CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — During the latest wave of pro-Palestinian protests at Harvard University, students and faculty members engaged in “study” actions in university libraries, as did protests on other campuses across the country. started attracting teachers.

According to the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson.

The practice involves protesters silently reading materials related to free speech while holding signs about dissent and university politics next to them or taped to the back of their laptops. The pro-Palestinian demonstrations Harvard agitated and divided and other campuses for much of the year.

Kerry Conley, director of communications for the Harvard Library, said: “We do not comment on individual issues related to library access or privileges. »

Faculty members have been informed that their library borrowing privileges have not been affected and that they will still be able to access other locations within the library system. However, they would not be allowed inside Widener, the university’s flagship library, according to the Crimson.

The newspaper said library administrators accused faculty members of gathering in the library “in an attempt to capture people’s attention through the display of tent signs,” which administrators said , violated library policies.

The group Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine said the school imposed library suspensions on more than 60 Harvard Law School students for a similar pro-Palestinian study.

In response, the group said more than 50 additional students, faculty and staff joined a study Thursday to denounce what protesters described as Harvard’s “complicity in the Israeli genocide in Palestine and the repression on campuses.”

Thursday’s study is the fourth of the semester, activists said.

During last week’s protest, students, many wearing kaffiyehs, studied quietly in the library’s reading room with materials taped to their laptops displaying messages such as “FREE PALESTINE” and “HARVARD DIVEST OF DEATH,” according to the band.

Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, participated in the protest, according to a press release from protest organizers.

“What was supposed to be a quiet hour of studying meaningful texts with colleagues, in an uninterrupted form of solidarity against the genocide of my own people, was instead – with blatant bad faith – characterized as an immature attempt to attract attention,” Kuemmerle said. said. “Silence in the face of the genocide in Palestine is deadly. Harvard chooses to silence us.

University librarian Martha Whitehead said in an essay that libraries “are deeply committed to upholding the rights of all members of our communities.”

“An assembly of people displaying signs transforms a reading room from a place of individual learning and reflection into a forum for public statements,” she wrote. “If our library spaces become a space for protest and demonstration – silent or not, and whatever the message – they will be diverted from their vital role as places of learning and research. »