Students, protesters ejected from controversial MSE speech

Protesters and sympathizers of the Occupy movements temporarily halted a lecture given by Karl Rove, former Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush, at Hopkins' Homewood campus on Tuesday night. Activists, predominately entrants in the Inner Harbor's Occupy Baltimore camp, interrupted Rove's speech with chanted political epithets, inciting anger from audience members, security officers, and Rove himself.

Rove was the capstone speaker of Hopkins' Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium, an annual lecture series offered by the University.

A small group of protesters gathered in front of Shriver Hall, the University's main auditorium, in the hour preceding the lecture, shouting chants read from orange cue cards at the base of the building's steps. Lawrence Egbert, a member of the Johns Hopkins Class of 1948 and an anesthesiologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, stood towards the back of the crowd, orange sheet in hand.

 "[Rove's political strategy] is based on a bunch of lies, and everybody knows it," Egbert said. "I was [at Hopkins] during World War II, and we were proud of what we were doing. Not this, though. Not this."

The lecture was slated to begin at 8 p.m., at which point the assembly dissipated into the auditorium itself. The gathering, however, proved to be a precursor to a larger protest. Ten minutes into Rove's speech, an unidentified male stood up from his seat in the center of the audience and began chanting, "I say ‘Bush years,' you say ‘nightmares!" Scattered throughout the audience, protesters abandoned anonymity and engaged in the call and responded.

Pandemonium ensued. A bevy of protesters contributed to the chants with political expletives of their own, successfully halting Rove's speech.

"War criminal! Murderer!" one female protester shouted, before a Hopkins security officer escorted her from the auditorium.

The remainder of the audience, which consisted largely of Hopkins undergraduates, responded with either confusion, craning heads to identify the sources, or, increasingly, hostility. Some members of the staff of the Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium – comprised entirely of undergraduates – called in security officials; others attempted to silence the outspoken themselves.

Students raised cell phones with illuminated camera flashes; some snapped shots of Rove, who appeared to be waiting for silence, but most documenting the outbursts, now unified by raucous chants of the Occupy movements' percentage creed.

"You want to keep jumping up and yelling ‘We're the 99 percent'?" Rove asked, shouting into his microphone. "How presumptuous and arrogant do you think you are?"

Chaos pervaded above his retort, prompting security officials to escort additional protesters from the premises. One officer slung an uncooperative individual over his shoulder and carried him towards the door, prompting cheers from the audience.

Order was not restored until junior Elizabeth Goodstein, a co-chair of the Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium, took the stage and the microphone, chastising those who participated in the outburst.

"Regardless of your political beliefs, students are here to hear Mr. Rove speak," she said, prompting immediate applause. "You are not only disrespecting Mr. Rove; you are disrespecting us," – she gestured towards the first few rows of the audience, where student government officers sat – "and the rest of the student body."

Though Rove continued his lecture, he paused on three further occasions in the face of interruption. At one point, he jeeringly invited a demonstrator to fight him onstage.

"Stop acting like fascists and start acting like Americans," he said.

With each outburst, participation from the non-activist members of the audience increased.

"Stand up, coward," shouted one unidentified undergraduate to Asher Strauss, a 23-year-old protester donning a rasta hat, who had screamed that Rove was a racist.

Security officials soon escorted Strauss from the premises.

A question and answer period followed the lecture, though the tenor of the audience remained tense and, ultimately, unforgiving from either camp. Further shouts of "murderer" accompanied a question regarding Obama's maintenance of the economic derivatives of the war in Iraq. Freshman Alexander Grable presented a question to Rove on Obamacare; when Grable sought to retort to Rove's response, an undergraduate staff member turned the microphone away from his face.

And as Grable, who was donned in a coat and tie, turned to walk from the microphone, Rove laughed.

"That's a good looking suit," he said.

The end of the question and answer period saw the end of the event and an audience of about half of its initial size. Many of its primary constituents had been expelled from the auditorium. Others had left in disgust.

Meanwhile, evicted activist Asher Strauss stood on the steps of the auditorium in his rasta hat, smoking a cigarette. A participant in Occupy Baltimore from the start, Strauss said he is accustomed to official harassment.

"I'm used to it," he said. "But I'm not backing down."

For further coverage, see the upcoming print edition of The News-Letter.