A Pro-Palestine student group is suing University System of Maryland leaders for banning a vigil they planned to host on October 7 to honor lives lost in Gaza since the Hamas-led attack in Israel exactly one year before.
University of Maryland Students for Justice in Palestine filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the Board of Regents, the College Park campus and President Darryll Pines for violating their first amendment rights. Not only did leaders cancel the vigil — they also banned all student events for the whole day.
“The First Amendment does not allow campus officials to establish free expression-black-out days, even on occasions that may be emotional or politically polarizing,” the lawsuit reads.
In July, the Pro-Palestine group received approval to host the vigil on the College Park campus through the university’s reservation system. But on September 1, the lawsuit says, student organizers learned via a Zoom call with school leaders that approval had been revoked because of student safety concerns.
President Pines sent a campus-wide email shortly after announcing the universal October 7 ban on student expression, saying he received an “overwhelming” number of calls to cancel the vigil. He also admitted that the university’s police department found “no immediate or active threat” posed by the event.
Student organizer and fourth-year student Abel Amene said the decision “shows that [university leaders] don't actually care about our safety or our rights and that they care more about how they're perceived in the public.”
“And it also affirms the position of our detractors by accepting the premise that this event would somehow be violent,” he said. “And it is frankly disappointing, when we have done nothing or said anything that would lead them to believe that.”
A spokesman for the University System of Maryland declined to comment on pending litigation.
Alex Morey, Vice President of Campus Advocacy at Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said this is the first campus-wide ban on student activity for the one-year attack anniversary that she’s seen so far.
“That is content-based discrimination, that's viewpoint-based discrimination, and that's what the First Amendment protects against,” Morey said. “The First Amendment stands for the principle that the government doesn't get to decide what kinds of things students and faculty or citizens can talk about on a public university campus.”
Universities can only limit student expression for health and safety reasons, she said, or specific time and manner concerns such as noise complaints.
“But by and large, what we see are schools pointing to these vague concerns that are not based on any actual evidence of a threat,” Morey said. “Instead of focusing on their core educational mission, administrators are playing controversy whack-a-mole and trying to censor their way out of what is an incredibly emotional and difficult topic for so many students to talk about.”
Amene said he thinks the university issued a blanket ban on student speech to “skirt the First Amendment” by not targeting the Students for Justice in Palestine group specifically. But he said it’s clear that they are being targeted – and that sets a “dangerous precedent.”
“There's 365 days in the year, and for almost every day, you could find an event that one certain group vehemently opposes,” Amene said. “So are we going to ban every single day whenever someone complains? Is it the university that chooses what is acceptable and what is not acceptable to mourn? It's a slippery slope that leads us to repression of almost everything.”
Morey said public universities should be focusing on protecting counter protests and facilitating robust and open conversations. And leaders need to keep the First Amendment at the top of their minds — or they’ll risk getting sued.
Amene said he’s hoping the University System of Maryland leaders will simply reverse their decision and allow the Gaza vigil to happen, instead of having to go to court.
