Yo-Yo Ma and Stephen Colbert had to cut short a Harvard University talk on Thursday night after a fire alarm was pulled inside Sanders Theatre, forcing the audience out before the event could finish. The alarm went off about 40 minutes into the conversation, during a question-and-answer session, and the two speakers had answered just three questions before the evacuation.
The interruption mattered because the venue was already under pressure from a protest outside. More than 100 Harvard workers were picketing at the theater, and demonstrators shouted, blew horns and pounded on drums as the event got underway. On Friday night, the Harvard Graduate Student Union posted on Instagram that the two had crossed the picket line.
John Green’s canceled appearance at an earlier campus event on Thursday underscored how widely the strike was affecting Harvard’s schedule. He dropped his in-person plan and joined by Zoom instead while pledging a donation to a Harvard Graduate Student Union strike fund, a sign that the dispute has spilled well beyond a single theater.
The union said the alarm was unrelated to its picketing activity and said it had no knowledge of what caused it. That matters because the fire alarm and the protest were unfolding at the same time, but not for the same reason. Firefighters found no reason for the alarm activation, and Harvard staff checked and reset the alarm system before the fire department cleared the scene.
The broader fight is still unresolved. Graduate students walked off the job on Oct. 27, and the union says its outstanding demands are safe work, fair pay and the right to stay. Negotiations between Harvard leaders and more than 4,000 student workers have stalled, leaving the university to manage a strike that already followed a 40-day walkout this spring and now has begun to disrupt high-profile public events as well.
