Students for Justice in Palestine no longer recognized at U of Illinois

[October 18, 2024]  By Tate Miller | The Center Square contributor

(The Center Square) – The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign no longer will recognize its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter as a registered student organization.

“On August 14, 2024, a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Student Discipline determined that the registered student organization (RSO) Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) violated numerous provisions of the Student Code related to events on April 26, 2024, and then April 28 – May 10, 2024,” UIUC’s associate chancellor of strategic communications and marketing Robin Kaler told The Center Square.

Students for Justice in Palestine is a group that “seeks to empower, unify, and support the Student Movement for Palestinian liberation,” according to its website. SJP was also “a central organizer” of the 2024 pro-Hamas on-campus encampments, as stated by the Anti-Defamation League.

SJP repeatedly “promoted, hosted, sponsored and/or engaged in an unapproved and unauthorized event and encampment,” Robin Kaler told The Center Square that with the activity at its events ranging from erecting tents in opposition to university staff and law enforcement, to participating in a blockade, to initiating “physical contact with and [impeding] access and the attempted removal of the non-permitted structures by university staff and law enforcement by linking arms and using wooden boards.”

Students for Justice in Palestine “chose not to appeal” the UIUC subcommittee’s decision to no longer recognize the group, Kaler said.

“The organization will be eligible to petition to restore their status in Fall 2027. Until then, the SJP chapter may not operate on the University of Illinois campus as an RSO, cannot represent itself as a university-recognized RSO, and will not have access to or use of university resources, funding and support that RSOs enjoy,” Kaler said.

The UIUC SJP chapter stated in a social media post that it refuses to be silenced and “will continue organizing with or without the support of our institution as UIUC is dictated by the student body and not the administration.”

University of Illinois

“The disbandment of SJP UIUC is a direct attack not just on Palestinian advocacy, but on the broader right to free speech, student organizing, and social justice movements,” SJP said.

Director of the AMCHA Initiative Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Center Square that “the University [of Illinois Urbana-Champaign] has taken an important and long-overdue step in no longer recognizing the school’s SJP chapter as an RSO.”

The AMCHA Initiative “is a non-profit organization dedicated to investigating, documenting, educating about, and combating antisemitism at institutions of higher education in America,” according to its website.

“As long as the university has one standard of behavior by which it judges the worthiness of a student group to be an RSO, which is apparently the case here, I see no suppression of free speech,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “If anything, the university’s decision will increase the freedom of expression of Jewish and pro-Israel students, now that the group committed to silencing them has lost its official recognition.”

“Unlike any of the other hundreds of social, cultural or even political organizations at the school, which were established to enrich the lives and university experience of their members, SJP was established at UIUC and on hundreds of campuses nationwide to be the foot soldiers of an internationally-coordinated campaign to demonize and dismantle the Jewish state, and to bully its on-campus supporters into silence,” Rossman-Benjamin said.

“It remains to be seen if UIUC will continue to enforce their policies when the now de-registered SJP attempts to target Jewish and pro-Israel students for harm – as they have indicated they will do,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “We urge administrators to remain vigilant.”