The decision comes seven months after a Faculty Hearing Committee also determined that termination was not warranted.<\/p>\n
Sundry Photography\/iStock\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
An arbitrator ruled that Sang Hea Kil, a tenured San Jos\u00e9 State University professor who was fired in 2025 after participating in pro-Palestinian student protests, should be reinstated, the California Faculty Association announced Monday<\/a>. The arbitrator deemed Kil\u2019s termination to be an \u201cexcessive\u201d punishment and said it should be reduced to a one-month unpaid suspension, according to the news release.\u00a0Kil was the first tenured full professor<\/a> to be fired for pro-Palestinian advocacy.<\/p>\n The arbitrator recommended the one-month suspension due to \u201cinterference with another faculty member\u2019s delivery of a lecture that Dr. Kil and others found objectionable and Dr. Kil\u2019s misadvising students about a rule she could or should have known about,\u201d CFA president Margarita Berta-\u00c1vila wrote in the news release. The decision comes seven months after a Faculty Hearing Committee made up of San Jos\u00e9 State faculty with \u201cno personal stake in the issues\u201d also determined that termination was not warranted in Kil\u2019s case.<\/p>\n \u201cCFA is committed to academic freedom for all faculty, and we could not let such an administrative overreach go unchallenged,\u201d Berta-\u00c1vila wrote. \u201cDr. Kil has been a staunch advocate for her students\u2019 fight against the genocide in Gaza. She has fiercely defended her students\u2019 right to speak freely on these issues and has herself been critical of right-wing interests interfering with constitutional rights and academic freedom across the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n A spokesperson for San Jos\u00e9 State declined to comment on \u201congoing personnel matters.\u201d Kil did not respond to a request for comment Monday.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The decision comes seven months after a Faculty Hearing Committee also determined that termination was not warranted. Sundry…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[5676,15,584,8527,1286,100,88,90,89],"class_list":["post-371334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-career","tag-education","tag-events","tag-higher","tag-jobs","tag-news","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}