On the afternoon of November 29, Carolyn Coyne biked near a pro-Palestinian student demonstration at Pomona College, listening to music.
As the junior entered a crosswalk, Coyne heard a commotion through her headphones and turned to see several police officers surrounding a man in a black T-shirt with white lettering that read “Anti-Apartheid Social Club.”
She whipped out her phone and started recording.
“I am a professor here, so thank you,” the man said as police officers handcuffed him, according to a video Coyne shared with The Chronicle. “This is gonna look worse for you.”
That man was Arón Macal Montenegro, a lecturer in the department of Chicanx-Latinx studies at Pomona, which is part of the Claremont Colleges, a seven-campus consortium in Southern California. Montenegro had taken his class of students to see the protest.
According to Claremont Colleges, Montenegro refused several requests to turn down music he’d been playing and identify himself to campus safety officials — so the officials called the police, who responded and arrested him for trespassing. Montenegro, who said he did comply with officials’ requests, believes the arrest wasn’t justified and that he had been targeted because of his race and for demonstrating in solidarity with the nearby pro-Palestinian event.
While students have been arrested or suspended at demonstrations since the Hamas militant group attacked Israel on October 7, the singled-out arrest of a faculty member is a rare occurrence, experts told The Chronicle. Still, as administrators have struggled to speak out or take action that appeases their campuses or the public, free-speech advocates have sounded alarm bells about colleges’ increasingly hair-trigger reactions to speech — including quick punishments to calm outcry, often without due process.
With increased scrutiny now placed on campuses’ tolerance and the policies that guide how they react to demonstrations, the arrest at Pomona captures the consequential nature of exactly how colleges choose to respond.
“I think they have been very bureaucratic about it. I understand their codes,” Montenegro told The Chronicle. “But they acknowledge that this shouldn’t have happened in the first place. So again, I just think it’s very revealing on how these colleges function.”
Over a week after the arrest, questions linger about precisely what transpired at Pomona College, including why campus security moved to call the local police department, when Montenegro identified himself, and whether the college followed its own procedures.
The Student Life, the campus newspaper, first reported the arrest on December 1. In response to the newspaper’s inquiry, a spokesperson for the Claremont Colleges Services, which manages services for and represents all seven colleges, said in the colleges’ first public statement that the faculty member refused several requests to turn down his “loud” music and, against campus policy, did not identify himself as a member of the campus community.
That led the campus-safety unit, operated by the colleges’ joint-campus services, to call the city of Claremont’s police department to “de-escalate the situation.” (The Claremont Colleges don’t employ sworn officers.) After the faculty member attempted to leave the area, the spokesperson said it was the police department which “made the decision” to arrest him for trespassing.
“The Claremont Colleges Services acknowledges that contact with Pomona College administration should have been made prior to contacting local police,” the statement said. Officials with the Claremont Colleges Services declined an interview and did not answer The Chronicle’s specific questions about the incident, including whether campus safety’s reaction aligned with the colleges’ policy.
Through public police call logs, The Chronicle identified the faculty member arrested as Montenegro.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Montenegro said he took his class — a sociology course titled “Los Angeles communities, transformations, inequalities, and activism” — to observe the pro-Palestinian student demonstration. The November 29 protest was part of a surge in activism related to the war at the Claremont Colleges over the past two months. Most recent student demonstrations have called for the colleges to cut financial ties with Israel.
“This is a perfect opportunity for them to see in person, on campus, what this kind of solidarity social movement may look like,” he said, “so I encouraged them to go and participate.”
At the start of his class, Montenegro said he greeted his students arriving at the demonstration and sat down at a park bench a couple hundred feet away. He took out a book and began playing pro-Palestinian music, in which the refrain of some songs include the lyrics “free Palestine.”
On the advice of legal counsel, Montenegro declined to provide certain specifics about his interactions with campus-safety personnel and city police officers. He confirmed to The Chronicle that, before the police arrived, he simply identified himself as a member of the campus community. “I thought that was enough,” he said.
Once the police arrived, he said he tried to leave the area, but the arrest continued. It was still his class period at the time. “I didn’t see myself causing any harm,” he said.
According to the college’s demonstration policy, individuals engaged in “disruptive or non-peaceful action” will be notified of trespassing and subject to arrest.
Robert Ewing, a lieutenant with the Claremont Police Department, said campus safety officials had put Montenegro under private-citizen arrest, which the police accepted. Ewing said Montenegro had numerous opportunities to identify himself. Once Montenegro was in the back of the squad car, Ewing said officers checked his wallet and found his Pomona ID. The police proceeded to take him to the station and cited him for trespassing.
Montenegro said his identity at the time of the arrest was clear. “Before the handcuffs were put on me,” he said, “it was known that I’m a professor.”
Montenegro believes his arrest represents an “escalation” in the national landscape of college-campus demonstrations in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. He said he feels he was targeted for expressing pro-Palestinian views. “Were there multiple calls to the campus security, saying … ‘We’re having a class and it’s disturbing us.’ That’s what I want to know,” he said. “Or was it just a single administrator who made the decision himself?”
Montenegro also sees the arrest as an incident of racial profiling. “If I was white and wearing a suit, I don’t think it would have been an issue,” he said, adding that his appearance on the whole stood “out of the mold of a Pomona College community member.”
Montenegro worries what the arrest will signal to students who want to demonstrate. Some students were already jolted by a campus directive that protesters may be asked to temporarily remove masks to be identified, he said. “How do they feel now,” he said, “when not even the professors are safe from just expressing themselves through music?”
