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Yale’s Protest Tradition Is Back

For the first time in 50 years, Yale students gathered around an iconic sculpture to protest their university and their government.

A crowd gathered around a 12-foot cardboard version of Claes Oldenburg’s lipstick sculpture to protest their university and government.

By 1969, the Vietnam War had killed tens of thousands of young American men. President Richard Nixon had begun a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. Across the United States, millions of protesters, many of them students, joined the largest anti-war marches in American history. In New Haven, Connecticut, Yale students were among the loudest, most impassioned demonstrators.

That spring, Claes Oldenburg, who had graduated from Yale nearly two decades earlier, installed a sculpture on Beinecke Plaza, the center of campus. It was called Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks: a giant tube of lipstick rising from the treads of a tank. Students for a Democratic Society used it as a podium for their speakers during anti-war rallies, positioning it outside Woodbridge Hall, where university presidents historically had their office and where trustees met. The art historian Mya Dosch has called the tube “phallic and bullet-like,” a beauty product that evokes the danger and threat of a weapon.

The sculpture, and the protests that it featured in, were about young people versus large institutions: the university and the federal government.

Last Friday, the Lipstick appeared on Beinecke Plaza for the first time in more than 50 years. Yale College students had built a cardboard version, about half the size of the original, and placed it near where its predecessor once stood. (Oldenburg’s sculpture was moved to the Yale University Art Gallery’s sculpture garden.)

Hundreds marched to Beinecke Plaza to protest, two generations later, their university and their nation’s government. Specifically, they gathered for the second protest of Democratize Yale, a coalition of students, staff, faculty, and alumni that formed following the university’s settlement negotiations with the federal government about Yale’s alleged racial discrimination in their admissions process. The coalition’s demands include shared governance; free speech and assembly; academic freedom; and that the university exit negotiations with the Department of Justice, which they see as a strategy to appease Trump.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Representative Rosa DeLauro, and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker stood in the crowd, signaling solidarity with the demonstrators’ civil disobedience against the university. Blumenthal could be seen chanting with the students who now study at his........

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