On Friday morning at 2 a.m. a group of students departed campus for New York City to protest the forced clean-up of  Zuccotti Park, which has been the home base of the Occupy Wall Street movement since its start on Sept. 17. Many protesters saw the forced clean-up, which was initiated by the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties, as a pretext for a dismantling of the encampment.

The group of Wesleyan students mobilized after holding a “General Assembly” meeting on Thursday afternoon in the Usdan University Center (Usdan).

“The things that are worth noting about [the cleanup] are that within the space, there was a working group for sanitation and the Park has been remarkably clean,” Nick Petrie ’12 said. “The [Wall Street General Assembly] had organized a cleaning all day Thursday, and so the space was cleaner than I had ever seen it before. There was certainly something funny going on.”

Anwar Batte ’13, who made his fourth trip to join the protests, said that he decided to make the trip again based on encouragement from occupants of the park, sent out via social media outlets, to stand in solidarity against the clean-up.

“Obviously how [the clean-up] was interpreted was an eviction of the park,” he said.

Following the meeting of the Usdan General Assembly, the group of students considered joining the protests that have recently flared up in Hartford before ultimately settling on returning to New York City.

“We eventually resolved that it made sense to go because Zuccotti Park became an epicenter of the movement and I think a lot of us felt emotionally connected to this space so it felt like something worthwhile to defend,” Petrie said.

Both Petrie and Jana Heaton ’14 attributed the successful shutdown of the cleanup to the size and diversity of Friday’s crowd.

“This was the most diverse crowd that I had ever seen at a protest and diverse on many different axes,” Petrie said. “Labor came out in force, there was a huge range of ages, and racially it looked like New York.”

Heaton, who joined the protest for the first time, said that she made the trip in order to learn more about the movement.

“I thought that if I went I would better understand it and what was going on,” she said. “It really was the sheer number of bodies that were there—they couldn’t have arrested us all. So instead of blindly being a participant, it really felt like we were contributing to it.”

Heaton added that one negative aspect of the protest she noticed was animosity toward police. The role of the police has proved a contentious issue in the protests, as members of the NYPD have used crowd control techniques at a number of marches, including pepper spray and “kettling,” a form of netting people in, that have resulted in mass arrests.

“In a situation like that, it’s understood that when cops are unnecessarily brutal it’s a problem, but what I didn’t like was seeing police pretty much doing their jobs and protesters just harassing them and bothering them when they were ordered to be there,” she said.

At 6:30 a.m. on Friday, Brookfield Properties announced an agreement with the protesters that shutdown the cleanup. Petrie said that the group encountered a number of other Wesleyan students, who had traveled independently to the movements, while participating in a march following the clean-up’s shutdown. He said that, in his opinion, students should make themselves aware of the legal risks and may prefer to travel in a group.

“Because, the legal system, particularly in that situation, is widely biased toward police, its very easy to get in way more legal trouble than you intended,” he said.

Petrie added that, given the arrests of five Wesleyan students on the Brooklyn Bridge earlier this month, the group had expected the worst.

Despite claims that the protests won’t bring tangible results, Batte said that, based on his experiences, the movement is heading towards making more concrete change. He cited the upcoming “Bank Transfer Day” on Nov. 5 as having gained traction and exposure because of the protests. On that day, people are encouraged to withdraw money from corporate banks and sign up for accounts with local banks and credit unions, according to Batte.

In addition to student participation in this weekend’s protests, nine Wesleyan professors have signed a petition stating their solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Hartford movements. The petition includes signatures from professors at Trinity College, Central Connecticut State University, and the University of Connecticut.

Assistant Professor of Religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein said that she didn’t think twice about signing the petition.

“I think that we need to get genuine conversations happening about peoples’ aims, the counter aims, what’s promising, what’s limiting about this,” she said. “And I don’t think that everybody needs to be on the same side about this—I don’t think that most people are on the same side.”