Protest that disrupted The Game still resonates
Two years after Yale-Harvard climate change protest disrupted The Game, it resonates for students
NEW HAVEN — Two years after the jaw-dropping Yale-Harvard climate change and fossil fuel divestment protest on the field of the Yale Bowl at The Game — Yale’s tradition-steeped annual football contest with its archrival — the far-reaching direct action remains the highlight of some college activists’ lives.
It was an activist’s dream: a few dozen nervous, welldrilled students looking to get out on the field even for a minute or two — with contingency plans A through H in case some or all of them got stopped and/or arrested along the way — suddenly found hundreds of people pouring out from the stands behind them to join in.
Yale-educated actor Sam Waterston of “Law & Order” fame, who was 79 at the time, was there, too.
The activists sat down on the field — and disrupted the game for about 40 minutes.
Fifty participants were issued citations — but Waterston was not.
Afterward, stories about the protest appeared all over Connecticut, the nation and the world.
In that brief moment, the event became the focus of the worldwide climate change movement.
For those involved, it went beyond their wildest hopes and dreams — and yes, sports fans, Yale ended beating Harvard 50-43 after a 40minute delay, clinching the Ivy League championship in the 136th edition of the football rivalry between the two elite universities.
But at protest time, organizers from the two ancient rivals were squarely and entirely on the same page.
“We were surprised. Even we had no idea how big it was going to be and how big a splash it was going to make,” said Nora Heaphy, a New Haven native, one of the organizers at the time and now a Yale graduate working as a research assistant in a Yale lab.
Heaphy, who was one of the students cited, said they all had charges dismissed after doing five hours of community service — something she and several others of those interviewed said was a potent example of their Yale privilege.
In Heaphy’s case, that meant teaching Irish dancing to local youth — something Heaphy started learning at age 6 after seeing the dancers in New Haven’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and continued to study until age 18 at West Haven’s Mulkerin School of Irish Dance.
“Obviously, I’m not that old, but it still was the high point of my life so far,” said Heaphy, now 22. “I think it was a lesson in our own power and in the ability to just will something and make it happen. It was just a really beautiful demonstration of our ability to work really hard — and we saw years of organizing pay off in that moment.”
That includes organizing by people who had graduated before it ever began, she said.
“It absolutely surprised me — it surprised me and deeply moved me,” said Josie SteuerIngall, who had just turned 18 a couple of weeks earlier. She was newly-arrived at Yale from her home in New York City and had never been involved in any kind of directaction protest before that.
“We never, in contingent plans A through H, expected to be on the field that long,” Steuer-Ingall said. “It’s just pure adrenaline. We were there and we thought, ‘This is a real disruption,’” she said.
“And then to have this become a (media) flashpoint was incredible,” SteuerIngall said. “To have that many people” join in was breathtaking, she said. “... I really and truly believe ... this is one the most important issues I will organize around.”
Steuer-Ingall believes the event will continue to be a big deal in her life 20 years from now and beyond.
“I don’t know how to describe the way it felt to be on that field, but I knew it was something seismic,” she said. “It’s my central memory of that semester, it’s my central memory of my freshman year — and it made me want to be an organizer.”
Beyond that, “It helped me make sense of my world,” she said.
Steuer-Ingall and Heaphy both said they knew of no plans for any protest at this year’s game.
While it might be easy to get frustrated with the fact that Yale — unlike Harvard — has yet to divest, “If we win, when we win, (the 2019 protest) is going to be a big part of the reason why,” SteuerIngall said.
At this point, every school in the Ivy League has agreed to divest their fossil fuel holdings except Yale, Princeton and University of Pennsylvania, she said.
Harvard announced in September that it would end its investments in the fossil fuel industry.
Harvard President Lawrence Bacow, in a statement posted on the Harvard website on Sept. 9, 2021, said, “Climate change is the most consequential threat facing humanity. The last several months have laid at our feet undeniable evidence of the world to come — massive fires that consume entire towns, unprecedented flooding that inundates major urban areas, record heat waves and drought that devastate food supplies and increase water scarcity.”
Yale, meanwhile, has announced that it will end some of its investment in some of the companies in the fossil fuel industry but keep others as a means of retaining leverage to help have a positive influence in other situations and steer them in better directions.
As of last month, Yale’s endowment had risen to a record $42.3 billion, second only to Harvard’s $53.2 billion.
Asked for comment on the protest and its fossil fuel holdings and future plans for it, a Yale spokesperson did not address the protest but responded with two previous Yale releases on its commitment to carbon reduction targets and a net-zero future. One pointed out that in 2005, Yale became one of the world’s first universities to commit to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, pledging that by 2020 it would reduce its carbon output by 43 percent. Last year Yale reached that goal, it said.
In a June 24, 2021, release, Yale President Peter Salovey and Provost Scott Strobel also shared an initial list of fossil fuel companies now ineligible for investment by the Yale endowment.
Those principals were highlighted in an April 16, 2021, release.
“The principles establish a framework through which Yale can encourage fossil fuel producers to adopt more sustainable practices and advance the shift to a decarbonized energy future — and to call out and make ineligible for investment by Yale those companies that do not,” the release states.
“The adoption of these ethical investment principles exemplifies the university’s deep commitment to promoting the development and use of clean, sustainable, and renewable energy,” said Salovey. “Climate change is an imminent threat to the planet, and tackling it in an effective way requires difficult but necessary choices.”