Pomona, as a private college, is legally allowed to restrict speech that officials view as “disruptive,” speech experts said. But the circumstances present tricky questions.
Zach Greenberg, a free-speech lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, said colleges tend not to call local police for nonviolent issues, which are typically handled through their own police forces or internal-disciplinary departments.
Keith E. Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University and the founding chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance, said that, in general, it is uncommon for colleges to call the police on students, faculty, or staff. “Before they want to involve police with really any member of the campus community,” he said, “I think universities generally would like to have pretty senior university officials making that decision.”
Colleges, including private ones like Pomona, typically embrace a broad view of free speech. Institutions can enforce time, place, and manner restrictions, which include disruptions like loud music. “That appears to be what happened here,” Greenberg said. If Montenegro was targeted because of specific speech or views, “that would be problematic.”
Whittington said the arrest should be considered in the context of how the college would usually treat situations like loud music or someone’s refusal to produce identification. The timeline of when Montenegro identified himself matters too, he added. “If campus public safety was acting within their general guidelines about how they deal with noise in public places,” Whittington said, “then I don’t think there’s anything intrinsic to object to here.”
In a statement posted on Instagram, Montenegro’s department strongly objected to how he was treated. The department said the decision to call the police was “unwarranted” and that the arrest was the result of racial profiling. “The charge of ‘trespassing’ even after our colleague was identified as faculty is not only baseless, it is a threatening blow to academic freedom and free and open dialogue,” the statement said.
On Thursday the Pomona College faculty passed a vote of no-confidence in campus-safety leadership, Kenneth Baxter Wolf, the chair of the faculty, told The Chronicle. Some students have also protested Montenegro’s arrest. About 200 students participated in a “reclamation potluck” against the arrest on Tuesday, according to videos posted by Claremont Undercurrents, a leftist student publication.
Coyne, the student who witnessed the arrest, views the incident as the product of three elements: racial profiling, the politics of peaceful protest on campus, and issues of policing on private property. “I think there’s clear reasons why this professor was a target of an arrest,” she said, “and there’s clear reasons why certain students on campus don’t feel as safe.”
A Pomona College spokesperson declined an interview with The Chronicle and did not respond to specific questions about the claims of racial profiling or violations of free-speech principles. In internal emails the college shared with The Chronicle, Pomona officials reiterated to faculty that they were not aware of the incident until after it happened.
“Our expectation is that Campus Safety would have consulted with Pomona’s senior administrator on call before contacting police in a nonviolent, non-emergency situation,” wrote Melanie Wu, the college’s dean, in a message sent to faculty on December 1.
At its request, the college said the police had dropped all charges against Montenegro. The Claremont Colleges Services announced Wednesday it is now “actively reviewing” the incident in addition to “related policies and training practices.”
G. Gabrielle Starr, Pomona College’s president, wrote in an email to faculty that she was “grappling with serious concerns” about the arrest and communicating with the other colleges about a response. “There will be many conversations and further work in the coming weeks,” Starr wrote.
The Pomona incident comes at a moment when colleges are facing greater pressure to act quickly when faculty members speak out about the Israel-Hamas war. Such reactions raise questions about campuses’ tolerance for free expression amid criticism and how they stick to their policies in heated moments, speech watchdogs say.
Greenberg said FIRE has received more inquiries in recent weeks from faculty members who were placed on leave or suspension for speaking about the war, usually online or on social media. “That’s kind of the biggest issue here,” he said, “is universities’ being tolerant of faculty members’ speech.”
Several recent cases capture the interplay of tolerance and criticism at the heart of some colleges’ responses. For example, after a student posted a recording on social media of two University of Arizona faculty members having a classroom discussion on Israel and Palestine that drew ire, the administration placed them on paid suspension. Similarly to the arrest at Pomona, some questioned whether the university had followed due process in punishing the faculty members, who said the recording had been edited and taken out of context. They have since both been reinstated, but a department head will teach the course where the discussion occurred for the remainder of the semester.
Or take the decision by M. Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, to re-examine the campus’s speech-conduct codes hours after her testimony in a congressional hearing on antisemitism spurred calls for her removal and a full-blown investigation. One proposal, from the Board of Advisors at Penn’s business school, suggests disciplining students and faculty members who “engage in hate speech” or “use language that threatens the physical safety of community members.” Magill ultimately resigned as president after four days of intense pressure from politicians, donors, and alumni.
Kristen Shahverdian, a senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, said colleges could be more transparent about how they’re deciding to punish people for their conduct. “They need to be clear about what policy has been broken,” when they reprimand professors, she said. “They can lean back into their policies, which should be implemented consistently.”
Whittington thinks many institutions — like Pomona — are now revisiting their policies amid this period of increased protest activity and perhaps reconsidering what they want to do. “Universities have a right to prevent disruptive expressive activities on their campuses,” he said. “And there should be careful conversation in universities about what kinds of activities are, in fact, disruptive.”
As Pomona undertakes that task following the arrest, Montenegro said he’s felt “overwhelming support” from his colleagues and students, and he looks forward to working with the campus community to make changes at the institution.
Still, he thinks that the college’s actions to make amends are “nothing in comparison to the damages” that have already been done.
“I’m finishing classes. I’m grading. I’m trying to live my life,” he said. “I have a lot to juggle and this has impeded me from doing what I love.”
Nell Gluckman contributed reporting to this article.
