Auraria campus authorities detained and issued citations to 14 pro-Palestinian protesters on Tuesday after students briefly occupied a campus building during finals and graduation week.
A release from the Auraria Higher Education said several dozen protesters entered Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Aerospace, Engineering, and Sciences Building Tuesday around 5 p.m.
Officials said the protesters were preventing students from accessing classrooms for finals, and “chanted, pounded drums and used amplified sound,” which breaks campus policies.
Auraria Campus police issued summonses for trespass and failure to obey lawful orders to 14 of those protesters, though it’s unclear how many others participated in the demonstration. Those citations are the first police action taken against antiwar protesters on Auraria since over 40 people were arrested a day after the antiwar camp was erected on the Tivoli Quad.
“We continue to balance the legal right to free speech with the need to keep our community safe and the campus focused on teaching and learning,” a campus release said. “However, this is the latest example of how the Tivoli Quad protest has escalated on campus, similar to how other protests have escalated on college campuses around the country.”
Earlier on Tuesday afternoon, protesters entered the Tivoli Student Union during a meeting between student organizers and Colorado Department of Higher Education Executive Director Angie Paccione.
The campus said those protesters were being disruptive, and police officers kicked them out of the building without incident before locking the building’s doors with plastic zip ties and handcuffs.
Protesters had briefly occupied Auraria Campus executive offices in the Tivoli Student Union on Monday. They only left after law enforcement and campus officials agreed to meet at a future time.
Heightened demonstrations come as summer vacation — and a likely campus exodus — draws near.
Students enrolled at the Auraria campus’ three universities — MSU Denver, the University of Colorado Denver and the Community College of Denver — are currently taking finals, with the spring semester set to end this week.
Graduation commencements are scheduled between Thursday and Saturday, with all three schools planning off-campus ceremonies.
That means the normally bustling Tivoli Quad is likely to become quieter, and the antiwar camp could lose some of the two to three dozen tents pitched on campus.
“We definitely know that this week is really critical for us because of that, but we also are very prepared to continue our protest, continue our actions until we're heard,” student organizer Lucia Feast told Denverite.
Summer classes are set to start in late May, and the Auraria campus commonly holds non-academic events on university grounds during that time.
Still, Feast said they’re confident Auraria will be busier than most campuses despite summer break.
While negotiations seemed to advance last week, protest leaders say that progress has been lost. MSU Denver officials agreed to broker discussions between protesters and the school’s Board of Trustees, but those negotiations stalled Monday, with the sides disagreeing on the circumstances of a potential meeting.
The pro-Palestinian demonstrators have demanded that the University of Colorado and MSU Denver release statements denouncing the Israeli government and divest from companies that operate in Israel.
