If these students have been holed up in a building for weeks, how have they gone to class? If they haven’t gone to class, why are they in college?

Emily Jashinsky of Campus Reform has the story.

Student protesters arrested after weeks-long divestment sit-in

After a three week sit-in, pro-divestment student protesters at the University of Mary Washington were arrested last month for refusing to vacate a university building they had been occupying.

Students conducted the sit-in as a protest to demand the school divest from fossil fuels.

On April 15th, weeks into the sit-in, university officials sent a letter to the protestors informing them they needed to vacate the space they had been occupying for safety purposes pursuant to a clause in the school’s policy. Officials gave them until 6:30 PM, after which they noted the protesters would be considered trespassing on university property and subject to police action.

State police entered the building and gave the protesters an opportunity to leave before arresting them for trespassing. Only three members of Divest UMW remained in the space and all three were arrested, taken to a regional jail, and processed for trespassing. Two of the arrested protesters were students while one was a community member. They were released on a $1,500 bond.

The sit-in, which began on March 26, lasted for hundreds of hours and showed no signs of stopping until the arrests. After UMW’s Board of Visitor’s rejected a proposal to form an exploratory committee that would evaluate the feasibility of divestment, a handful of students from Divest UMW spent the three weeks sleeping on the floor of the university’s administration building.