Sang Hea Kil, a tenured justice studies professor at San José State University, was fired in November 2025 after a February 2024 confrontation at a campus protest and her subsequent participation in a student-led encampment, according to university records and court filings reviewed by the Guardian. The independent arbitrator ruled last week that the charges 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 university terminated Kil against the recommendation of a faculty committee that reviewed the incidents and found the dismissal was disproportionate and not justified, according to internal documents reviewed by the Guardian. The arbitrator agreed, noting in the ruling: “The propriety of imposing the ultimate sanction of employment termination for free-speech activity, even if its exercise clashed with institutional restrictions, is questionable.”
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’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, and 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 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.
In a lawsuit filed in May 2026 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. Rebecca Brown, one of Kil’s attorneys, said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit: “This is one of the most egregious and extreme examples of repression of pro-Palestine speech that we’ve seen. 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.”
A spokesperson for the university declined to comment on personnel matters, according to the Guardian.
Kil was the first tenured faculty member 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, according to the American Association of University Professors.