‘Your Free Speech Does Not Apply’: Suspended UC Berkeley Lecturer Speaks Out

The suspension of a UC Berkeley computer science lecturer who went on a hunger strike over the war in Gaza and made pro-Palestinian remarks in the classroom has raised questions about free speech and the scope of academic freedom on the Bay Area campus.

Late last week, UC Berkeley administrators notified Peyrin Kao, 26, of his six-month unpaid suspension, effective Jan. 1, 2026. The suspension, handed down at a time of heightened tensions over free speech on campus, drew criticism from groups and faculty advocates, who immediately called for his reinstatement and launched a hunger strike in solidarity on Wednesday.

Some argued that the university’s decision was a blatant violation of Kao’s First Amendment rights and part of a broader effort to chill pro-Palestinian speech on campus.

According to an October letter from UC Berkeley Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin, Kao misused the classroom “by distorting the instructional process” and deviated from “the responsibilities inherent in academic freedom” during the spring 2024 and fall 2025 semesters.

Kao maintains that he followed university policy by making the comments outside of official class time. He said his suspension is part of what’s called “the Palestine exception,” or the selective enforcement of rules to restrict Palestinian advocacy. Kao questioned whether he would have been suspended if he criticized the U.S. government or international issues that have drawn condemnation by the university, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“There’s this gaping exception in this so-called free speech that our university and our country champions,” Kao told KQED. “The university loves to talk about how they are ‘the free speech university,’ ‘the home of the free speech movement,’ … but when it comes to Palestine: ‘Sorry, we’re drawing the line, your free speech does not apply.’”

UC Berkeley spokesperson Janet Gilmore declined to comment, saying the university doesn’t comment on confidential personnel matters.

In Hermalin’s report, Kao was accused of twice violating Regents’ Policy 2301, a rule that explicitly prohibits “political indoctrination” as misuse of the classroom and has been frequently cited by the university to regulate campus protest in the wake of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

A recent analysis by Berkeley law students found that the university’s administration enforces the rule more harshly against faculty who speak in support of Palestinians, and Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Bay Area office, said the policy’s vague language lends itself to weaponization against Palestine advocacy.

“One very important question: Is the policy being enforced in an even-handed way?” said Eugene Volokh, a former First Amendment law scholar at UCLA. “I do think that people ought to be asking, well, are you doing this fairly with regard to all viewpoints?”

Volokh and other free speech advocates, however, questioned whether an argument for pedagogical autonomy works in this case, and argued that Kao’s use of the classroom to advocate for his political beliefs may have gone a step too far.

In general, the protection of free speech and academic freedom of students and faculty is essential to providing for the education of students and teaching them how to think — the university’s chief role, Volokh said.

“At the same time, we have to recognize that in order for the educational process to work, there have to be limits on what is said in the classroom,” he continued. “In a classroom, I’m talking to a captive audience of students who are there to learn a particular subject, presumably not for political indoctrination.”

The suspension is not Kao’s first brush with the administration over his vocal support for Palestinian human rights: the letter notes a 2023 censure by a former chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences over the school’s anti-advocacy policy.

At the beginning of the school year, Kao’s name appeared on a list of 160 staff and faculty members whose identities UC Berkeley disclosed to the federal Department of Education as part of what the university described as an antisemitism investigation. Around the same time, Kao began a 38-day hunger strike to protest the war and “how our tech is being to fuel genocide in Gaza,” the lecturer told KQED’s The Bay in October.

In April 2024, after dismissing students of an introductory computer science course at the end of his last lecture of the semester, Kao spoke for about four minutes about ethics in technology — using Google’s collaboration with the Israeli military as an example — and expressed solidarity with fellow educators in Gaza, according to the university’s report.

Kao made those comments after the end of class, and prefaced his remarks by saying that students were free to leave.

“But again, if you want to go, then I don’t take any offense. It’s all good. And I will try not to waste too much of your time because it’s after 2 [pm],” Kao said, according to a transcription created by the university.

More recently, Kao drew attention to his hunger strike in class, informing students that he was in poor health due to his activism — without explicitly stating that the act was in protest of the war in Gaza.

“Just a heads up that the lectures I give may be a little bit wobbly and poor quality,” Kao allegedly said during a class in the fall.

Based on these statements, the university determined that Kao “misused” his authority over students. Even without explicit acknowledgement of the advocacy during class time, the “visible toll” of the hunger strike, and Kao’s own admission that the strike may have affected his teaching, was enough for the university to determine it a violation of policy, Hermalin wrote.

The University Council–American Federation of Teachers, the union that represents lecturers, filed a grievance against the “wrongful discipline” of Kao, said field representative Jessica Conte. And STEM 4 Palestine, a campus group that Kao co-founded, announced a hunger strike beginning Wednesday, in solidarity with Kao and other “repressed academics.”

“Peyrin is known as a committed educator. He is not just committed to students at Berkeley,” the group told KQED by email. “Putting his own body on the line, he demonstrated public commitment to the students of Palestine, whose universities have been bombed into rubble using technology our university builds.”

Kao maintained that all of the discussions in question took place outside of official class time, during an optional lecture that many students elected not to attend, and that the hunger strike took place entirely outside of the classroom.

“We were very careful not to talk about it in class with any of our students or any of my students or my staff. And it was something that I think is totally protected by the First Amendment, because I’m doing it in my own capacity,” Kao said.

He also pushed back against the university’s claims that his ethics discussion — and his presentation on cloud-computing contracts between Google and Amazon with Israel — was not germane to the classroom.

“These are companies that our students are going to work for. We’re giving our students the tools that they’re then going to use to go and work for these companies and others that are complicit in this ongoing American-Israeli genocide in Gaza,” Kao said. “When you don’t talk about this, that is also making a political decision.”

Academic freedom enshrined in the First Amendment protects a professor’s right to discuss pedagogically relevant material during class, and allows some breathing room — as long as it’s furthering the purpose of the course, said Zach Greenberg, director of the Faculty Legal Defense Fund at advocacy group FIRE. However, the university has some leeway to limit free speech of faculty within the bounds of the institution’s own academic freedom and, ultimately, to make the judgment call.

“The question that we always ask when it comes to political speech is, what’s related to the class and what were they speaking as a professor or as a private citizen?” Greenberg said. “And if you’re going on tangents during class or expressing a political advocacy to students during class as a professor, you’re on company time.”

As a California state employee, Kao was entitled to a Skelly hearing, in which the proposed disciplinary action is reviewed by a third party. The lecturer met with Eric Meyer, the dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Information, but his appeal was denied, Kao said.

He’s currently working to fundraise the salary he will lose for the next semester, about $68,000, Kao said, which he vowed to donate to mutual-aid efforts in Gaza.

KQED’s Ted Goldberg contributed to this report.