Harvard Divinity on Twitter: "Prof Ahmed Ragab was in Cairo recently for a documentary called “The Story of God,” with Morgan Freeman.
Posted on 09/07/2017 8:30:23 PM PDT by Enchante
Thirty-one professors from Harvard and other Boston-area universities were arrested Thursday for blocking traffic along Massachusetts Ave. in protest of President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind an Obama-era program that gives legal protections to undocumented young people.
Professors took to the street outside Johnston Gate in a planned act of civil disobedience, forming a human chain and blocking traffic on Mass Ave. Before the arrests, Cambridge Police officers read a written statement warning protesters that they would be arrested if they did not move.
According to Cambridge Police Department spokesperson Jeremy Warnick, the protesters face charges of disturbing the peace and bail is set at $40. After posting bail, they will be required to appear before a judge tomorrow morning, Deputy Superintendent Jack Albert wrote in an email.
African and African American Studies professor Walter Johnson, who was among those arrested, spoke of a “moral responsibility” to stand with undocumented students.
“It just came to a point of crisis, both for the nation and for us,” Johnson said. “It seemed like it was time for us to jump off, and to try to both stand firmly with our students, to stand for justice and decency in the face of an unjust law, and to try and kick off a conversation about resistance between campuses in Boston and among faculty.”
Trump’s decision Tuesday drew strong criticism from top Harvard administrators, including University President Drew G. Faust—who denounced the move as “cruel”—and Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana. Several dozen Harvard students benefit from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides work authorizations and relief from deportation to undocumented young people who arrived in the United States at a young age.
Kirsten A. Weld, a History professor who started a conversation about the DACA repeal over a faculty email list, was also among those arrested. That conversation led to a meeting Wednesday morning, where roughly 75 to 100 faculty members from Harvard, Tufts, MIT, Babson, and other area universities brainstormed what they could do to support undocumented students, according to Weld.
Weld said the professors wanted to do more than sign a petition, and felt it was “high time” to act. In a speech to the crowd, she said three of the students in her 14-person course were undocumented.
“It’s not business as usual because the Trump administration is targeting our students,” Weld said in an interview before her arrest.
Divinity School professor Ahmed Ragab was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in downtown Boston just an hour before he was arrested in the protest.
“This is something that allows me to live under protection, to be safe and secure,” Ragab said of his new citizenship status. “It feels so sad to see that on the day, at the time that I’m getting these rights, that my students are being deported and taken away from this country, that is their country.”
Before the arrests, several professors, one undocumented student, Massachusetts State Representative Marjorie C. Decker, and Memorial Church Minister Jonathan L. Walton spoke of the need to take action against the policy outside Massachusetts Hall to a crowd of roughly 300 students, faculty, and affiliates from five different universities. Khurana was also at the protest.
Walton, who was later arrested, denounced the Trump administration in his remarks.
“We are here to say to the U.S. President, to his Attorney General, and to all the insecure leaders of this nation, that no human being is illegal,” Walton said.
Trump’s decision to end DACA in six months sparked outrage across campus Tuesday, and hundreds of Harvard affiliates gathered to protest in front of Memorial Hall.
75 to 100 faculty members from Harvard, Tufts, MIT, Babson, and other area universities brainstormed what they could do to support undocumented students
Harvard Divinity on Twitter: "Prof Ahmed Ragab was in Cairo recently for a documentary called “The Story of God,” with Morgan Freeman.
How the hell can an illegal afford to go to Harvard?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if conservatives got together more often and showed their own opposing passion? Saying enough is enough we’ve got to get in the streets and fight for our native born children and all American citizen’s rights to live in a sovereign nation with enforced borders, a nation where city mayors and governors of states uphold the rule of law instead of catering to foreigners? A nation where educators actually educate instead of brainwashing our children with their corrupting ideology?
White males pay the $65,000 per year to subsidize illegls, women and minorities.
Probably the true cost of a university education (with housing), would be about $30,000-$35,000 per year.
It should be legal to drive right through people who block traffic as a protest. Right through at 100 mph.
Lib professors getting street cred. Now they can pretend they’re just the same as those who protested with MLK in Selma. Poseur trash.
Note the first guy mentioned is an African studies “professor” meaning he is not a professor of anything. He is simply a race pimp promoting his own race while denigrating other races. This is what African studies is all about on every campus.
Our laws are made to extract money and exact punishment from US citizens.
Ragab was trained in epidemiology and medical sociology, and worked on infectious and epidemic diseases. He has a special interest in gender, ethnic and religion-based disparities in disease burden, and in the gender, ethnic, and religious dimensions of treatment modalities, and healthcare policy.
Is Harvard touchy-feely worth the expense?
From his Wikipedia biography, Walter Johnson appears to be white (there is a photo from 2000). His father was a professor of Economics at the University of Missouri. He specializes in 19th-century slavery and related issues.
You are exactly right. Women’s studies is about the same.
Worthless. Absolutely worthless. They are training up young Alinsky leeches to bleed working people to death.
The orders right now do not repeal DACA applications that are already approved, and the future of those applications is now up to Congress, with DACA for now accepting no new applicants and holding in place the existing ones.
Therefore, the professors lie when they say the Trump DACA decision affects DACA students of theirs.
What I hold Trump responsible for right now is how he and sessions have not spoken forcefully and clearly about what the DACA decision does for the moment, nor about their demand that Congress act on this matter.
It has left the media free to oppose what I believe is just a temporary hold between an executive order and legislatively enacted law, and yet able to mount that opposition as if Trump’s decision is and will permanently end DACA, which I don’t believe will be the case.
To me, Trump and Sessions handed the media & the Left a new “cause” for “resistance”, when, they both know and believe that “cause” will be gone in six months or less. All such causes, whether fixed or temporary, are “crisis” with which the left and the Dims work to beef up organizing. That organizing they are able to gain with any crisis, does not dissipate when the “cause” they organized over is gone.
What the Left will insure, and insure the Dims insure, is that when all this episode is over, the sheeple will remember most will not that Trump got Congress to legislate some form of DACA, but only that he ended DACA as Obama ordered it.
Barack Hussein Pencil Neck did.
I still believe he was on a foreign student scholarship...
True, but doesn’t the left claim illegals aren’t getting government aid? Unless they get a full ride scholarship they would have to be getting help from somewhere...My son had enough scholarship to cover his tuition and books but would have had to pay living expenses on his own if he hadn’t lived at home.
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