Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Yale Police Arrest 47 Students: A Symptom

A university is not an inner city, and thus should not be policed as such, as if students were hostile gang members in need of constant surveillance. On April 22, 2024, I was not a bit surprised in reading that Yale, which I had hitherto described as a private police-state on steroids, ordered its own private police to arrest 47 students that morning on charges of criminal trespassing on campus for having brought and set up tents days earlier. Even though temporary housing goes beyond political protest per se and the students could have returned day after day to Beinecke Plaza to protest—venting off stream that could be justified by the U.S. Government’s continued financial, military, and political enabling of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza—that Yale’s administration put the plaza under police guard after employees had removed the tents is indicative of a police-state mentality that is not conducive to academic pursuits. Furthermore, arresting students for criminal trespassing rather than simply removing the tents demonstrates an inner-city policing mentality that is out of place on a prestigious university's campus.

Alternatively, the university could have sent security employees rather than its private police force—and notice that both Columbia and NYU used municipal rather than private police! Rather than charging students with trespassing, Yale could have used its on-campus security to tell the students to pack up their tents as cleaning crews cleaned the plaza. “You can come back to protest, but tents are not allowed and right now we are cleaning the plaza from the weekend.” Some students had even brought tall wooden bookshelves with which to promote books on the topic. How Yalie! Boola Boola!

April 22, 2024 at Yale as Yale's private police force arrests students for trespassing (YDN)

Nevertheless, erecting tents and bookshelves is not political protesting. Had particular students refused to pack up, then the university could have called the New Haven police, whose legitimacy is solid from a democratic standpoint, to respond in a per person way. At the very least, the local police should have handled any local residents having tents there. It is entirely reasonable for a university to tell students (and especially local residents!) to remove furniture and tents from campus. Regarding New Haven residents who came to Yale's campus to "set up shop," Yale is not a state university. It would be highly presumptuous for a townie to refuse to pack up, but students should be handled differently, for they are neither locals nor even customers as their university status is academic in nature andthey should thus be dealt thusly. Deans rather than handcuffs, unless the latter are absolutely necessary as a last resort, should do the heavy lifting.

Such a draconian measure as saturating Beinecke Plaza with university police to do a mass arrest as if students on their own campus constitutes trespassing might fit an inner-city mentality, but on a college campus, the trust and stability of students at their school undoubtedly could only take a hit. Put another way, I doubt that Yale students looked at Yale police employees (and their ubiquitous vehicles on campus) the same way for the rest of the 2024 spring term. Certainly, claims by the police employees that they are there to protect the students would fall on deaf ears, as it should.

When Yale graduate students who were teaching assistants had been on strike sometime in the 1990s, while I was a student there, some of them had tents in Beinecke Plaza. I used to walk past them after eating breakfast at Commons (sadly, along with the advent of Yale’s police presence on campus at least as of 2023, breakfast was no longer served at Commons when I returned in September, 2023 as an alumni scholar in residence). Back in the 1990s, there was no hint of possible arrest for trespassing. Of course, Yale was not a campus saturated with security guards and Yale police employees back then; Sterling library did not have its own security force making rounds every 20 minutes or so, disturbing students who study in the stacks. Tents were fine (though not my preference).  A double-standard surfaces, however, 25 years later, now that Israel was being criticized. At the very least, the president of Yale had a personal conflict of interest that inadvertently played into the double standard. 

I contend that Yale students should protest the police-state mentality itself at Yale, and the resulting saturation of security and university police personnel and cars on and even off campus. A local resident told me in December, 2023 that Yale police regularly arrest locals leaving bars at night OFF-CAMPUS, and yet The Yale Daily News reported on April 22, 2024 that Yale police have no jurisdiction off Yale’s property—even on the local streets themselves that border or even run through campus, such as those that intersect at Grove and Prospect, where the sit-down protest resumed on April 22nd after the arrests. Yale police self-entitlement hardly stops at the edges of Yale's campus. It’s no wonder that Yale students walked into an intersection owned by the city just beyond Beinecke Plaza in preferring to be subject to a police force of an inner city to Yale’s private police state. Arresting young-adult students—many undergraduates still being teenagers!—for trespassing on campus for having set up tents is in my view unnecessary and thus indicative of a mentality of domination and even aggression of easy targets. It is not as if an Ivy League university is at all like an inner city, or populated as such.

