Inside the IOP Protests: An Interview with IOP Director, Senator Heidi Heitkamp
On the afternoon of May 7, a small group of pro-Palestine protesters occupied the UChicago Institute of Politics (IOP) while large crowds demonstrated outside. The occupation, which took the IOP and the UChicago administration by surprise, followed several weeks after UChicago President Paul Alivasatos cleared away the “UChicago Popular University for Gaza” encampment on the quad.
Since the end of its encampment on the quad on the morning of May 7, UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) had promised that they would continue to organize rallies and events through the end of the quarter. However, it was a group of UChicago alumni and autonomous protesters who took the lead in organizing the protests during alumni weekend. While the occupation of the IOP was perhaps the most well-attended and newsworthy protest of the afternoon, it was bookended by several other rallies around campus. At midday, protesters marched to the UChicago Alumni tents on the quad and covered them with blood-red handprints. Around 4pm in the afternoon, a group of roughly 150 protesters met at the Masaryk Monument at the east end of the Midway and began to march west towards the center of campus.
By 4:30 p.m., a small cohort of protesters began holding up signs reading “Free Palestine” and “Fuck UChicago” on the front lawn of the IOP. The word went out on social media that “Protesters have liberated the Institute of Politics! … We’re bringing the Intifada home.” By 5:00 p.m. the crowd outside the front and back entrances of the IOP had grown considerably and UCPD had arrived in numbers on the scene. A large flag hung from the front porch proclaiming a new name for the building – Casbah Basel al-Araj – named after Palestinian writer and activist who was killed in a home raid by Israeli counter-terrorism police forces in 2017. The organizers released a “Statement of Principles from the Liberated Casbah of Basel Al-Araj,” making it clear that, unlike the previous encampment organized by UCUP, they did not intend to negotiate with the administration and believed that “the divide of students / non-student, peaceful protester / outside agitator does not serve us.” While several tents were set up around the IOP building, they seemed to be erected as a gesture to the previous encampment and the wider protest movement rather than in a genuine effort to stay the night.
Crowds gathered across the street to observe the occupation or engage in acts of counterprotest. A small group of counter-protesters draped in Israeli flags stood on the lawn of the Rohr Chabad center, located just across the street, and the Iron Key Society blasted country music from speakers facing out on their front lawn.
UCUP’s protest, which lasted until around 9:30 p.m., drew widespread media coverage in both local and national outlets. At one point during the protest, multiple news helicopters circled the building from above, trying to get a perfect shot of the action. But, while much has been written about the demonstrations outside of the building, little is still known about the events that occurred inside the IOP during the occupation itself. To shed light on the situation, The Gate spoke with the Director of the IOP, Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who was the only person still in the building when the first protesters entered.
On the afternoon of May 7, Sen. Heitkamp had finished up an advisory committee meeting at the IOP and was sitting in her office preparing for a live segment on ABC News when she became aware of the protesters walking down the street. She told us that she first assumed they would march past the building and was most worried about dealing with the background noise during her live appearance. But soon after she heard the demonstrations outside, a group of three masked protesters, two women and one man, burst into her office. The man told her that she had five minutes to leave the building, and Sen. Heitkamp refused, in part due to her impending live TV appearance. However, after he walked over to her side of the desk and put his face in front of her camera, she told the ABC team that she could not record the news hit and logged off.
Up until this point, Sen. Heitkamp said, she had little idea what was going on inside or outside the building. She tried to contact university administrators to figure out how they wanted her to proceed but was having trouble reaching them. The masked protesters continued to ask her to leave the building, and she responded by questioning why she had to leave. When the protesters told her that she would get hurt if she stayed, she asked “will you hurt me?” The protesters said they wouldn’t. When she asked, “Then who will hurt me?” the protesters claimed the cops would. Sen. Heitkamp disagreed. The protesters told her that people would begin to think that she was part of the protest if she stayed in the building any longer. She voiced her firm disagreement again. Despite rising tensions around her refusal to leave the building, the situation inside the office remained relatively calm. When Sen. Heitkamp asked the protesters to stop leaning on her desk, body language she interpreted as aggressive, they took a seat at her conference table.
