Two weeks before she was to graduate from the University of Virginia, Cady de la Cruz said she found herself being dragged across the ground by the police, marched off the campus with her arms zip-tied behind her back, and banned from re-entering.
Ten members of the first-generation student’s extended family were making plans to join her to celebrate her years of hard work. Her graduation, though, was now on the line because of her refusal to leave a pro-Palestinian rally that the university said had become dangerous and unruly when people unaffiliated with the university showed up and some protesters started acting aggressively.
The university gave students a chance to sidestep the disciplinary process if they’d agree to come in and talk to administrators, she said. The students responded that they would go in only as a group.
“This is something UVA inflicted on us collectively and we don’t want to be isolated,” de la Cruz said. “Singling students out,” she said, seemed to be a way for the university “to get either an apology or an admission of guilt, and we weren’t interested in giving them either of those.”
A university press officer did not respond to requests for comment.
Scenes like this are taking place across the country as colleges are confronted this summer with hundreds of emotionally fraught disciplinary cases stemming from pro-Palestinian protests and encampments.
Administrators are trying to demonstrate that their rules matter and that students who break them will be held accountable, but also to make clear that students have a right to express ideas, no matter how polarizing. Looking ahead to the fall, they want to ensure that their campuses will be safe and that students will be able to focus on their studies without disruptive protests that some Jewish students have described as threatening.
Clashes could turn ugly this fall, with the potential convergence of protests over both the U.S. election and the war in Gaza, where the death toll continues to mount.
Would harsh penalties for the spring protests deter students from defying those warnings again? Or would anger over the disciplinary process make students even more defiant?
Here are five ways pending disciplinary hearings could continue to stress colleges throughout the summer and into next fall.
The timing of the most disruptive protests has resulted in degrees being withheld, with hearings dragging into the summer.
Many of the protests erupted a few weeks before graduation, meaning that, like de la Cruz, some students would be graduating before their disciplinary cases had wrapped up. Cases will stretch out, at least over the summer, and probably into the fall, long after graduating seniors have attempted to move on to jobs and graduate study. That could be complicated without a résumé that specifies when, and even if, a degree was conferred.
Youssef Hasweh received an email shortly before his graduation from the University of Chicago stating that his degree would be withheld because of his involvement with an encampment on that campus in May. He is one of four seniors whose degrees are being held up while the university decides how to discipline them for violating the university’s code of conduct.
Local authorities dropped a trespassing charge against him, he said, but the university is moving ahead with its own disciplinary process. “It’s huge because all of us are unemployed. Having a degree is hugely important,” he said.
Hasweh, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native whose parents are Muslim and Moroccan, said during an interview last month that he hadn’t broken the news to his mother yet. “I can only imagine how heartbroken my mom would feel right now. She and our family have sacrificed so much to get to this point.”
Still, he said, he’d do it again, even if it meant never getting a degree. He had already been reprimanded by the university for participating in another protest against the war back in November, when students staged a sit-in at the admissions office and refused to leave.
“I have no regrets,” Hasweh said. “There are people in Gaza who will never walk on a stage or get a degree. I have family in Palestine, and I would do this 10 times over for everyone there.”
Thirteen Harvard University students also had their degrees withheld because of their protest activity in May, a decision by the university’s governing board that prompted hundreds of students to walk out of a commencement speech in protest.
Some colleges will be overwhelmed by the high stakes and sheer number of cases.
On June 17, The New York Times reported that more than 3,100 people had been arrested or detained on dozens of college campuses since April 18, including 217 at Columbia University and 271 at the University of California at Los Angeles. In many cases — including at Columbia, the City College of New York, and the University of Texas at Austin — local prosecutors have either dropped charges against protesters or agreed to do so if students don’t commit any crimes over the next six months. But that hasn’t stopped campuses from going ahead with their own student-conduct charges.
Caseloads on some campuses are likely to stress small offices that handle student-disciplinary matters, some of which already have backups. Hearings typically take place over several days, during which evidence is presented against the student, who’s given an opportunity to respond. Resolving the cases can take months, leaving students in limbo for a year or more beyond the alleged infraction.
It’s unclear how many of the more than 200 people arrested at UCLA during a police sweep of an encampment in May have been summoned for disciplinary hearings. More than 40 members of the history department signed a statement last month saying that everyone arrested was being called in and urging amnesty for the protesters. They said that the students, some of whom were injured by counterprotesters during a melee that broke out, “need support, not discipline or policing.”
The stakes for students can be high. Those found to have violated campus rules can be suspended or expelled, and they might be prevented from living in college residence halls, studying abroad, or landing campus fellowships. But even lesser punishments can leave black marks on students’ academic records that can show up if they try to transfer to another college or apply to graduate school. An international student who is expelled or suspended could lose their visa status and risk being deported.
Jack Petocz and two other students are being expelled by Vanderbilt University for occupying the chancellor’s office for 21 hours in March. Petocz, a freshman at the time, is appealing his case. He was among a group of students who forced their way into the building. He was also accused of shoving a campus safety officer, which he denies. In an April post on TikTok, Petocz said he was being “expelled for simply fighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza that has killed more than 33,000 people.” He has appealed the punishment, which he said was levied “for having the gall to say the university shouldn’t be profiting off mass slaughter.” He added, “We cannot let Vanderbilt quietly expel passionate activists.”
Vanderbilt officials declined to discuss his specific case, but in a statement in April, the university’s provost, C. Cybele Raver, wrote that “student choices and decisions can lead to serious and costly consequences.”
Campus-disciplinary hearings could hurt students in pending criminal cases.
