SANTA CRUZ — A Santa Cruz judge on Tuesday denied a court injunction that sought to temporarily halt UC Santa Cruz’s practice of mass banning students and faculty members without individual fact-finding hearings.
An alliance of civil rights firms representing two students and a faculty member filed a lawsuit in September suing the university after the arrest of more than 100 pro-Palestinian protesters involved in a campus blockade. The month-long encampment and protest ended after a show of force from systemwide university law enforcement, who took remaining protesters into custody at the end of May, and banned them from campus for two weeks.
On Tuesday morning, several dozen UCSC students and supporters crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court courtroom of Judge Syda Cogliati to hear results of the predisposition hearing. While the matter of blocking protesters’ campus bans without a hearing remains to be litigated at trial, Cogliati said she would not grant the order for the case’s interim, citing a need to balance issues related to community risk of harm.
The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, the Center for Protest Law and Litigation and civil rights attorney Thomas Seabaugh, argues that campus policy requires a hearing for each student before findings sustaining the temporary campus ban can be made. Arrested students and faculty were unable to access the campus and their possessions at the end of the school term, causing hardships for many, according to the suit.