Sen. Heitkamp told us that she engaged the protesters in a dialogue about the purpose of their occupation. She wanted to know why they had chosen to occupy the IOP in particular. However, despite her efforts, she said she did not receive a satisfactory answer. She recalls that, in their curt response to her questions, they revealed only that since the IOP is the center of political life on campus, it was a prime candidate for a protest. Online, however, the organizers of the protest were more verbose, writing, “we’ve liberated the Institute of Politics – a breeding ground for politicians, bureaucrats, non-profit functionaries alike to come to learn to say the right things while meting out violence and devastation on oppressed, colonized people.” Inside the building, however, these strong views were not shared with Sen. Heitkamp. She emphasized that “I was never hurt, I was never intimidated, I was never fearful, I just wanted to understand why they were in this building.”
Sen. Heitkamp struggled at times to speak to the protesters because, as members of a collective movement, they refused to be identified as individuals. Although “we did not have a big dialogue about the history of the region,” she managed to strike up a conversation about her own record on Palestine in the Senate and the issue of whether campus protests were taking away from the situation on the ground in Gaza. The discussion was cut short when another masked protester entered and whispered hurriedly to the group, at which point they fled the building through the second floor windows. UCPD arrived in Sen. Heitkamp’s office soon afterwards, and they were able to escort her out of the building through the barricaded back entrance after confirming she was unharmed.
Sen. Heitkamp said that her previous work on the Hill and as Attorney General of North Dakota had provided her ample experience dealing with hostile perspectives and protests, and that she knew how to de-escalate the situation. “If you meet anger with anger … a lot of times it will escalate. So what you want to do is take the temperature down, don’t get mad, try to have a conversation,” she said.
Nevertheless, despite her conciliatory attitude, Sen. Heitkamp acknowledged that the occupation of the building was inappropriate, and she criticized the protesters for damage caused to the IOP’s furniture. “It’s a brick building, it’s not going to get wrecked, but I knew they were moving furniture around and throwing things against the wall. I could hear things crashing and didn’t know what I would walk out to.”
Looking back on the occupation, Sen. Heitkamp wished that the protesters had been more open about their motivations in conversation with her. When The Gate shared some of the more candid online rhetoric associated with the occupation with her, she found it unfortunate that, to the protestors, “the work that we do at the IOP to try to talk across differences is somehow seen as less valuable than simply talking about your perspective.”
When asked whether the IOP had lived up to its mission over the past year in light of the issues raised by the protest, Sen. Heitkamp spoke at length about the numerous efforts at the IOP to start a dialogue about the conflict in Gaza, including small, unpublicized group dinners and gatherings. However, she was painfully aware of the difficulty of achieving productive conversations on Israel and Palestine: “The hundreds of people sitting on the outside are not engaged at the same level and the people on either side have so solidified their positions that there isn’t at this point a place where you can engage in cross dialogue.” In many ways, her description of the challenges of leading the IOP reflected the scene outside the building during the occupation, where overzealous protesters and counter-protesters were ultimately outnumbered by the bystanders who stopped to watch the action throughout the afternoon.
Regardless of the difficulty, Sen. Heitkamp pledged that the IOP would continue its work to “bring more light than heat,” a quote she attributed to Zeenat Rahman, the IOP’s Executive Director. She maintained that going forward, the IOP will continue to carry out its primary goal of providing a space for students to engage in meaningful dialogue. To Sen. Heitkamp, achieving that goal also means drawing in new students who don’t have firmly established opinions on these contentious issues and training them to think about complex issues in a way that helps them sort the emotional from the factual to come to a personal conclusion. “I will always resist the idea that the people who are most engaged on both sides are our only audience,” she shared.