It was a cold night in November, and Oakland was quiet. Adam* was studying with friends. While checking their email, they saw an alert from the Office of Student Conduct. Under their name were the words persona non grata — they had been dismissed from the University of Pittsburgh, and their presence was forbidden on Pitt grounds.
This was no surprise to Adam, who had spent the last three months embroiled in student conduct hearings for their participation in pro-Palestine demonstrations. But that made it no less terrifying.
“When I got that notification, all I felt was fear,” Adam tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “It felt like my future was being closed off.”
Last April, students began peacefully occupying Pitt’s campus to show their support for Palestine and call for Pitt’s divestment from Israel. Two students were arrested during an encampment in Schenley Plaza. In June, a second encampment was set up on the Cathedral of Learning lawn, which later escalated into a standoff with police.
Pitt did not respond by press time to detailed questions about the ongoing disciplinary process.
Encampments like the ones last spring have been used throughout history to bring attention to issues, from the Vietnam War to South African apartheid. But they are generally received more negatively than other forms of protest, such as marches.
“Camping has a level of permanence and potential for property damage that is higher than for marches or other forms of demonstrations,” Sara Rose, deputy legal director at ACLU PA, tells City Paper.
“Universities don’t like the attention; they want to maintain control over their image,” Tanisha Long, a community organizer with Abolitionist Law Center, tells CP. “And people are deeply uncomfortable with what they view as a land takeover in support of a country in the Middle East that has been politically and socially demonized.”
Long was present at the encampment as a representative of ALC. She says she witnessed campus police erect barricades at the Cathedral of Learning, shoving and elbowing students who were nearby. They prevented supporters from giving anything to those inside, including food and water. In one instance, she says a community member trying to get items over the barricade was thrown to the ground and dragged away.
“Pitt police were very aggressive,” Long says. “I have videos of them slashing water bottles. I have videos of them dragging someone down the stairs.”
The Cathedral of Learning encampment reflected a national movement on college campuses, with students setting up encampments at 117 universities across the country. Its forcible disbandment reflected a trend, with nearly 51% of encampments getting dispersed by law enforcement. Student encampments at Columbia and the City University of New York made headlines, but what made fewer headlines was the dismissal of Columbia students and the 22 CUNY students who faced felony charges after the fact.
Following the Pitt encampments, demonstrators say campus police combed through photos and video to identify them. Many chose to turn themselves in, which led to their arrest. Since then, 25 students and community members have been arrested and charged, with Adam being one of them. Adam’s criminal proceedings commenced over the summer, and they face felony charges.
Then, early into their senior year, Adam was informed that, in addition to criminal charges, the university was opening disciplinary action against them, following a referral from campus police. In the hearings, Adam sat across from the campus police that had charged and testified against them in court.
“Sitting in the disciplinary hearings felt incredibly oppressive and scary,” Adam recollects. “It felt like I was facing the wrath of the entire institution coming down on my head.”
Then it came time for Adam to defend themself.
“My hands were entirely tied from being able to say or admit anything that could shed light on the situation,” Adam shares. “I was afraid it could be subpoenaed and used against me in my criminal trial.”
Rose says that Adam made the right decision. “You absolutely should not be saying anything during the disciplinary process because it could harm your criminal case,” she explains. “It puts students in a difficult position.”
Long says she voiced concerns to the student conduct officer about Adam’s disciplinary and criminal processes taking place concurrently. “[The officer] was like, ‘I understand it’s not the not the best process. There’s really no other way. We have to do it,’” Long repeats.
Pitt’s code of conduct gives students three options in a hearing — to accept the charges and accept the sanction, to accept the charges and reject the sanction, or to reject the charges and reject the sanction.
“Nowhere does it give students the option to reject the charges and accept the sanction,” Adam says. “And I couldn’t accept the charges, for fear of self-incrimination.”
Adam had to reject the charges and reject the initial proposed sanction, which was suspension. This intensified their disciplinary process. Fellow Pitt student Natalia* served as a character witness. They say that, halfway through speaking to Adam’s kindness and maturity, they realized it was in vain.
“Everything I was saying was falling on deaf ears. The university was intent on making an example out of them,” Natalia tells CP. They suspect race played a role. “As a person of color, Adam is up against stereotypes branding them as violent. No testimony seemed sufficient enough to penetrate that assumption.”
Adam was an honors student and active in their school community. They had 11 credits left to graduate. “It feels very much to me like the university just wanted their pound of flesh,” Adam shares. “I was a senior. I was graduating in May.”
Adam is the first of the demonstrators to be dismissed from the university, but Natalia says Adam’s situation is far from unique — they believe it’s a reflection of a broader, institutional effort to stifle student dissent.
