish who sided with the protesters, among which are many self-identified Jewish students and educators.
While much of the comment was reasoned, emotions sometimes ran high. Political organizer Willow Carretero Chavez, a resident of Somerville and an undergraduate at MIT, said she’d been arrested at Emerson College last month in a police sweep that was “brutal and unnecessary,” with officers seen with bloody knuckles and in a van of arrested protesters “on them so tightly that they were going to vomit and pass out.”
“If you do not keep the police away from this protest, that’s what’s going to happen at MIT. That’s what’s happening at MIT right now. Do you understand that?” Carretero Chavez said. The prediction did not come true.
Only in Cambridge?
MIT student Zack Duitz, on the other hand, said he had video evidence from protesters reentering the tent camp that proved that they were not, as officials and commenters kept saying, peaceful: “While I was walking back to my dorm to come onto the Zoom meeting, I watched as protesters violently tore down a fence on MIT’s property,” he said. “According to the U.S. government, you can’t have free speech that leads to violence.”
A few speakers said they wanted Wilson’s order to be strengthened, not weakened, by amendments – that the schools disclose and divest their endowments’ financial holdings in businesses that support the Israeli economy, and that they drop all changes against protesting students. Among this group was Dan Totten, a former legislative aide to a retired councillor, who was annoyed by the possibility of the unheard substitute order.
“I predicted earlier today that Paul Toner and Patty Nolan would introduce a substitute order at the last minute. I was correct. They are both white supremacists,” Totten said.
The comment was mentioned later by Toner. “Being called a white supremacist when I’m offering ACLU language can only happen in Cambridge,” Toner said. “That can only happen in Cambridge.”
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The substitute order was also co-sponsored by Denise Simmons, who is black. I guess she’s a white supremacist, too.
How does one gently tear down a fence?
If the fence itself was preventing free speech from occurring then the action was justified.
According to the U.S. government free speech cannot be suppressed unless it is hateful.
Did someone call the fence names?
I’m confused.
And does anyone really care what the Cambridge city dunce-il has to say about this?
“I watched as protesters violently tore down a fence on MIT’s property”
How is tearing down a fence violent? Destruction of (temporarily effected) property isn’t the same as violence against people, which is what all those calling for the police to step in are asking for.
In a sign of how much things have changed, in the 60s students would trap boards of regents at meetings, smash windows etc and the coverage would say “there was no violence” because it was understood that property destruction and violence against people were different. That has changed for the worse.
Here is a photo of an armed occupation of Columbia in the 60s: https://x.com/jordangreennc/status/1786014011386962096?s=46&t=icK2vopVBZp5zp-pQfKZ-Q
*erected not effected
*Cornell not Columbia
Sam: My understanding is that the fence was a temporary fence, and was easy to tip over. I was not there, but the description in other reporting suggested no damage to the temporary fence from the process of going from standing to lying down (although I might have suggested simply rotating it 90 degrees, since then it’d be less likely to be damaged when people stepped over it).
Regarding hate speech, it’s worth reading this article:
https://undergradlawreview.blog.fordham.edu/first-amendment/hate-speech-its-protection-under-the-first-amendment-and-resisting-it-with-counterspeech/
Otherwise, on a couple of visits, the protests seem a lot more civil, mild, and respectful than conveyed on social media or TV. This game is worth playing (<5 minutes) to understand where the difference from reporting and reality come in:
https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
For avoidance of ambiguity: I am taking no sides on any issue in this post. Just clarifying factual issues. My comments on reporting on social media also don't refer to Cambridge Day, which has very high standard for journalistic integrity.
PLEASE do not try to read any implied meaning, coded words, or subtext into the above. There is none.