College Must Clear Records of ’69 Protesters
After 16 years of legal battles, a federal appeals court ordered San Francisco State University on Monday to roll back the disciplinary action taken against 336 student protesters who participated in a 1969 student strike.
The bitter four-month strike over control of the university’s Ethnic Studies program catapulted then-university President S. I. Hayakawa to national prominence for his hard-line treatment of student activists. Hayakawa was later elected to the U.S. Senate.
In Monday’s ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered U.S. District Judge William Schwarzer to have any record of disciplinary action against the students removed from school transcripts, to supply a monitor to ensure that everything is removed and to have the university pay for the 16 years of attorney fees, estimated by the students’ attorney to be “at least $100,000.”
The appeals court said the students were denied their due process rights when the school based the expulsions, probations and reprimands on a police list of those arrested rather than on specific evidence against individual students.
“We’re in no mood to compromise at this point,” said Peter Pursley, the student’s attorney. “This has been a case of justice delayed.”
Pursley was among those arrested in the 1969 demonstration. He was an instructor in the university’s Psychology Department at the time.
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