UC Santa Cruz Students, Professor Sue Over Campus Bans After Pro-Palestinian Protest

As pro-Palestinian activism resumes on college campuses this fall, a group of UC Santa Cruz activists is suing the school for issuing what they believe were illegal campus bans to protesters last spring. Their goal is to prevent the school from doing so again.

On Monday, lawyers filed a lawsuit on behalf of two students and a professor who were among more than 110 people arrested during a protest in May. They say that campus officials issued up to two-week bans to many of the people arrested, leaving some without housing, campus resources, or places to take their final exams for the spring quarter.

“They flunked classes and had difficulty obtaining enough food during this period of time,” Rachel Lederman, a member of the legal team, said. “One of my clients couldn’t access an important health care appointment at the campus health center because she was banned from campus. The effects were pretty devastating, even though the ban was short term.”

Late on May 30, police in riot gear were deployed to a pro-Palestinian encampment set up in a little-used parking lot near the base of UC Santa Cruz’s mountainous campus.

Lederman said that when students and professors heard police were arriving, many joined to stand in solidarity with the protesters. Throughout the night, she said police surrounded and squeezed in on them and eventually arrested and detained 112 people.

When they were released, many were told they were temporarily banned from campus and could face a misdemeanor charge if they did not comply.

The suit filed by Lederman and the protesters’ legal team claims that UCSC officials illegally imposed a California penal code that allows the school to “withdraw permission for a person to be on campus.” The statute limits these temporary bans to 14 days.

She said that the California Supreme Court has limited the scope of the legal code so that a ban without a hearing can only be imposed if a person’s presence on campus constitutes a “substantial and material threat of significant injury to persons or property.”

“They didn’t present any such threat,” Lederman told KQED. “There was no violence or disruption caused by this protest. The only disruption was caused by these bans that instantly banished students from campus.”

Lederman said that some students were able to have hearings that resulted in an earlier end to their campus bans, but those didn’t take place until at least a week after they were issued.

UC Santa Cruz officials said that they had not been served the suit as of Tuesday morning but that they are committed to upholding community members’ rights of free expression and speech and “remain confident that decisions made in the spring were necessary and critical to preserve safety, access, and operations of the campus.”

Laaila Irshad, one of the students named in the suit, was a resident adviser and was compensated for her work through free housing and meal points. The campus ban meant she wasn’t able to access it either.

“She didn’t really have a way to get food. She doesn’t receive parental support; she depends on the meal points that she receives in compensation for her R.A. job,” Lederman said. “She also couldn’t do her R.A. job, even though residents were still contacting her for help.”

Irshad said that she failed her classes when she couldn’t access her computer, complete assignments, or attend classes.

Now, Irshad is considering taking time off of school due to the stress and concerns for safety.

“The ban prevented me from accessing my meal plan, my job, and my housing. It was incredibly destabilizing physically, emotionally, and financially,” she said in a statement published by the

American Civil Liberties Union NorCal branch.

The bans occurred during the last two weeks of the spring quarter, and according to Professor Christine Hong, who is also joining the lawsuit over her ban, it was up to individual instructors to decide whether to offer students a remote option for their final exam.

Hong said she arrived at the protest around 11 p.m. after hearing from a student that police were present.

“In the past, faculty have served as a buffer between students and the police at different protests. We’ve also been there to witness what has happened, and I also went because I also was joining in the protest,” Hong, who is the director of the campus Center for Racial Justice, said.

Her banishment prevented her from accessing her personal library, which was on campus, and her office. She also wasn’t able to record the necessary asynchronous lectures in the campus’s recording studio.

Hong had a hearing after ten days, and her campus ban was overturned that evening. The lawsuit is asking for an injunction to prevent the school from issuing these bans and a declaration that doing so is illegal, she said.

“We are trying to make sure that both UC Santa Cruz and others don’t use this tactic again to just banish students and faculty from campus for speaking out for Palestine,” Lederman told KQED.

KQED’s Keith Mizuguchi contributed to this report.