Drunken students and clean energy activism didn't mix well yesterday.
Nine students camping out on the Res Quad early Wednesday morning were shocked when drunk students passing by first harassed them and then broke their tent, according to university police and two members of the group.
The campers, part of the Tufts branch of the Leadership Campaign, were participating in a nightly, on-campus sleep-out designed to raise awareness of climate issues and galvanize local politicians into passing legislation supporting clean energy.
On Wednesday shortly after 1 a.m., a group of students started shaking the tent and bothering the activists, who were about to go to sleep, according to the accounts of two students who were in the tent and Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) Sgt. Robert McCarthy. The activists asked the students to leave and they did.
Around 20 minutes later, some members of the group returned.
This time, a smaller group of students came by. One student charged the tent and knocked it over. The crash broke a tent pole.
"I don't think it was anything malicious toward what we were doing or our cause — it was just a bunch of stupid, drunk kids," said junior Sally Sharrow, who is co-coordinating the sleep-out campaign and who was in the tent yesterday morning. "I don't think they even knew who we were … They just saw an opportunity to be jerks and took it."
Students from the Leadership Campaign told the Daily last month that they planned to sleep outside every night until a bill is passed supporting 100 percent clean energy use in Massachusetts by 2020 or until December's UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Members of the group saw the drunken students run in the direction of Wren Hall, an all-sophomore, uphill dormitory, and called TUPD at 1:40 a.m. Officers responding to the scene electronically traced the fob of someone who had just entered Wren Hall, according to Sharrow and senior Erin Taylor, who was also in the tent.
The offending student was identified as a white male with an American flag, according to McCarthy.
The officers found six or seven students in one of Wren's common areas, and one of the students admitted to running around the quad earlier, McCarthy said.
"He had been drinking," McCarthy said. "He said he had a couple of beers."
TUPD does not generally release the names of students accused of wrongdoing in such instances, and neither Sharrow nor Taylor knew the student's name.
After bringing the student into the lobby, another student there said he had seen him run into the building earlier.
The intoxicated student did not admit to breaking the tent, although he agreed to pay for the snapped tent pole, according to Taylor, who is an outreach coordinator for the Tufts chapter of the Leadership Campaign.
A report will be sent to the dean of student affairs office today, McCarthy said.
This incident does not mark the first time the Leadership Campaign has had trouble since its members began sleeping on the Academic and Res Quads nearly three weeks ago.
On Saturday night, Sharrow said, one student was sleeping outside when someone or a group of people outside the tent attacked the tent twice, breaking it. She was not sure of the circumstances surrounding those occurrences.
Taylor said yesterday it was "pretty obvious" the drunken students on Wednesday morning were not making a political statement, but that she found the incident dishearening.
"It just made me sad, I think, that members of my own community would be that disrespectful to their peers," she said.
