Contact: tahrircoalition@proton.me
JULY 20, 2025, ANN ARBOR, MI - The University of Michigan Board of Regents have brought disciplinary charges against 11 current students and recent alums—including leaders of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, the Muslim Student Association, Arab Students Association, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Graduate Employees Organization, AFT Local 3550—for participation in pro-Palestine protest on campus 10 to 14 months ago. Four of those charged are members of the Encampment 11, who successfully defeated Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s criminal charges in May. The Regents are seeking formal reprimands, disciplinary probation, suspension in abeyance, and, for those who have graduated, a lifetime ban from all future activity at U-M.
The disciplinary charges come on the heels of two political defeats for the Regents: In May 2025, Attorney General Dana Nessel was forced to drop all criminal charges against Gaza Solidarity Encampment activists under the weight of her anti-Palestinian bias and clear overreach. Shortly after, Interim President Domenico Grasso was forced to cancel the University’s contract with CityShield Security after The Guardian exposed U-M’s use of undercover spies to surveil pro-Palestine students.
Now, the Regents are constructing a new office—the Office of Student Accountability (OSA)—as the University of Michigan Police Department’s own private court system. These efforts began July 2024, when the Regents unilaterally revised the student code of conduct so they could bring complaints, control their adjudication, and determine their outcomes. The predictable result has been a 100% “conviction rate” against pro-Palestine students, despite both student panels and appeals boards finding protestors not responsible for policy violations.
Despite a federal lawsuit challenging these practices, OSA is a draconian attempt to accelerate and double down on the Regents’ agenda to retaliate against those who call for divestment. UMPD gathers intelligence against students, identifying them through the Michigan State Police Biometrics Database, then sends the information to Student Investigator Donovan Golich, who relies exclusively on police evidence. Golich serves as both investigator and complainant—an obvious conflict of interest—and even initial resolution coordinator, conducting intake meetings to explain the process to students. When at the University of Virginia, Golich made headlines in 2024 when he was recorded threatening fraternity members and was involved in attempts to withhold diplomas from pro-Palestine students.
As israel kills over 100 Palestinians every day and pushes Gaza into catastrophic famine, the U-M Regents are creating OSA to silence demands that they divest the genocidal Zionist entity. As UN Special Rapporteur to Palestine Francesca Albanese’s recent report shows, there are 60+ major corporations involved in the genocide. The University of Michigan invests its funds in many of these corporations, thus profiting from the genocide. As alum Eaman Ali stated, “from the release of Mahmoud Khalil to the dropping of criminal charges against our own U-M Encampment 11, we’ve seen that the challenges of repression only strengthen our unity and resolve to see a Free Palestine. We recognize repression on a national scale as nothing but a means to distract us from the unspeakable horrors and crimes committed against the people of Gaza, and we will not be silenced.”