Civil Rights Orgs Warn Pomona College Unprecedented Suspensions of Students Are Unlawful

Claremont, CA, Nov. 13th, 2024 – Five legal organizations including Palestine Legal, the Asian Law Caucus, the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, and the National Lawyers Guild of Los Angeles sent a letter to Pomona College today warning the school that its unprecedented suspensions of a group of students for the remaining 2024-2025 academic year without due process violated First Amendment principles and California law.

The legal letter urges Pomona College to revoke the unlawful suspensions immediately, noting that the college has caused immediate and severe harm to all students who have received the year-long suspension by abruptly depriving them of housing and all access to campus.

This is the first university that Palestine Legal is aware of where students have been suspended without a hearing and without having a chance to see any evidence against them before the deadline for filing an appeal. Pomona students have also told attorneys that the president’s use of “extraordinary authority” to distribute the punishments is unprecedented in the university’s history.

During the week of Oct. 21, 2024, Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr sent a group of students an identical notice stating they would be suspended for the rest of the academic year, effective immediately. The suspension letters allege that the students participated in a student occupation of Carnegie Hall on Oct. 7th, 2024, in which protesters called for Pomona to divest from weapons manufacturers and companies complicit in Israel’s brutal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, ruled a plausible genocide by the International Court of Justice and echoed by a US federal court. The suspension notice explicitly holds all of the students in the protest responsible for any vandalism that occurred during the protest — regardless of whether the individual students participated in it.

Invoking her “extraordinary authority of the president,” Starr suspended students without input from Pomona’s Judicial Council, a student-run group that traditionally oversees such cases. Now, 12 students are suspended for the rest of the academic year and six await further disciplinary actions — all without any fair process.

In an op-ed, the suspended students identified themselves as majority first-generation, low-income (FLI), and/or students of color who rely on financial aid and on-campus employment. The students are indefinitely cut off from access to housing, dining halls, classes, on-campus jobs, extracurriculars, student health services, libraries, and more, all for charges for which they have not been found guilty.

Legal organizations, including the signatories to today’s letter, are monitoring the wave of increasingly harsh suppression of pro-Palestine student activism across the country. After last spring’s historic student encampments led to thousands of arrests, universities are imposing severe rules to restrict protests and free speech. Following this reported trend in repressive policies, several schools, including Brown University, have recently suspended their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. Professors at Columbia, Muhlenberg College, Princeton University, and elsewhere are also facing severe disciplinary actions, including firings, as retaliation for supporting students demanding their universities disclose and divest from financial ties to Israel.

The legal letter concludes that if Pomona College refuses to change course, “we reserve the right to take any necessary legal action to vindicate the rights of the students.”

“I came to Pomona as a first-generation, low-income college student to be the first in my family to graduate from college. That goal and the years of hard work have been brought to a halt, with no presentation of evidence or due process,” said suspended student Francisco Villaseñor. “Since my suspension, I have had to stay at five different houses. I spent two weeks living off of the clothes that I packed for what was supposed to be a weekend trip for fall break. I have had to talk on the phone with my devastated parents and explain to them that I was removed from campus without any idea what evidence was being used to connect me to an alleged policy violation. President Starr's use of executive authority is shameful and a startling precedent that is being set for free speech and protest all over the United States.”

“It is clear that Pomona has targeted important community members with this wave of unilateral suspensions. Without providing sufficient evidence, they have suspended students who fight to amplify the voices of workers, advocate for first gen low-income students, and platform Black, Brown, and Queer voices”, said suspended student Daniel Velazquez. “By targeting marginalized students, Pomona's suspensions reflect a historical continuation of political and free speech suppression in academia that is creating a community where those on the margins feel scared and under threat.”

“Pomona is utilizing collective punishment, disciplining students severely regardless of their individual conduct, as a way to chill student speech on campus and deter student advocacy for Palestinian human rights,” said Palestine Legal staff attorney Tori Porell. “Many students chose to attend Pomona because of Pomona’s purported commitment to social justice, but have just received a first-hand lesson in the limits of that commitment, when students call on the University to divest their substantial financial resources from the US war machine.”

“California students have hard-won rights to express themselves and engage in protest, both of which are vital to upholding a thriving democracy and inclusive educational environment,” said Kanwalroop Singh, staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus. “Pomona College's actions not only disregard these rights but also undermine the very values of justice, safety, and fairness that we need our educational institutions to champion and defend. We call on Pomona College to uphold all students’ free speech rights and immediately rescind the baseless and illegal suspensions of students.”

BACKGROUNDER:

According to the legal letter, these suspensions, and the peremptory manner in which they were imposed, violate the students’ rights under California law.

The suspension letters make clear that the College is holding anyone who attends a protest responsible for any unlawful or disruptive actions that may occur within the vicinity of the protest, regardless of whether the person participated in or even knew of those actions. The letter states that this action “is, in effect, punishing the act of protesting itself.”

The legal letter explains how these suspensions incur significant harm to these students and constitute a major disruption to their lives and pursuit of their college degrees. Overnight, these students were forced to contend with a loss of their housing, meal plan, access to medical resources, including mental health care, income from various on-campus jobs, loss of their support networks and community, and a full year delay in progressing toward graduation. These students, who are disproportionately low-income, BIPOC, and members of other marginalized identities, have already suffered greatly as a result. For some students whose families are counting on their ability to earn income, the year-long suspension may even prevent them from completing a college degree altogether.

The legal letter states how Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr’s decision to suspend a dozen students and ban dozens of other Claremont students for the entire year without any real opportunity to be heard or advisement of the evidence against them, undoubtedly has chilled and will continue to chill other students from participating in anti-war protests.

During the week of October 14th, Pomona College also brought disciplinary charges against Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine and the student-run publication Claremont Undercurrents for reporting on the divestment action on Oct. 7, 2024. Claremont Undercurrents has stated that these charges risk setting the precedent that student press cannot stay in the area of protests to cover them until their conclusion — putting any repressive actions completely out of sight of the community.

In addition to the potential legal violations Pomona College has committed by issuing the unilateral suspensions, there is currently an open investigation as to whether the College has violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its implementing regulations, through its alleged discriminatory treatment of “Arab, Palestinian, Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA), and Muslim shared ancestry.” These draconian disciplinary suspensions further contribute to the hostile environment originally described in the civil rights complaint filed by Palestine Legal on behalf of Pomona students.

Since Pomona College issued these unilateral suspensions, the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and Human Rights Watch sent an open letter to US college and university presidents urging them to protect the right to protest on their campuses.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently designated Pomona College as an “Institution of Particular Concern” due to their reported creation of a hostile campus environment for Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish and other students, staff, and faculty opposing the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The discrimination, harassment, stereotyping, disparate treatment, and racial profiling described in the coalition letter are not isolated instances but are the product of both deep-rooted, dehumanizing bigotry against Palestinians and decades-long systematic efforts by anti-Palestinian groups and their allies to suppress advocacy for Palestinian rights on college campuses.

https://palestinelegal.org/news/2024/11/13/civil-rights-orgs-warn-pomona-college-unprecedented-suspensions-of-students-are-unlawful-punishes-the-act-of-protest-itself