It had been raining some 18 hours, the first sustained deluge to fall on Philadelphia in more than a month. At 3:52 p.m., the air dried; the clouds gave way to a neon-pink sunset. Not long after that, two demonstrators — their faces shrouded by keffiyehs and hospital-grade facemasks — set foot on the base of the Bell Tower and stood.
“Temple has a new president, John Fry,” they said — sunnily — to those walking past. “Get to know him.”
In the pair’s outstretched hands fluttered copies of a monochrome print-out: The man of the hour’s trademark grin hunkered in each page’s upper-right corner. Fry’s alleged “flaws,” which the protestors had gathered to recount, unfurled in sans-serif font down the middle. Scroll-like.
Vice President for Student Affairs Jodi Bailey approached the tower’s base at the appointed start time and motioned to the event’s leader — whose white T-shirt, piled beneath layers of winter clothing, read “GENTRIFRY.”
Fewer than a dozen actual protestors had gathered by then — not counting the dozens of police officers, security guards, administrators, professors and idea-lab leaders dotting Pollett Walk from 13th Street to 12th. Whoever had stockpiled steel partitions on the lip of Beury Beach — Main Campus’s central lawn — accomplished little more than a pre-holiday lifting session.
Yet the pro-Palestinian rallygoers had still drawn the attention of those in power.
Bailey had come to tell them to go. Students were not allowed, she said, to organize “events” at the Bell Tower without advance notice through Temple’s designated channels.
In an exchange both unimpeachably polite and unmistakably tense, the protestors asked where they could set up, and Bailey — repeatedly — alluded to the street. Which street, and where exactly in proximity to the street, weren’t abundantly clear at first. The protestors noted they couldn’t block traffic, per Temple’s amended guidelines for demonstrations.
They also questioned the act of reserving space at the Bell Tower. Streetside evangelist Patrick Donlevy, they noted, rolled a speaker across campus delivering sermons several times each semester. So, they asked Bailey whether “the street preacher,” as he’s known, reserved his space in advance.
After roughly five minutes of haggling, the protestors set up shop on a park bench between the 12th Street sidewalk and a pretzel stand that had closed for the day hours before. It was good enough for Bailey — not too disruptive, she said, nor threatening.
Four demonstrators would ultimately come to pass the megaphone around. A man with a moustache and buzz cut stood to the side with another, repeating what he found repeatable.
For roughly half an hour, the protestors laid out a case spanning half the earth: Fry, they noted, had been president of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when the school moved a rail yard and landfill to another part of town.
In his time as Drexel’s president, speakers claimed that Fry abetted the destruction of the affordable University City townhomes. And Fry’s messages of sympathy in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attack — which mourned for both the Israeli dead and Palestinians facing the war’s fallout — hadn’t mentioned 75 prior years of Palestinian suffering, they claimed.
“Imperialism, right here at home,” said one speaker in a black sweater, the keffiyeh wrapped around her neck like a scarf. “We, as students, are complicit in the ways our tuition is weaponized against our neighbors in North Philadelphia.”
Temple’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine long faced claims of trafficking in antisemitism and violence, even while its rallies and protests were routinely drawing hundreds of spectators and supporters. But those charges reached a fever pitch this past semester: First, the group drew condemnation from university administrators when one of its marches came to a halt and began chanting in front of the university Hillel. Then, SJP members and police clashed when demonstrators marched through an engineering career fair to protest the presence of defense contractors there.
Administrators at colleges across the country — smothered by moral, legal and political dilemmas — had already sanctioned student protestors: Last fall for, in their view, crossing the line between anti-zionism and violent antisemitism. In the spring, for delivering campus life’s widest day-to-day shock since the 1960s.
After making moves to punish individual student-protestors during the summer, Temple followed suit — placing SJP on interim suspension, The Temple News first reported. Its path to reconciliation remains unclear; one of the consequences of the group’s official exile, according to Bailey, is that it is barred from reserving on-campus spaces.
On-campus spaces like the Bell Tower.
One attendee, who asked to be identified only as a Temple student and rallygoer for her safety, said she had a cousin whose life had been upended by the conflict — not in Gaza, among the 44,000 slain and millions displaced, but in at her bakery in the southern Israeli city of Tel-Aviv. After war broke out, the student said, her cousin’s landlord seized the store and shuttered it.
Shock at the loss of 44,000 Palestinian lives may have been the spark that powered much of the student protest movement. But this particular student believed her roots were far too deep to ebb with public appetites.
At 5 p.m. the demonstrators left the bench and began to pack their megaphones away.
“We’ve said everything we needed to,” said the main speaker, collecting the un-taken papers and no-longer-necessary equipment.
The ring of spectators had seen everything there was for them, too. As they broke apart and embarked on their homeward commute, the heavens reopened — and the rain began to fall on Philadelphia again.
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