Second demonstration in three months
The Yale Police Department yesterday issued 17 “citations for trespassing” for students engaged in a protest against Yale’s investments in fossil fuels.
The protesters “demanded that Yale divest from fossil fuel companies and companies that hold Puerto Rican debt,” The Yale Daily News reports. The sit-in lasted for two hours.
The protest began, the paper reports, after two students attempted to speak with members of the school’s investment team. The students “were told that no workers were in the office due to the weather,” though allegedly the two activists “saw employees at their desks.”
The sit-in began shortly following this incident:
Soon after, several dozen additional activists — including Yale undergraduates, Yale graduate students and community members — entered 55 Whitney Avenue, carrying “Yale is Complicit” signs and chanting protests, vowing not to leave the building until Yale agreed to their demands. At 5 p.m. — the time the Investment Office closes — activists were asked to leave, but 17 of them chose to remain and received citations from YPD officers. Most of the demonstrators were undergraduate members of the Endowment Justice Coalition, a consortium of Yale and New Haven groups including Fossil Free Yale and Despierta Boricua, the Puerto Rican students’ association.
This is the second anti-fossil fuel protest at Yale in around three months, both of which involved police officers. In December, police arrested nearly fifty students who were “[urging] the University to instruct its fund managers to cancel their holdings in Puerto Rico’s debt and divest from the fossil fuel industry.”
Several years ago the school announced that it would partially divest from fossil fuels. The school still has many millions of dollars invested in a natural gas producer, however.
MORE: Harvard pledges to be fossil fuel free in three decades
IMAGE: Lifetime Stock / Shutterstock.com
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