Occupy Harvard: Protest becomes “exclusive”
A banner hangs above Occupy Boston’s camp in Dewey Square, located in Boston’s financial district. Hundreds of Boston and Transit police officers moved in on a group of Occupy Boston demonstrators early Tuesday morning for expanding into nearby Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway.
BOSTON — Harvard students may be seen as the future 1 percenters, but many of them are trying to do their part too.
Hundreds gathered Wednesday night to hold their own Occupy protest, setting up about two dozen tents in Cambridge's Harvard Yard. The protest was going fine until, well, it became exclusive.
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Harvard's campus police temporarily limited access to the yard to only those with Harvard school IDs. Police and security guards blocked about 300 people from joining the protest, the Associated Press reported Thursday.
Officials from Harvard said they wanted to keep out protesters who did not belong to the university, but the AP reported that many of the demonstrators who tried to join the protest were holding up their school IDs.
The student protesters are mostly concerned with the school's culture, reported Slate. A press release by the student group criticized the "corporatization of higher education, epitomized by Harvard University."
It said that the students' main concerns are the university's investments and compensation for its service workers.