What was really remarkable about this protest to me was, contrary to what you might have heard in the media, its restraint and tactical shrewdness. A few dozen antifa directly engaged the police with fire crackers, rocks, and reappropriated barriers, using smoke bombs to conceal their movements & forming phalanxes to protect themselves when the cops rained down pepper spray pellets. Antifa clearly had a gameplan going in and really seemed to know how to work together. Surrounding this militant core where hundreds of protestors, cheering on their every tactical gain, chanting slogans, booing the police. The sheer size of the crowd acted as protection and legitimation for the handfuls of militants doing the hardest work. (To be sure, the crowd had to be wrangled. When a sizeable portion mistook a smoke bomb for tear gas and began to flee, experienced activists called out that there is safety in numbers and that by fleeing they were putting the most militant protestors in greater danger.) A few windows were smashed in a corner of a building, not all throughout it as some media claimed. A chair and a portable lighting rig, behind which cops hid to shoot at protestors unseen, were set ablaze. And that was all it took for the event to be cancelled. Their objective accomplished, protestors did not storm or loot the building. Tonight's protest was essentially a defensive action--we were there to defend one another and to defend our campus, even if a couple windows had to be smashed to do it. What protestors did do after it was announced that the event was cancelled was continue to maintain control of the square for was continue to maintain control of the square for another two and half hours, preventing the event from being restored and refusing to leave on the police's terms. A mobile speaker system blasted hip hop and the protest turned into a kind of dance party, albeit with the occasional volley of projectiles. The music kept the crowd from dispersing by making it a fun place to be, and it countered the "verbal force" of the police's dispersal warnings (for hours they told us we had only ten minutes left to disperse) by drowning them out. We shouldn't think this was just a carnival though: I did see two fist fights and one arrest, but no other violence. (Be on the look out for whatever bail fund may pop up for the arrestee.) There was no "lockdown" of campus, as CNN reported--a feat which, given the size of the place, would require a military batallion. Outside the square, campus life went on as usual; only after the protestors had left was the square for some reason blocked by riot police. Contrary to portrayls of this event as a riot, it was a model of what the NYPD would call the use of "minimum necessary force" to achieve an objective, and it was the most effective instance of cooperation between militants and masses I have ever witnessed first hand.