“It’s a concrete show of solidarity,” he says, sitting on the back fender of a car stuffed with blankets and sleeping bags after the tents have come down. “It’s here. It’s big. You can’t deny it.”

The inhabitants of the tent city, many sharing Rae’s sense of solidarity, regularly held meetings and events together. Last Sunday afternoon, the campers held a barbecue. On Monday morning, they held an instruction session with an organizer from the Ruckus Society, which trains activists in non-violent civil disobedience.

In recent days, emergency plans had been discussed in case police arrived to shut down the protest and round up the tent city occupants. That scenario never came to pass. In fact, the campers gave local police officers rounds of applause at several of their meetings.

“We were happy with the way they carried themselves,” says Prashant Inamti, who spent a week and a half in the tent city.

According to Inamti and other residents, the main disruptions came on the weekends when undergraduates returned from parties drunk. One man tried to urinate on two of the tents last weekend, they say. Another one stumbled and fell onto a tent, though the occupant was not injured.

“There were a lot of ridiculous, stupid incidents,” Rae says. “Basically, we had to keep security.”

Though the tent city attracted many people from outside Harvard, residents say they caused no trouble. Many were like Samaria, people who heard about the sit-in, happened to stop by, and then just decided to stay.