Penn encampment continues as protesters defy university orders

Pro-Palestinian protesters maintained their on-campus encampment Saturday for a third day — with no signs of disbanding — defying the Friday night order by Penn’s interim president to end it “immediately.”

“We’re disappointed that university administration has not given our demands the time of day,” an encampment spokesperson said Saturday night after protest leaders and professors met with university officials, including interim president J. Larry Jameson. Encampment leaders would not disclose what the administrators had requested of them.

Late on an overcast, chilly Saturday afternoon, only a handful of security officers were near the site with no evidence of any move to evict the protesters, who are demanding that Penn divest itself of any Israel-related investments and provide amnesty for pro-Palestinian students who might be subject to discipline over past protests.

About 400 people were gathered at College Green on Saturday evening, where about 35 green, orange and gray tents had been pitched. Supplies of fruit, vegetables, water, almond milk, coffee, and pudding were on hand for those who were staying around or making a night of it.

Meanwhile, a contingent of pro-Israel demonstrators, bearing a U.S. flag and covering themselves with Israeli flags, arrived at the College Green on Saturday evening, taking positions across from the encampment.

Among the pro-Palestinian protesters was student organizer Eliana Atienza, 19, who had spent the previous night at the site, when temperatures dropped into the 40s.

The sophomore said she was at the scene when Jameson ordered pro-Palestinian protesters to “disband their encampment immediately” because of alleged violations of university policies, including the act of encampment “itself.” The day before, Jameson hosted a “community listening session” in response to the proliferation of campus protests around the country.

“I felt disappointed,” said Atienza. “It perpetuates the false idea that we are disruptive and violent; we are not.”

Junior Sophia Rosser, 21, said the encampment would remain at the scene until protesters’ demands were met, regardless of the consequences. “It is a risk for all of us and there is real fear of disciplinary action or police action,” Rosser said.

But nothing suggested that any such action was imminent.

In his order, Jameson cited “harassing and intimidating comment and actions by some of the protesters.” Jameson said the defacement of a statue of Benjamin Franklin, on which a derogatory message was written, would be investigated as a “hate crime.”

That episode “likely” was a primary reason for the disbandment order, said Benjamin Abella, a professor in the department of emergency medicine at the Penn School of Medicine, who described himself as a “concerned Jewish faculty member.”

“This was hateful language spray-painted on our much-beloved statue,” said Abella. He added that he was at the encampment Friday and witnessed Jewish students being verbally abused.

But Abella said that some of the protesters appeared “too old” to be students and that any number of them appeared to be unaffiliated with Penn. He said he was confident that the statue vandals were not Penn students.

In statements on Instagram on Saturday, both the Penn Arab Student Society (PASS) and the Penn Muslim Students Association called for an investigation into the statue vandalism, and, concurring with Abella, said it was the work of an “outside agitator.”

Jameson’s order has gotten blowback from other faculty members. The Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors said it was “deeply disturbed” by Jameson’s order, which it said was prompted by “unsubstantiated allegations.”

Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine, the group that held a walkout on Thursday as the tents were being erected, added its objections.

The group wrote that Jameson and other university leaders had executed an “about face” and ignored due process.

Earlier Friday, Jameson had written in an email to the university community that administrators would continue to support the “rights of our community members to protest peacefully and in keeping with university policy.”

He had warned, however, that if protests violated university policies, “we will not stand by.”

Jameson’s Friday night letter sent ripples of panic through the encampment, according to organizer Taja Mazaj.

Jameson wrote that he had “notified the protestors of their legal and policy violations” and “have engaged with some of the protesters, with limited access to the broader group.”

But organizer Emma Herndon said the letter sent out Friday was the first communication protesters had received.

The encampment presents a challenge for Jameson, the successor to former president Liz Magill, who resigned in December after her remarks before a congressional committee regarding the university’s handling of antisemitism stirred a storm of controversy. In addition, Penn’s campus had been a venue for near weekly protests of the war.

Ramanan Raghavendran, the Penn board chair, has not commented on the encampment, which overall has proceeded peacefully, as have similar encampment protests at Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges.

In an interview Friday, former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said that although protests should be allowed, encampments should not be tolerated.

“From my experience, the quicker you take these encampments down, the better,” said Ramsey, who was Philadelphia’s police commissioner from 2008 to 2016 and is a law enforcement analyst for CNN. He has been commenting on the growing national campus protest.

He argued that encampments will draw more people from outside the campus, and become ever more difficult to dismantle, raising safety and sanitation issues.

This is not Penn’s first experience with this phenomenon.

In 2022, Penn’s College Green was the site of a protest encampment aimed at pressuring the university to divest from fossil fuels and to aid low-income residents in the University City area.

It lasted six weeks, and ended when students stormed Franklin Field during halftime of the Penn-Yale football game.

Scott L. Bok, former board chair at the University of Pennsylvania, who stepped down in December amid the storms over Penn’s handling of antisemitism complaints, recalled that “university administrators carried on a dialogue with protesters but allowed the tents to remain. ... The strategy was to be patient with the students and avoid any sort of unpleasant confrontation, although obviously we would have changed course if there was any violence or threat of violence.”

Emma Glasser, a Penn alumna who was involved, said the university had threatened disciplinary action that it never took.

In the end, the students eventually dismantled the encampment voluntarily.

Staff writers Ximena Conde and Max Marin contributed to this article.