Nora Moses, Contributing Photographer

On Saturday afternoon, about 80 students gathered on Beinecke Plaza to call for Yale trustees to engage with them and their longtime demands for Yale’s divestment from military weapons manufacturers.

The protest was hosted by the pro-Palestine Sumud Coalition, a group that consists of Yalies4Palestine, Yale Jews for Ceasefire and the Yale Endowment Justice collective. The gathering consisted of chants and speeches. At one point, an organizer read the names of the Board of Trustees, and after each name, the crowd shouted “shame!” 

The protest occurred as Yale trustees convened for their second meeting of 2025 at an undisclosed location.

In Instagram posts advertising the protest, Sumud demanded “real dialogue” with the trustees, calling on them to “come to the table” and “negotiate” with students. During the rally, students erected a “negotiating table” to represent their call to bargain with the trustees.

“The board has consistently sidestepped students’ overwhelming calls for disclosure, divestment, and reinvestment. Now we’re asking for public negotiations towards our demands,” wrote Lakxshanna Raveendran ’26, an organizer with the Sumud Coalition.

In December, Yale students passed a referendum written by Sumud with an overwhelming majority of votes. When accounting for the entire student body — including students who did not vote — the three questions received support from 38 to 41 percent of the student body.

In her five-sentence reply to the referendum, University President Maurie McInnis explained that Yale has “well-established policies and procedures” surrounding the issues of disclosure and divestment. In response to the third referendum question about the investments into Palestinian studies, she linked the homepage of a Yale and the World website about the University’s efforts to respond to global conflict.

“President McInnis responded to the December referendum by referring us to channels we’ve already exhausted,” Sumud said in a post advertising the protest. “We demand public negotiations with the trustees.” 

Sumud’s public statements about the protest claimed that students have used the channel McInnis referenced to no avail. In November, students presented their proposal for disclosure of Yale’s holdings in military weapons manufacturers in a private meeting with the chair of the Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility, or CCIR. The proposals were “rejected,” per protesters. Previously, in April 2024, amid mass student protests, Yale refused to divest from military weapons manufacturers.

In an interview with the News in December, McInnis said that the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility, or ACIR, was currently reviewing “many different proposals that were brought to it” and that a decision surrounding the protesters’ concerns would result from those deliberations. 

Three people held a counter-protest on Beinecke Plaza at the same time as Sumud’s protest. The three held signs that said “Mothers Against College Antisemitism,” referring to a Facebook group devoted to combating antisemitism on college campuses. When protesters chanted “Free Palestine” the counter-protesters added “from Hamas.”

“University Plaza” was renamed Beinecke Plaza in 1963.

Correction, March 28: This post has been updated to correct Raveendran’s title.