A San Jose State University professor who was fired over her on-campus pro-Palestinian activism will get her job back after an arbitrator ruled her termination was excessive.
Sang Hea Kil, a tenured professor in the justice studies department at SJSU, was fired in November over policy violations stemming from her attendance at protests on campus. She was found to have violated SJSU and California State University policies during three pro-Palestinian events: a February 2024 protest that shut down a Jewish studies professor’s guest lecture, a May 2024 rally and a May 2024 encampment on campus.
“We have never seen such an overreach in punishing faculty, and that’s why we agreed without hesitation to represent Dr. Kill [sic] in the faculty committee and the arbitration,” California Faculty Association president Margarita Berta-Ávila said in a June 22 press release celebrating Kil’s reinstatement.
Kil is the first tenured faculty member of a public university to lose her job in connection with pro-Palestinian advocacy, according to the American Association of University Professors.
According to faculty review documents and arbitration hearing records obtained by KQED, the case against Kil began in February 2024. At the time, she was the faculty adviser for Students for Justice in Palestine’s SJSU chapter and was co-chair of the Palestine, Arab and Muslim Caucus of the California State University faculty union.
In April 2024, university officials informed Kil that she was under investigation for violating campus policies related to professional responsibility and “time, place, and manner” rules, which determine when and how protests may be conducted on campus.
The following month, the university expanded its probe and suspended Kil for “directing and encouraging” students to join the pro-Palestinian encampments that had sprung up during the Israel-Hamas war and to violate university policies.
After more than a year of suspension, SJSU fired Kil. She appealed to have a faculty hearing committee review the university’s case against her. The committee recommended no further repercussions beyond the one-year suspension Kil had already completed.
In late 2025, the university upheld her firing.
Per SJSU’s contract with its faculty union, Kil’s last chance to contest her dismissal was a five-day arbitration hearing. In proceedings in March, CSU lawyers argued that her firing was warranted based on an alleged pattern of unprofessional conduct, KQED reported.
The arbitrator found that while CSU successfully demonstrated that Kil had engaged in unprofessional conduct, it failed to establish that she neglected or refused to carry out her duties as a professor, according to KQED. The arbitrator also determined that a third-party review concluded her termination was an “excessive and disproportionate” response.