Steuer-Ingall doesn’t think Yale’s response to date is good enough.
“I think it was unconscionable two years ago that Yale had holdings in the fossil fuel industry and it’s unconscionable now,” she said.
One of the Harvard organizers, Illana Cohen, called the protest “one of the defining moments” of her college career to date, “but more importantly, it was a gamechanger,” she said. “I proved that people were willing to take a break entertainment and ... daily life ... in order to take a stand.”
Cohen, a junior who grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., said the protest’s success was “a testament to the power of grassroots organizing and student” activism. “In a sense, it was a miraculous moment — we could not have anticipated hundreds of people joining in.
“Honestly, it is certainly one of the highlights of my life so far,” she said.
She said she “was very, very nervous” that Saturday. “I think many of us were very nervous about whether we would pull this off. I mean, we had eight backup plans,” but “in the end, we didn’t need them,” she said.
“Part of why we were so surprised was, it was by no means guaranteed that we were going to even make it on the field,” said Heaphy, then a Yale junior who was a graduate of the city’s Engineering and Science University Magnet School — where “we did not have a football team — we had robotics team.”
Going onto the field “definitely was a real surreal moment. We were divided into nine groups and we were going to go at the end of halftime,” said Heaphy, who coordinated the group’s media effort at the time of the protest.
Groups were positioned at different entrances so that if one were to get stopped, others could take the lead.
In the days preceding the action, “we were very careful not to send information over the Yale email system,” she said.
During training, “We did a little role play — like practice facing a police officer,” Heaphy said. “If you’ve never been in that situation before, it can be intimidating.” Planning began about a monthand-a-half in advance.
“We had 150 people signed up who had been through training” with a couple of local nonviolent action trainers with whom the organizers had worked before, said Heaphy, who grew up in East Rock, lived in the Dwight neighborhood at the time and now lives in the city’s Westville section. “But we had no idea that that many people would join in from the crowd.”
The organizers did have a clue that Waterston might be there, although it was unannounced.
Heaphy told Hearst Connecticut Media at the time that “we reached out to him ahead of time because he had been involved in the Green New Deal protests.”
Waterston issued a statement after the event, which Fossil Free Yale, part of the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition, one of the organizers, posted on its Facebook page.
“I’m here because I hope the students’ determination, and maybe my joining in, will give some heart to the great majority of us who know we are in the middle of a climate emergency, but are paralyzed by the size of the challenge, so that we will take courage from these young people to speak up ourselves; that, seeing them, we’ll feel a new confidence in our numbers and strength, and in our power to move even a mountain of inertia and resistance as big as this one.”
In addition to fossil fuel holdings, the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition also has been pressuring Yale to divest of its holdings in Puerto Rican debt.
Yale protester Rachel Pontious, 20, who is still a sophomore because — like many of her fellow students and organizers, took a gap year last year during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic — said she and other organizers were worried because “we didn’t know how much Yale knew about what we had planned.”
Pontious, an environmental engineering student who grew up in Baltimore, said a lot a lot of those worries melted away when “halftime came and we got the signal.”
They had been told it wouldn’t be good for them to run onto the field, “so we just walked onto the field. There were still cops, like, everywhere, but they didn’t stop us,” Pontious said. “... We were able to just walk to the middle of the field and just sit down before anybody even knew what was happening.
“We got booed really briefly, and then people started cheering for us,” she said.
Police “were literally about to arrest us and then all these people just started coming down onto the field,” Pontious said. “We didn’t expect to be on the field for more than 5 minutes. But because of all those people who just saw it in that moment and decided to join us, we were on the field for like an hour. It was really the most incredible experience.”
Pontious, who was not among the people arrested, said, “It was such an impactful experience to me . ... It has only solidified my feeling that this was exactly what we had to do at the time.”
Yale protester Fi SchrothDouma, a music major who grew up in Hamden’s Whitneyville neighborhood, said she also had just gotten to Yale at the time of the protest.
“We were just doing a disruptive thing at an event where we knew there’d be news coverage,” SchrothDouma said.
“I was nervous. We had been planning it since August” — before she arrived at school, she said. “The concept of the Harvard and Yale game disruption was already in the works,” with the big question hanging out there, “Are we going to risk arrest?”
As it turned out, “It was surprising and hopeful in the best way,” Schroth-Douma said. “It was an incredible moment of joy — even the hundreds of people who came streaming down on the field.”
That joy didn’t end when the protest — or The Game — ended, she said.
“I just remember feeling so much love from the students around me in that protest ... and in the days that followed,” she said.
In Schroth-Douma’s opinion, divestment is not just a crazy idea — and it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that Yale might eventually decide to do so.
“Yale should be working toward a renewable energy future,” she said.
Schroth-Douma was one of several people who took part who acknowledged that the privilege they enjoy as Yale students allowed them to do things that other people not have been able to pull off — with relatively mild consequences.
“Part of our privilege as Yale students is that we only got five hours of community service,” she said. SchrothDouma said she spent her five hours cleaning up the New Haven Green with the team of Downtown Ambassadors from the Town Green District.
Two years later, “Yes, my life is definitely different and better,” she said. “It had a giant positive impact.”
She’s still involved with the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition, she said.
The organization ran a GoFundMe campaign to cover its legal bills in the wake of the protest and ended up collecting more money than it needed, so members currently are engaged “in giving that money away to other organizations in New Haven,” Schroth-Douma said.