“Their case is not an isolated incident,” Natalia remarks. “Many students have found themselves in disciplinary hearings for anti-genocide protesting.”
Rose says that the amount of due process that one is owed depends on the severity of the consequence, and, historically, courts have deemed disciplinary action against students as “not punitive.”
“So, there’s not a lot of due process that students are entitled to compared to a criminal proceeding, where there are very robust due process protections,” she says. “But you know, in cases where there is the possibility of expulsion, possibility of losing financial aid, those kinds of things — that is punishment. I think that it is.”
“I think that it is important for students to have due process protections that are perhaps more robust than the courts have recognized,” she continues.
Students for Justice in Palestine, a club on campus, is also facing conduct hearings. They are accused of holding a protest at Hillman Library this December, after students with keffiyehs and literature welcomed peers to come sit with them and learn about Gaza. SJP leaders Andrew* and Amelia* say that the students were approached by Pitt staff and police and told to leave.
“Students were told varying rationales as to how their presence contravened university policies,” Andrew tells CP. “That students couldn’t use whiteboards for non-study purposes, that they had modified the space, that their signage was ‘facing outward,’ or that they were holding an event.”
Andrew and Amelia were notified of disciplinary action over a month later. They say that, throughout this process, they have had to be their own lawyers.
“It’s basically forcing us to neglect a lot of our school work, because we’ve had to read through documents, we’ve had to strategize arguments, defenses,” Amelia shares with CP.
Andrew and Amelia characterize Pitt’s 67-page student code of conduct as “intentionally vague and confusing,” and share that when they asked clarifying questions, they were often directed back to the code of conduct “at large.” In one instance, they were told by the student conduct officer that they would have to submit all of the questions they planned to ask in their hearing in advance.
“This was not a practice in use as recently as Oct. 30, 2024, when one of us was present for another individual’s conduct hearing,” Andrew says. When Andrew and Amelia asked the officer to locate the practice in the code of conduct, he could not. Soon after, he walked back his words.
But Amelia and Andrew claim there is an even more glaring issue at hand — Students for Justice in Palestine still don’t know exactly which codes they violated. At their disciplinary conference, they were presented with a list of alleged violations. These included:
- 19. Violates or assists in the Violation of any policy, procedure or guidance of the University including but not limited to the following:
k. Any other policy, procedure or guideline of the University whether or not listed in the Code
36. Fails without just cause to comply with the lawful direction of a University official, or other lawful authority have just cause and acting in the performance of their duties and authority
“We were walking into the hearing not knowing the full extent of what our violations were,” Amelia says.
For Andrew, this was not his first encounter with Pitt authorities. Last April, a video circulated around campus of him surrounded by five Pitt police officers who pinned and straddled him while he was peacefully protesting. Like Adam, he faces criminal charges. He says that the university and campus police’s actions are meant to isolate and paralyze students.
“It makes people think that they cannot speak up, especially when it matters the most,” he says. “It’s a violation of freedom of speech when you are under the impression that it is not safe for you to speak out without retaliation, without disciplinary or legal measures being taken against you.”
An unnamed Pitt professor agrees. “Like many universities, Pitt is weaponizing the student code of conduct to silence pro-Palestinian speech,” they tell CP. “Many students I’ve spoken with are scared and anxious. They are being forced to choose between speaking out against an egregious moral wrong and their safety and futures.”
Andrew and Amelia are both people of color. They say that they feel unprotected by the university. “There have been incidents where individual members of SJP, as well as other Palestinian students, have received threatening, hateful messages, calls to their personal phone numbers, and been doxxed,” says Amelia.
Andrew reminds her to mention Betar, a national Zionist organization that visited campus. “They posted on social media, saying that they ‘looked forward to giving a beeper’ to SJP,” Amelia says. A screenshot from Betar’s Instagram story confirms this. She says they brought the incident to the university. “Nothing happened,” she remarks.
Betar has since sent a list of “pro-Palestine” Pitt students who are on visas to the Trump administration. Recently, the administration announced they would be canceling the student visas of pro-Palestine protestors. Pitt has not publicly responded to any of this news.
“The silence from the university is deafening,” Amelia says, noting that there are no universities left in Gaza. “It doesn’t go unnoticed, especially by Palestinians, especially by Arabs, especially by Muslim people who feel as if we have been ‘othered.’ They will use us for diversity shots to make their public image look better, but at the same time, criminalize us when we point out their complicity in genocide.”
Editor’s note: Following feedback from readers, we amended this article’s headline for greater clarity around the potential consequences of students’ ongoing disciplinary processes both inside and outside of the university.
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2025.
