By CARLOS SAPIR

On Thursday, Aug. 27, the ban against Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of Pittsburgh was lifted by a federal judge, who ruled that their right to freedom of speech had been violated by the university. Reinstatement was won thanks to determined organizing by the students and faculty, who rallied university, labor, and community organizations to their public defense.

This victory follows the February 2024 victory for a civil liberties defense campaign at Ohio State University, where the Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists were briefly banned for organizing pro-Palestine events, winning reinstatement after a public pressure campaign. Despite the many draconian efforts by universities to limit or suppress speech on campus, these rights are still within our grasp, and provide a valuable platform to win a broader audience for solidarity with Palestine.

What happened in Pittsburgh?

Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Pittsburgh has been hounded by university administrators for all of its protest activities opposing the ongoing genocide in Palestine. In addition to hostile communications from the university, it has been harassed by Zionist groups, which publicly threatened it with violence during the 2024 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (threats that Democratic Senator John Fetterman said he approved of).

In December 2024, during finals week, SJP students organized a group study-in at Hillman Library on campus. For several consecutive days, students wearing keffiyehs held space in the ground floor of the library, while university administrators and police periodically threatened the students and demanded that they disperse on vague disciplinary grounds. The students, flanked by supporting faculty, insisted that the administrators specify the exact university policies that they were supposedly in violation of, and complied with demands to erase messaging on communal white boards. The students were referred to an opaque internal disciplinary process, while being continuously menaced about repercussions for further political activity.

The students were not deterred. They published an open letter calling on the university to drop the charges against them, with the signed backing of 70 university and community organizations. The university responded by officially suspending SJP, accusing it of tampering with the disciplinary process for sending the open letter to the disciplinary review board.

Student organizers brought the core questions of the moment to the student body as a whole, proposing three ballot measures in the March 2025 student government elections that directly related to their political fight:

1. Should the Student Code of Conduct be amended to ensure that, at all Hearings, one or more students serve as additional Hearing Officers or as members of a Hearing Board?
2. Should the University of Pittsburgh disclose the contents of its investment portfolio and undergo a yearly, public auditing process to ensure that University operations are transparent and accountable?
3. Should the University of Pittsburgh divest all financial holdings, if any, from weapons manufacturers arming Israel?”

All three measures passed with high turnout, alongside a fourth measure to phase out single-use plastics. Thousands of students voiced their support for divestment from Israel, for the financial transparency to allow such divestment to occur, and for greater student control over student disciplinary processes—a key, historical, and democratic demand of student movements around the world.

The students and faculty also contacted legal support, with the ACLU agreeing to file suit pro bono in federal court. The faculty union, United Steel Workers Local 1088, organized a rally aligning with the April 17 national day of action for higher education, tying together the questions of federal attacks on university budgets, academic freedom, and diversity programs to the censorship of Palestine by the university. They also demanded answers from the university about its treatment of SJP in meetings about university policy in the wake of the federal government’s assault on university funding and political speech.

Meanwhile, the internal disciplinary process meandered forward through additional hearings, with the university ultimately retracting its charges in relation to the December library study-in, but sustaining the suspension.

In August, students went into the preliminary hearing surrounded by a crowd of supporters. After a few hours of deliberations in the federal courtroom, the judge published an injunction stating that the students’ rights to speech had been violated by the university, a government entity, that their suspension during the early-semester recruitment period constituted irreparable harm to them, and that reinstating SJP would benefit the public “by increasing the level of association and speech on campus.”

We can fight—and win

Campuses are important fields of political activity: nowhere else in society are so many people actively forming and rebuilding their political understanding of the world. Students’ ties to their communities back home, as well as their position as new workers entering the workforce, make it possible for them to organize and influence political activity beyond the campus itself. And the universities are also often the largest employers in the cities where they exist, often deeply embedded in local health-care services. Maintaining a foothold on these campuses is important for social movements and socialist organizations, and also provides access to resources made available to student groups.

The democratic rights that we have today, like freedom of speech, are the product of centuries of class struggle. Contrary to the ruling-class ideological perspective that these rights are protected by virtue of being enshrined in law, we know from experience that these rights must be continually fought for, demanded, and protected.

Winning reinstatement for SJP at the University of Pittsburgh, much like it was for Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists at Ohio State University, meant months of political organizing and action, to push support for the case as widely as possible. In the process, these student groups were able to demonstrate the links between the oppression of Palestinian people by Israel and the repression of free speech at home, winning ever-broader layers of people to support Palestine and other liberation struggles. These fights do not distract from each other, but rather complement each other and allow for the movement as a whole to advance politically toward defeating the ruling-class agenda both in Palestine and North America.

Photo: Police at the University of Pittsburgh attack pro-Palestinian student protesters near their encampment on June 3, 2024. (Quinn Glabicki / Public Source)