A tenured San Jose State University (SJSU) professor fired for her pro-Palestine activism has been reinstated to her position and is now suing the university for attempting to wrongfully terminate her.
Dr. Sang Hea Kil and her attorneys, Rebecca Brown and Brian Olneys, from Hadsell Stormer Renick & Dai LLP, held a press conference in Pasadena on Monday, where they celebrated Kil’s reinstatement and condemned the Cal State University (CSU) system’s attempt to terminate her.
“We’re here today to announce that San Jose State University in California State University has been ordered to reinstate Dr. Kil to their tenure teaching position,” Brown said.
She also announced the lawsuit against CSU and SJSU leadership for their “unlawful termination, discrimination, harassment, and retaliation of her.”
“It’s a pattern—it’s nationwide,” Kil said of the crackdown on pro-Gaza protesters during the press conference Monday morning.
“This looks to me like a team-up, basically between MAGA and higher ed administrators, to attack us as educational workers to attack the system of tenure that provides us job protection.”
Kil has taught at SJSU since 2007 and received tenure in 2013. As a Justice Studies professor, Kil has been deeply embedded in the SJSU campus community, serving as faculty advisor for the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and co-founding her union’s Palestine, Muslim, and Arab caucus.
In early 2024, amid campuswide mobilizations, Kil attended on-campus demonstrations in support of Palestine. According to the university, Kil directed students to violate university policies and engaged in “harassing and offensive conduct and comments directed towards colleagues individually and as a group.” CSU officials also cited her attendance at a May 2024 rally and the Gaza solidarity encampments on campus as additional policy violations.
In April 2024, the university placed Kil on suspension. Despite a faculty hearing committee finding her actions did not warrant termination, SJSU President Cynthia Teniente Matson overturned the decision. Over a year later, SJSU and CSU leadership announced the decision to remove her from her position.
With the support of the California Faculty Association, Kil appealed the termination.
Last week, an arbitrator ordered Kil’s reinstatement, citing her right to free speech, and reduced her sanction to a one-month suspension. The arbitrator called her dismissal “excessive and disproportionate.”
Kil is the first case nationally of a tenured professor fired for criticizing the genocide in Gaza, although similar cases have occurred across the state for non-tenured faculty.
In September of 2024, Dr. Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), was placed on leave and temporarily had her clinical privileges suspended by the UCSF executive medical board for comments she made on X. Marya wrote that medical students at UCSF were concerned about the presence of a former Israel Defense Forces member in the medical school. Similar to Kil, Marya has pursued legal action against the university for violating her constitutional right to free speech.
The nationwide crackdown on professors and students who joined pro-Palestine protests emerged amid a broader political attack on free speech on college campuses. The Gaza solidarity encampments began under former President Joe Biden’s administration, and Biden condemned them as “violent protests”–not protected under free speech.
Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have spent years passing legislation to limit curriculum on race, gender, and sexual orientation, instead pushing their own right-wing ideologies onto college campuses, with a major boost from the Trump administration.
University officials have often bent the proverbial knee to the Trump administration by eliminating funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and undermining academic freedom and free speech.
For this reason, Kil feels it is her duty, as a tenured faculty member, to “sound the alarm” and organize against the coordinated attacks on higher education.
“It’s up to individuals like me who have been targeted and harmed to use the justice system—to use the legal system…to communicate very directly and very forcefully to those powers that try to oppress and destroy us, to say no more,” Dr. Kil said.
