Tenured California professor fired over Gaza protest wins job back

Arbitrator rules California State University system violated law when it dismissed Sang Hea Kil, who now plans to sue

A tenured professor who was fired last year over her pro-Palestinian activism has won her job back and is suing her university over the termination.

Last November, Sang Hea Kil , a justice studies professor at San José State University in California, became the first tenured faculty member to be dismissed from a US public university following nationwide campus protests over Israel’s enduring war in Gaza. After several appeals, an arbitrator last week ruled that the California State University system had violated the law and ordered it to reinstate her. Kil had previously filed a lawsuit against CSU, which it accused of “discriminatory and retaliatory attempts to silence her”.

A spokesperson for the university declined to comment on personnel matters.

Kil said she was “relieved” to get her job back but determined to keep speaking out for Palestinian rights and free speech.

“The arbitration hearing outcome in my favor shows that the first amendment of the constitution is not dead at San José State University,” she told the Guardian. “Which was in question when they targeted me for merely showing up to anti-genocide events on my campus to support students protesting the Israeli destruction of Gaza and its people.”

Kil was one of several university professors and staff to be suspended , investigated and in some cases dismissed or forced out in connection to the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that swept US campuses in the first year of Israel’s war in Gaza. She was the first tenured professor to be dismissed from a public university since Steven Salaita , who was fired in 2014 from the University of Illinois over a series of social media posts critical of Israel’s bombing of Gaza that year.

In a lawsuit filed in May with the superior court of California, county of Santa Clara, Kil argued the state university system violated employment law as well as the first amendment.

“This is one of the most egregious and extreme examples of repression of pro-Palestine speech that we’ve seen,” Rebecca Brown, one of Kil’s attorneys, said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit on Monday. “This is a tenured professor who was fired over a free speech activity – a punishment that’s usually reserved for professors who engage in conduct like sexual assault or physical violence.”

Kil’s firing stemmed from a February 2024 confrontation involving students and a faculty member at a tense protest on campus, which she attended. The university also accused her of making remarks at a different event that it said encouraged students to stage an encampment in violation of university policy, as well as of eventually participating in such a student-led encampment.

Kil, a faculty adviser for the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, said she had attended the protest in a personal capacity and that while there she witnessed another faculty member “assault” a student. That faculty member was briefly suspended but later reinstated – a decision that she argued showed “deep disparity of due process and equal protection” on the part of the university. She also said she joined a student-led encampment for three nights after similar ones in other cities were raided by police, leading to dozens of students being arrested.

“A lot of my work is critical of policing, and I felt, because of what happened in New York and Los Angeles, obliged to camp with [students],” Kil said.

The university terminated her against the recommendation of a faculty committee that reviewed the incidents and found that while she had violated some university policies, that the dismissal was disproportionate and not justified, according to internal documents reviewed by the Guardian.

The independent arbitrator who reviewed the case agreed – ruling that the charge against Kil did not “rise to the level of dismissal of a tenured faculty member”, reducing her termination to a one-month suspension, and ordering the university to reinstate her with backpay.

“The propriety of imposing the ultimate sanction of employment termination for free-speech activity, even if its exercise clashed with institutional restrictions, is questionable,” the arbitrator noted.