For students who face both criminal and campus-disciplinary charges, the timing of how those cases play out could be important. Some students have resisted participating in campus-disciplinary hearings where they might be expected to admit culpability, worried that a local prosecutor could subpoena that statement.
In most instances, the statements made to a university in a conduct hearing could be used against a student in a criminal case.
Those fears of self-incrimination may be justified, according to Kristi Patrickus, a co-chair for the Association for Student Conduct Administration’s public-policy and legislative-issues committee.
“In most instances, the statements made to a university in a conduct hearing could be used against a student in a criminal case,” she said. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act generally protects a student’s educational records, including conduct records, from unauthorized disclosures, she said. “However, a Ferpa exception allows disclosure without a student’s permission in order to ‘comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena.’”
Students who are awaiting disciplinary hearings at the University of Texas at Austin complained they were being asked to answer questions that could incriminate them.
Among those questions, according to the Austin American-Statesman, was whether “it is appropriate” to create encampments and break university policies and whether they would agree that their actions were disruptive. That, some said, would essentially be an admission of guilt, which could hurt them in pending criminal charges. Those fears were partially alleviated last month when prosecutors dropped charges against 79 UT students. Still, because of the pending campus-disciplinary hearings, some students have reported being unable to access transcripts or register for classes. A university spokesman said holds are typically placed on student transcripts and degrees when disciplinary cases are pending. KUT News reported on Friday that students arrested during the protests will receive various forms of suspension.
Colleges will continue to find themselves under an intense spotlight.
Arrests and suspensions of student demonstrators have captured the attention of national reporters, politicians, faculty members, and free-speech advocates. That’s put pressure on colleges to either drop charges against students or speed up the disciplinary process so they aren’t left hanging over the summer. Others want colleges to crack down on the protesters and set a precedent for protests that could break out in the fall.
Faculty members and graduate students at the University of California at Irvine called on the administration to drop interim suspensions against students arrested during a May pro-Palestinian encampment. The Academic Senate had also urged an investigation into the administration’s decision to call in dozens of police officers, who arrested 47 students when they refused to end a protest that escalated into the takeover of a lecture hall.
Students who receive interim suspensions can be banned from going to class, living in university housing, or participating in other campus activities. A campus spokesman said many of the students who’d been suspended later had those penalties eased or lifted.
Still, university officials have stood by their tough approach. The chancellor, Howard Gillman, and provost, Hal Stern, wrote a letter to the campus this month that reiterated their strong disapproval over the protesters’ tactics, which they said included “efforts to silence or marginalize voices on their campus that disagreed with the protesters’ views.” Red paint was splattered on the doors of Israeli faculty members, the officials wrote, and “wanted” posters targeted a Jewish faculty member.
Pressure is also coming from the federal government. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has been acting on dozens of complaints against campuses accused of doing too little to combat antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other acts of discrimination based on shared ancestry. Many of the complaints have centered on recent protests surrounding the war in Gaza.
In a resolution agreement with several campuses of the City University of New York, for instance, the office required the system to reopen complaints of discrimination against both Jewish and Palestinian or Muslim students, provide training for public-safety officers, and administer climate surveys.
But with all the pressure to punish student protesters, some argue colleges are trampling on students’ rights. “Amid federal investigations, congressional scrutiny, international media coverage, and pressure from donors, college administrators are feeling the heat to punish student protesters,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in a statement in May.
“In the middle of a crisis, it is all too easy for college administrators to throw due process out the window and punish students accused of misconduct — whether that misconduct is forming encampments, occupying buildings, or committing other violations of law and university policy.”
Students who hold firm convictions about the causes they’re protesting will resist punishments that call for apologies or admissions of guilt.
Some colleges have tried to come up with restorative measures aimed at educating rather than punishing students who violate their rules.
But what does that mean in the context of a war where students have deep-seated convictions that taking over buildings and refusing to leave encampments was the moral thing to do? New York University raised some eyebrows by requiring students to complete 49 pages of readings and tasks aimed at helping improve their “moral reasoning and ethical decision making.” They also had to write a paper that answered questions about whether their actions aligned with their personal values, but they were explicitly told not to “justify” their actions. To some, that amounted to a coerced confession.
An NYU spokesman, John Beckman, said the point of the writing assignment “is not to get students to disavow or change their values; it is to ask the students to consider the impact of their behavior even as they champion their views.” A university spokesman agreed in a statement that the prompt could be improved and said the exercise since been modified.
Complicating matters for colleges, many of the accused students have refused to engage with administrators trying to resolve cases before they go to hearings or in the proceedings themselves.
Last month a group called Students for Justice in Palestine at Rutgers University at New Brunswick released a statement saying its members would refuse to participate in any forthcoming disciplinary hearings.
In May, pro-Palestinian protesters voluntarily packed up an encampment in the heart of the campus four days after they’d set it up after administrators agreed to meet some, but not all of their demands. The administration had brought in law enforcement and threatened to clear them out by force if they didn’t negotiate. The encampment ended with no arrests, no violence, but still plenty of controversy, with Rep. Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, declaring that the university’s president had “surrendered to antisemitic radicals.”
Protesters, meanwhile, complained that hearings would stress and distract students and attempt to punish them for practicing their First Amendment rights.
“We recognize that these so-called disciplinary meetings are performative, designed not to hear our position but to hasten our punishment and strategically delay our efforts to speak out against the ethnic cleansing of our people,” their statement read. The hearings, they wrote, would only extract more information from students, adding to the stress and trauma that have caused some to drop out of college or fail classes.
A Rutgers spokesperson said student-conduct cases are fair to all students and “can proceed regardless of whether students or organizations choose to participate in the process.”
