Community Corner

*VIDEO* Occupy Wesleyan Joins National Protests

Students on the Middletown campus held a peaceful protest march Thursday in conjunction with national protests in the Occupy movement.

About 100 Wesleyan students joined the reinvigorated national Occupy Wall Street movement Thursday, holding a protest march on the campus, at the end of which they ceremoniously stripped the diploma of Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, a 1974 graduate of Wesleyan, who recently evicted Occupy Denver protesters from an encampment in that city.

Chanting phrases like “Hell no, we won’t go,” “This is what Democracy looks like,” and “We are the 99 percent,” the students took their peaceful protest march around the mostly empty campus at 4 p.m., walking, chanting and waving signs for about an hour in the drizzling, cold rain.

As darkness fell they walked through some of the university’s buildings, including North College and Olin Memorial Library, where the normally quiescent library was disrupted by the sounds of their chants and bemused students studying at small desks watched the protesters pass by.

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Ross Levin, one of the members of Occupy Wesleyan and an organizer of Thursday’s march, said it was held to show solidarity with the hundreds of other Occupy protests that were held around the country today, some of which turned violent, including a huge protest in lower Manhattan. It was also held, he said, in protest of the eviction of the Occupy Zucotti Park encampment in New York City this week.

“All over the country today there are hundreds of protests going on,” Levin said through a bullhorn announcement to students who took part in the Wesleyan march. “Congratulations for coming out to be one of them! You are good people. This is just the start. This will not end. There will be more protests this year.”

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