Ishita Jayadev ’26 and Amy Jayasuriya ’26
Editors-in-Chief
On Oct. 15, Kate King ’26 received a letter from Pomona President Gabi Starr and Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students Avis Hinkson stating that she was “banned and designated persona non grata from Pomona College.” She quickly realized she was one of over 15 Scripps students who were banned from Pomona due to their alleged involvement in a divestment protest at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 7, 2024.
In the five months since this letter was issued, King and other banned students have navigated a frustrating and confusing process of figuring out how to proceed with classes they were attending at Pomona, attempting to appeal their bans, going through a disciplinary process at Scripps, and eventually receiving their final sanctions from Pomona’s administration.
The Scripps Voice spoke to King about this process, as well as three other students who requested to remain anonymous due to safety concerns. At the time of publication, all four of them have received their final sanctions stating that they will remain banned for the rest of the 2024-2025 academic year.
Like King, the three anonymous students received their first ban letters on Oct. 15, eight days after the building takeover at Carnegie Hall.
King talked about her shock and confusion at receiving the first letter which stated that students would be banned from Pomona College for the 2024-2025 academic year and unable to participate in classes or activities in person at Pomona.
“I was literally sitting on the couch with my mom, waiting to drive back to school. And then I got [the] email which had this super dramatic letter where they were like, ‘you are banned and designated persona non grata [from Pomona College],’” she said.
She specified that the email did not give any information or evidence about her alleged participation in the protest. While students were given five business days to appeal this initial ban, King emphasized her and other students’ confusion about what would happen next.
Three days after King appealed her initial ban, Hinkson responded to her appeal with a “vague, copy paste” response reiterating that she was banned for the rest of the school year.
One of the anonymous students, a Scripps junior, also talked about their experience submitting an appeal, where they discussed how the ban would negatively affect them academically as well as personally.
“I mentioned that I would only be able to attend two classes now, which would be pretty detrimental to my education,” they said. “I [also] discussed things like my mental health and some pre-existing health issues and how those affected the situation as well as other family things.”
In response to their specific concerns regarding the ban, Hinkson wrote back: “You mentioned the high value that you placed on education, but your participation in the building takeover did not demonstrate a respect for the value others place on their education and work. Even if you were not directly responsible for the vandalism of the building, your conduct was negligent.”
In the initial Oct. 15 ban notice, Starr told banned students enrolled in Pomona classes that, “you may make arrangements with faculty to continue coursework in other modalities (e.g., via Zoom), at the sole discretion of the faculty member, while your ban is under review.”
Two of the students interviewed continued to complete coursework for their respective Pomona classes asynchronously for a month after receiving their initial ban notice. However, on Nov. 1, Starr released an FAQ that announced that banned students would be administratively withdrawn from their Pomona classes and unable to enroll in Pomona classes in the Spring 2025 semester.
The banned students only received direct communication ten days after this FAQ was released on Nov. 11, where Hinkson identified specific times where each student had connected to the Wi-Fi inside Carnegie through their “unique emails and passwords.”
In the leaked communication, Hinkson also stated that students had to send their final appeals within three business days which would determine whether their ban from Pomona remained. This included “prohibition from continuing any Pomona courses in which you are enrolled in the Fall 2024 semester, and the inability to enroll in Pomona College courses in the future, regardless of modality or location.”
King explained the stress associated with such a fast appeal turnaround. “Three business days was crazy,” she said. “I was losing my mind trying to figure out who to ask to help me with appealing, because it was our last opportunity to appeal before it would stand for the rest of the year.”
Despite being told that she would receive a response in three business days, King had to send a follow up email in order to get a response from Pomona’s administration. On Nov. 25 she was informed that she was banned for the rest of the academic year and couldn’t register for classes at Pomona for the fall 2025 semester until the first day of classes.
King did add that there were many students whose appeals were successful and were allowed to take classes at Pomona during the Spring 2025 semester but explained that this was probably because they expressed more remorse than she had in her appeals.
“[That] doesn’t bother me,” she said. “I knew that was the risk that I was taking on by choosing to be a little bit more aggressive in my appeal letter.”
