On Thursday last week, campus leadership dismissed UC Berkeley lecturer Peyrin Kao — the latest casualty in the administration’s war on Berkeley’s free speech foundations. Kao’s censuring proves yet again that free speech at UC Berkeley is no more than administrative marketing. It’s a principle invoked when convenient and easily discarded when costly.
This semester, Kao participated in a 38-day hunger strike, meant to call attention to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. Restricting himself to just 250 calories per day, Kao’s protest intended to represent the severity of famine in the besieged enclave. “To me, the most important thing is not that people recognize…that I’m at the center of any of it,” Kao said in an interview with the Review this fall. “It’s that the people in Palestine are at the center of it.”
Kao first drew administrative scrutiny two years ago, when he concluded a CS 61B lecture with a brief reflection on the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza.
“I think that part of my struggle to get you all the education that I think you deserve is connected to the fact that our governments are okay with underfunding the EECS Department over and over and over again until we have no money left to support any of you. Meanwhile, it seems like every time Israel needs more bombs, they can always pull up the money that they need. How? How can that be right?”
In a letter first published by The Daily Californian Monday morning, Executive Vice Chancellor Benjamin E. Hermalin found Kao’s 2023 lecture statements and 2025 hunger strike to be a violation of Regents Policy 2301, and Kao guilty of misusing the classroom for “political indoctrination.” Hermalin’s letter underscored the apathy the campus has toward free speech in any capacity.
Kao’s actions, the letter writes, would have been as unquestionably dismissable had he just worn a “t-shirt when teaching that had on it a very visible political symbol or a picture of a political candidate.”
By Hermalin’s letter, it’s clear that it’s not how Kao spoke up, but that Kao spoke up. For the home of the Free Speech Movement, this is as concerning as it is disappointing.
Kao has long been aware that his vocal opposition to the genocide in Gaza would endanger his employment. As a lecturer, he lacks the job security offered to tenured faculty. Kao explained to the Review that lecturers are hired on “year-to-year contracts” with no guarantee of renewal. His current appointment was set to extend through spring 2026, before being cut short.
Kao’s firing didn’t happen in a vacuum. Attempting to shield itself from federal scrutiny, UC Berkeley has preemptively silenced speech that is at odds with the Trump administration’s cultural agenda. Earlier this year, campus leadership provided the names and personal information of over 150 faculty and students as a part of a federal investigation into “alleged incidents of antisemitism.” Kao’s name was on that list.
Guiding itself by the motto Fiat Lux (“Let There Be Light”), UC Berkeley’s recent crackdowns on free expression have cast a dark shadow over the campus’s commitment to its central mission. This is the same institution that birthed the Free Speech Movement — a legacy now betrayed by administrators more concerned with appeasing federal overseers than defending intellectual freedom.
The Trump administration is tightening its grip on institutions of higher education across the nation, and it is greatly disheartening to watch the home of the Free Speech Movement capitulate so readily. As the binding fibers of the First Amendment are attacked again and again, it is with shame that we watch university administrators exchange our “permissible” free speech rights as bargaining chips in the pursuit of federal funding.
Kao’s dismissal sends an unmistakable message: at UC Berkeley, free speech is an identity but not a practice.
“So, at this point, I know that people are about to come for my job,” Kao ended his post-lecture statements on the crisis in Gaza. Two years later, they finally did.
