Tulane University is no longer pursuing disciplinary action against seven students who were originally facing consequences for their participation in an off-campus protest advocating for Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil to be released from immigration detention in Louisiana.
The students announced on June 9 that the school had dismissed the charges.
The protest took place on March 11 near Tulane University and proceeded peacefully as participants called for both Tulane and Loyola universities to take action against deportation and recent actions taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Rory Macdonald, one of the seven students, said that initially receiving the charges was devastating.
“It was a terrible overreach on Tulane’s part,” Macdonald said.
Macdonald and some other students went through a similar disciplinary process after participating in an encampment at Tulane during the spring of 2024, which resulted in a semester-long suspension.
“We tried to fight [those suspensions] too, and we weren’t successful,” Macdonald said. “But I think that what’s different here is that we had the legal support that really let us show them, this will not stand.”
After the protest, the Office of Student Conduct sent emails to the students informing them of their charges, including “failure to comply,” “disruptive conduct,” and “acting in collusion to violate the Code of Conduct.”
According to a letter written by legal counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the students were told that their actions were not protected by the university’s freedom of expression policy because of their association with Tulane Students for a Democratic Society, a student group that was suspended from campus after organizing the spring 2024 encampment.
Cameron McLaren, one of the students who was facing charges, told Verite News in an email that she believes the university was operating politically without explicitly saying so.
“The school was trying to police our affiliation with a national organization and hid their motives by retroactively enforcing copyright/branding rules,” McLaren wrote.
FIRE, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting free speech, criticized Tulane for penalizing the students for protesting off-campus.
“Once an organization is no longer affiliated with the university, Tulane has no further interest in prohibiting students from associating with the group off campus, just as it has no interest in barring membership in any other local political organization, sports league, or theater ensemble,” the letter reads.
Zach Greenberg, a lawyer with FIRE, told Verite that the organization is involved with hundreds of cases regarding free speech on college campuses each year.
“We’re glad to see that Tulane dropped the charges and did the right thing,” Greenberg said. “However, the charges should never have been brought to begin with. The universities, before they bring these charges, should understand what free speech protects and refrain from punishing students for exercising their rights.”
According to Macdonald, the process of disciplinary hearings typically involve Tulane’s legal representatives asking students questions in a format similar to that of a legal deposition.
“It’s a very one-sided process and we fought to change the process,” Macdonald said. “We eventually were able to get a meeting between the students who were under attack, faculty who were supporting them and the dean of students.”
Leading up to these meetings, the students asked members of the public to call into the dean of students’ office and express their concerns about penalizing the students. In their second meeting with administrators, the students were informed that the charges were being dismissed.
Tulane has not made a public statement about the reasoning behind the charges being dropped. Macdonald said that the students were not given any additional information regarding the decision when it was made.
Tulane spokesperson Michael Strecker said that the university cannot comment on individual conduct cases. In a written statement provided to Verite, Strecker emphasized that Tulane’s conduct process is “educational in nature.”
“There are multiple paths for resolving cases, ranging from major matter investigations to informal resolution processes,” Strecker wrote. “The path any individual student’s case takes may change along the way based on the information provided and available.”
McLaren was relieved when the charges were dropped because it meant that she could graduate this past May as planned, with a degree in psychology and computer science.
“I knew that the decision wasn’t due to Tulane having a change of heart; rather, we ran a successful political defense campaign,” she wrote, referring to the letter from FIRE and calls from the public.
Macdonald, who will be returning to Tulane in the fall to finish their studies as a history major, says that they are still concerned about the state of free speech on campus.
“We won the right to keep organizing Tulane students off-campus, but a lot of us feel like we need to keep fighting until there is actually some measure of free speech on campus,” they said. “The only way we can make any progress in our universities is to be loud and public about it.”