Professor faces suspension for pro-Palestinian protests

Author

Carly Heltzel
May 23, 2025

Good morning. It’s Friday, and I’m reading about the this weekend’s local events: from Memorial Day ceremonies to baseball and a free weekend-long beach party. Onto the five Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and California stories you need to know for today.

1.

A Cal Poly English professor faces an unpaid two-quarter suspension for her involvement in two pro-Palestinian protests. Her hearing, held Tuesday, produced seven hours of testimony about the nature of her involvement at each. Both instances lead to her arrest, one for battery of a police officer outside the winter career fair last year and one for obstruction of free movement in a public place during the protest that blocked California Blvd. “My heart led me to defend students against harm in those two incidents,” the professor said. 

2.

A fifth of faculty signed a statement asking University President Jeffrey Armstrong to denounce government overreach in high education under the Trump administration. But Armstrong told faculty he won’t join other university presidents in a nationwide joint letter, citing Cal Poly’s longstanding policy of political neutrality. Across Cal State, 17 campus presidents have signed the joint letter, along with all ten UC campus chancellors, the UC system president and 19 California community college presidents. There are over 650 signatures total.

3.

A Paso Robles councilmember finally turned over the public records The Tribune sued him to obtain after he “explicitly refused” to follow the request in February. The Tribune will receive the initial documents by June 6. The councilmember said he reviewed over 60,000 emails and 26,863 text messages to review if they were relevant to the requests submitted before turning over 2,000 emails and 3,763 texts for the city to review. His submittal took an extra day because he had to compress the 1.5 gigabyte file of emails and the 743 page PDF document of texts. 

4.

Cal Poly engineering students deployed a 30-pound aluminium buoy to generate energy from the waves in Morro Bay; the up and down movement of the waves causes a generator inside the device to spin. The test run will collect data for the team to bring back to their partners at a Navy research center for improvements, and eventually the device could be used to power small devices at sea for the military in times of emergency. 

5.

Prison security has caught on to a bizarre new method for smuggling marijuana to inmates. Authorities found several cases of fake letters from attorneys containing copies of court documents that have been sprayed with synthetic marijuana. The synthetic THC compound is both odorless and invisible, but mail security caught on after they realized the “attorneys” sending the mail weren’t the ones representing the inmates. One attorney whose name was used on the letters said the plan “sounds clever and sneaky.”