The University of Michigan is facing a federal lawsuit that alleges it violated the free speech and other constitutional rights of students protesting the Gaza war.
The suit filed Friday in U.S. District Court on behalf of pro-Palestinian students and alumni names as defendants the U-M Board of Regents, President Santa Ono and others. The university did not respond to a request for comment.
It alleges the school has selectively targeted peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators for their beliefs, subjecting them to disciplinary proceedings and suspensions in a move at odds with its response to past campus protests for other causes.
“For the past year, the University of Michigan has overreached to specifically target students who advocate for divestment and the human rights of Palestinian people,” said attorney John Philo of the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice, among the firms bringing suit. “The university is breaking from its own long-standing traditions of honoring student protest and is violating the United States Constitution by weaponizing student and student organization disciplinary processes to punish pro-Palestine protesters into silence and to chill and repress speech in support of Palestinian causes on campus.”
Students and faculty at the Ann Arbor campus have demanded the school halt investments that may flow to Israeli companies in protests since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, sparked Israel’s war on Gaza. They’ve faced arrest in addition to university-level sanctions; 11 were criminally charged by Attorney General Dana Nessel this fall.
Friday’s suit is the latest in a series of First Amendment-violation cases brought against public U.S. universities for their curbing of pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Branches of the University of California and University of Texas also face lawsuits.
The University of Michigan has allegedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring consultants to initiate the disciplinary proceedings against individual students and student organizations, according to the suit.
Punishments for demonstrators include “terminating students’ employment from campus jobs, blacklisting students from future employment and issuing trespass notices preventing students from attending classes, going into administrative buildings, or even entering the University’s Ann Arbor, Dearborn or Flint campuses,” the suit says.
The disciplinary proceedings have been conducted “in a manner that radically departs from published rules and longstanding practices for such proceedings, and in a manner that has never been implemented in proceedings against any other students or student groups,” the suit says.
More U-M news:Huntington Woods home of regent Jordan Acker targeted by vandals
Proceedings were also allegedly initiated against a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter called SAFE (Students Allied for Freedom and Equality) over “protected speech” on its Instagram account, the suit alleges.
The disciplinary consultants and private firms for which they work — Grand River Solutions and Beyond Consulting Group — are listed as co-defendants. Neither company immediately replied to a request for comment.
The Michigan chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations has separately accused the school of a bias that favors fighting antisemitism over Islamophobia. In an October complaint with the Department of Education’s civil rights office, the group cited, among other things, a recording in which Ono allegedly described government pressure on universities to focus on anti-Semitism “in an unbalanced way.”