Indiana University

Introduction

This page will contain various bits of information on the April 25 incident at IU. 

Demonstration and Arrests of April 25, 2024

Personal Observations

• At the 10am rally in front of the administration building, I heard a good story. A woman professor was arrested and kept at the jail till about midnight, so about 9 hours. She was with a female student. The student's mother came to pick her up from jail. It turned out, the mother had been in the professor's class, a generation before! And that the professor had actually held that student in her arms, when she was a baby.

• I also heard that some of the students in jail were very scared, some weren't. I heard one story that someone had just been picking up some belonging of his girlfriend from a collapsed tent, and they arrested him. Some were charged with trespass, some with resisting the police. Some were trying to defend the tents, but others were arrested too, it seems. Before the state police with automatic weapons showed up, someone from the university said that university policy meant the demonstrators had to leave. The demonstrators said the rules allowed them to be there. "I've done my research," said the official (a policeman?I don't know). "Then what's the policy?" said a demonstrator. The official couldn't answer.

• I arrived late at the 10 a.m. faculty-led rally, having been busy trying to let state officials know what was going on, since I'm about the only Republican at the university (well, there are a dozen of us). They have recorded it, an organizer told me. At 11, people marched over to Dunn Meadow, for the student-organized rally. To my dismay, by the time we got there the organizers were already starting loud Palestine chants, and it looked like it was going to be just another pro-Hamas rally. I asked an organizer of the faculty rally if he'd like me to speak as a conservative supportive of free speech and hostile to Hamas. He said this was the student show and he was uninvolved. He also said, "Don't you think that might be inflammatory?", since I hd my MAGA hat with me. I like to get unlikely people to work together, so that was kinda the point, but it wasn't my show either, so I left.

April 26 Stories

• Indiana U. AAUP Statement (morning, April 26)

 "The President and Provost state that their action involved the need “to balance our commitment to free speech activities with the need to ensure safety and security.” Nowhere is there any indication of how the presence of tents—whether conforming with existing policy or even of ultimately violating it by remaining overnight—endangered the safety and security of the campus, much less required the stationing of snipers on the IMU roof."

April 25 stories

• WRTV, "leads to the arrest of 33 people".