Students hustling to noon classes yesterday were greeted outside the Science Center with nearly 100 chanting participants in a national walkout to protest the war in Iraq and military recruitment in schools.

Local high schoolers—who said they were risking suspension by cutting classes—joined workers and Harvard students in front of the Science Center.

A graduate student in molecular and cellular biology, Kaveri Rajaraman, shouted over a loudspeaker, “If the United States government does not pull out of Iraq, there will be trouble.”

After the Science Center rally, nearly 100 students and workers marched across the Yard in single file and complete silence, waving an American flag and holding signs.

Reorganizing outside Cafe Gato Rojo, protestors said the war in Iraq is “sexist, racist, and classless.”

The group then hopped on the Red Line to Park Street, where they had planned to meet with other demonstrators for a rally in Boston Common. But the Harvard group arrived in the Common about a half-hour early, so the protesters marched to the Armed Forces Career Center on Tremont Street.

Outside the career center, the protesters chanted: “Hey recruiters, we’re no fools, get your lies out of our schools.”

Back at the Common, the crowd swelled to about 200 as students from six other colleges and several high schools joined the Harvard contingent.

“We cannot have a democracy and live in lies,” a lecturer in philosophy from Suffolk University, Jeffrey Johnson, told the crowd.

He added that the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war is “no different than Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy.”

Yesterday’s protests were part of a larger national campaign with planned walkouts at 133 high schools and colleges in 53 cities.

Sponsors of the walkout included the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice and Harvard Socialist Alternative.