Nine Student Protesters Are Arrested in Claremont

Police arrested nine college students early Tuesday, ending a 28-hour blockade of a business office serving the Claremont Colleges. Officers were unable to remove six other students who were chained to concrete-filled buckets but photographed them for later identification.

The 15 were among about 40 students protesting plans for a new campus building, the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences. The proposed site, on an 87-acre preserve north of the main campus, has been a focus of controversy for more than three years.

“This is the only way we could get to them,” said Lara Foy, 20, a sophomore at Pitzer College. “By jamming up their system.”

The arrested students were booked by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in nearby Industry and released. All nine were back at the building by midafternoon Tuesday, planning their next move.

“This is not the end,” said Libby Coggshall, a sophomore at Pomona College who remained locked to one of the buckets. “Until the bulldozers physically run over that land, it’s not a done deal.”

The Keck Institute offers master’s degrees in fields related to the burgeoning biomedical industry, but officials have encountered resistance in finding it a home. Its first students began course work last year in an office park southwest of the campus.

Student activists, upset with a recent settlement that would allow construction of the campus, want a promise from the Claremont University Consortium to keep the land the way it is.

The consortium handles the combined operations of the seven otherwise independent Claremont Colleges and owns the land collectively held by the schools.

College officials refused to negotiate with the protesters, suspended the students and finally had them arrested.

“We couldn’t go another day without access” to the offices, said consortium chief executive Brenda Barham Hill. “I told them . . . I am not going to talk until they were out of the way.”