The chief of Yale's department of police at the time had been the chief of the New Haven police department for more than a decade, and he participated in an Israel-led program for police as reported by The Yale Daily News on April 22, 2024. To be sure, he did graduate from Yale College, and more than a decade later, he received a degree from Yale’s divinity school, ironically a Christian divinity school. Even so, I contend that his policing at Yale did not reflect his having been a member of the Yale community, but, rather, his time as head of New Haven’s police department. I contend that Yale should not be policed at all like an inner city, and even hiring retired inner-city police employees risks having students treated very unfittingly. For one thing, Yale students (and thus alumni), employees, and faculty are vetted, whereas the residents of crime-ridden urban areas are obviously not.

Nevertheless, at Yale during the fall of 2023, a thug security employee stalked me three times on campus. The local creeper even hid behind a car to take pictures of me one night as I was walking down Prospect Street. Why does Yale hire local creepers who are too weakly constituted to know the difference between a university like Yale and an inner city? I had complained twice with photo evidence, but I soon discovered that a dean at Yale refused to get the bully fired. Get the thugs off the payroll! Where there’s smoke, there’s probably fire. Simply put, Yale is not New Haven. The other school is much better situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As far as the wildly excessive police presence on Yale’s campus on a daily basis, and even AFTER the tents were cleared on April 22, 2024 at Beinecke Plaza and then on the following day, I’m not the only Yalie to have left. A lawyer who studied at Yale and went on to teach there told me after he and I both had left, “It has gotten really bad there.” I knew he meant it in terms of the sheer meanness, but all I had to do was mention the constant police and security presence everywhere on campus and the guy was firmly nodding his head in agreement. Its certainly ironic when being so "in control" evinces things being out of control. Try squeezing jello in your hand if you don't believe me. Tightness gone too far.   

I submit that something has gone very wrong when an academic campus looks like a police-zone even after an incident has been ended. On April 23, 2024, the day after, CNN reported that Beineke Plaza “was closed and under police guard.”[1] If tents had really been the problem, the university would have allowed students to hold protests there as long as they were not setting up camp. For their part, the students should have given in on the tents in order to stay in the plaza on April 22nd. 

That “50 to 60 Yale police” employees had been at the plaza on the morning of the arrests, along with 15 police from New Haven just shows the over-extent of police presence at Yale and the underlying mentality.[2] Why have the second jurisdiction there?  To intimidate? Only Yale’s police “were involved in arresting protesters.”[3] From a democratic standpoint, it should have been the reverse; like Columbia, Yale should have called the local police department like anyone else. Fifty to sixty Yale police, doubtless with an overwhelming show of their vehicles with lights flashing, is not only excessive, but it pensively baits violance and at the very least stubbornness, which is exactly what they got. 

Even on the following evening, there were five Yale police employees standing in front of the main library, and several security cars stationary on a nearby walkway between the library and the law school, and doubtlessly more Yale police and security in the plaza while a protest was going on nearby, on Cross-Campus lawn until 10 pm. Why all the fear? The protesters had moved from the street intersection at 5pm as New Haven police had asked. Paranoia and an aggressive bent are in my view the underlying causes, and the resulting visuals doubtlessly cause student and faculty discomfort and impede studying. That this was presumably not a concern to Yale’s police and security departments should be something Yale Corporation's board might want to reflect on. 

I had seen such an over-reactive, passive-aggressive, and even paranoid mentality on a daily basis at Yale during the 2023-2024 academic year that I was not at all surprised to read that the reaction to the tents was draconian as well and went on well after the tents had been taken down. Was a full-frontal militaristic assault by some Yale students really likely even after all the arrests?  Why have the plaza then under “police guard?” Why have it closed at all, if the tents were really the problem? I’m sure that even on the day after, that part of the campus looked even more like a police zone than the campus typically looked in 2023-2024. The Rambo mentality has no place at a university like Yale. Students and alumni can unite to defend academia from such interlarding encroachments that do not respect academia. Oil and water do not mix. A university is not an inner city. Where is Yale's board of directors in all this? Silence itself can be enabling.