June 4, 2024
How Yale University Surveils Pro-Palestine Students
By Finn Cooley
Documents reveal a pattern of targeted monitoring: administrator presence at rallies, police surveillance of social media, and coordination between campus, local, and state police.
As pro-Palestine students have slowly escalated their tactics in response to a deadlock on divestment and escalating violence in Gaza, Yale has deployed a variety of measures to monitor student dissent. Documents obtained by The Nation under Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Act illustrate a pattern of targeted surveillance by Yale University against students engaged in pro-Palestine activism.
These tactics, as the documents reveal, vary from administrator presence at rallies to police surveillance of students’ social media accounts, to coordination between campus, local, and state police forces.
The university has, so far, avoided the drama of presidential resignations like those at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Until it arrested 47 students at an encampment on April 23, the protests on campus were largely not disruptive to campus life.
