Florida State University campus police made a group of students remove camping tents they had set up at 4 a.m. Thursday in solidarity with pro-Palestine protests on college campuses around the country. As the demonstration continued later in the day, sprinklers dampened the group of nearly 40 protesters.
Tally Students for a Democratic Society has organized several pro-Palestine protests throughout the year, but the demonstration Thursday morning was the first since police arrested demonstrators at Columbia University, Yale, and the University of Texas. The group is calling upon FSU to divest from companies with ties to Israel.
University of Florida University students also rallied Wednesday in support of Palestine, according to WUFT.
And there were protests on Tuesday while President Joe Biden spoke on abortion rights in Tamp at the Dale Mabry campus of Hillsborough Community College. Those protests targeted the president’s policies regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict.
In Tallahassee, “We’re organizing a protest today to stand in solidarity with the students who are facing repression at Columbia University and other universities across the country as they stand in solidarity with the tens of thousands of people in Gaza who have been killed; the millions of people in Gaza now facing starvation and massacre of the hands of the Israeli military,” said Oliver Cheese, a first-year student and one of the organizers of the protests.
Cheese said police had asked the group to move around Landis Green, a central space on campus, several times because of landscaping work going on around the green and maintenance to the fountain the students stood around.
Landscapers operating lawnmowers circled the green near the students, but the group planned to protest the entire day.
“It’s insane. This is a deliberate attempt to repress the student movement because they’re aware that if we’re in a visible location we are going to attract supporters,” Cheese said to the Florida Phoenix. “They’re aware that while we’re here people are being educated, people are being informed, and people are coming together to stand up for Palestine for liberation.”
Campus police were monitoring the protest
Students for a Democratic Society is not affiliated with the university, FSU spokesperson Amy Farnum Patronis wrote in an email to the Phoenix. The university suspended the group in January after members interrupted a board of trustees meeting with pro-Palestinian chants, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
Carolyn Egan, FSU vice president for legal affairs and general counsel, wrote Thursday in a statement that the university has had a longstanding prohibition against camping on campus.
“FSU will continue to diligently enforce the university’s content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions,” Egan wrote. “Violence of any kind, obstruction, disruption of classes and other university activities, destruction of property, intimidation, threats, and harassment will be addressed by law enforcement or campus conduct officials, as appropriate.”
The statement continues: “With important rights come substantial responsibilities, and it is imperative that members of our campus community understand free speech as well as its limits and the consequences for conduct that exceeds these boundaries.”
The Phoenix saw nine police officers around Landis Green, where the group held the demonstration. Some of the officers wore different uniforms.
Demonstrators remained on the green after sprinklers turned on
After 8 a.m. the group settled in front of the Strozier Library and started chanting “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” A man approached the group, yelling at them to be quiet because students were trying to study. The demonstrators did not engage with the man.
The sprinklers in the green turned on at 10 a.m., soaking protesters standing around them. But the group came up with a chant addressing the situation: “Spray us. Spray us. We don’t care. FSU should be scared.”
Jayci Qassis, a Palestinian American student, said the group would remain on the green.
“It’s suppression, but it’s so cowardly that they can’t even just directly say that that’s what it is,” she said to the Phoenix. “That’s what I mean about this next generation of students, and my classmates, and these wonderful people, is that they take those barriers and they make them opportunities.”
Farnum Patronis maintained that the sprinklers had been scheduled to be turned on.
“Work on our grounds happens throughout the day,” she wrote. “Sprinklers needed to be run now, as the area is reserved for scheduled events happening the rest of the day.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis has criticized the protests in Columbia and Yale in multiple press conferences this week.
“When you’re chasing Jewish students around. When you’re not letting a Jewish professor enter a building. When you’re targeting people like that: That’s not free speech. That’s harassment. That violates appropriate conduct, and, yet, at Columbia, at Yale, at all these places those folks rule the roost,” DeSantis said during a bill signing ceremony on Wednesday. “They do whatever they want, and these administrators and these presidents of universities are weak. They’re scared, and they don’t do anything.”
He continued: “You do that in Florida at our universities, we’re showing you the door. You’re going to be expelled when you’re doing that stuff.”