The third banned student who requested to remain anonymous, on the other hand, did not go through this appeal process due to a family emergency. However, they still ended up with the same sanctions as King.
Both of the other anonymous students remained banned as well, however, they were granted a modification that allowed them to register and attend a Pomona class during the spring 2025 semester.
Despite this allowance, one of them emphasized the emotional toll the appeal process had taken on them, specifically citing the lack of consistent messaging from the colleges about their ability to continue their Pomona classes.
“Throughout this whole thing I felt defeated and it definitely caused me to rethink the value of my education and why I’m here and what I hope to get out of my time here,” they said. “It was pretty gutting to go through and not be able to do anything about it. Being told that I couldn’t go to class or the thought of being a part-time student definitely loomed over me because then I would lose my financial aid, which would mean I would have to literally drop out of school.”
Scripps ended up enrolling banned students who were administratively withdrawn from their Pomona classes in independent studies, allowing them to receive credit and a letter grade for each class.
King explained that she was also informed in a letter from Hinkson that her ability to physically go on Pomona’s campus for the 2025-2026 academic year was contingent on her going through a disciplinary process at Scripps.
“It’s [only] once they have been assured that you’re no longer a threat to the campus communities [that they’ll lift the ban], so it’s still kind of up to the colleges whether they think that I’m dangerous or not,” she said.
Each of the banned students were contacted by the Interim Special Assistant to the Vice President for Student Affairs, Deborrah Hebert, who set up a time to meet for an administrative hearing. After this, students were asked if they wanted to proceed with the administrative hearing or go through a further judicial board process.
During the hearings, Hebert went over a list of seven questions with each student and a faculty advisor. Students were allowed to step outside of Hebert’s office if needed to go over the questions. The anonymous Scripps junior described not realizing that her meeting with Hebert was the extent of her disciplinary process at Scripps.
“They framed [the meeting] to us as an opportunity to discuss the conduct and hearing procedures,” she said. “So [I thought it was] kind of like an introduction to what that process will look like. But then they followed up [after the meeting] and said we want to be sure you still want to proceed with this as your administrative hearing, so we could choose between an administrative or a judicial hearing, [and] we all ended up doing [administrative hearings] without realizing it.”
King described how the hearing itself went. “I pulled up with a faculty member because I was kind of scared and [Hebert] basically pulled out a stack of papers that was all of the communications between me and Pomona that they had sent over,” she said. “She had a little paper with everyone on the list who was a Scripps student who got banned from Pomona, and then there was a little column where [it had] the specific timestamps that they identified people being connected to the network.”
She expressed being surprised that the only evidence they had on students was the timestamps.
“I was like, surely they got pictures of some people but they really didn’t have anything.”
After the hearing, the anonymous Scripps junior received communication from Hebert that said, “they were confident in my ability to peacefully and productively engage in the campus community in conformity with the Pomona College student code.”
King described the aftermath of the disciplinary hearings. “After that, it kind of just fizzled out, like we didn’t really hear anything else from Pomona and Scripps kind of washed their hands of all of us.”
However, King emphasized how much the ban affected her day-to-day life at the 5Cs.
“Some of the clubs that I have leadership positions in are based mostly at Pomona, even if they are 5C clubs,” she said. “So, I kind of had to be like, hey, I can’t really do that because I don’t want to get the cops called on me. They were very explicit about that. They were like, if we see you on campus, then we’re gonna call campus safety and then we’re gonna call the cops and then they’re gonna arrest you.”
“You can drive on the public city roads, just not on any of the Pomona owned streets,” she said. “So they were sending around a map so that we could figure out, like, what streets we were allowed to be on. [Which is] crazy.”
The anonymous Scripps senior also touched on how the ban has affected her ability to access areas around Pomona.
“There was this one day where me and [another banned student] wanted to go to the village and since [we] were banned and terrified, we had to take the most roundabout way to get to the village,” she said. “Coming back up, we had to walk this insane way, and go through this random neighborhood and CMC. It actually took us like an hour to get back. I was just like, I can’t believe this.”
The anonymous Scripps junior also described how emotionally taxing it was to have to tell their parents about the ban while they were visiting them for a weekend.
“My mom texted me and her mind jumped to saying your life is ruined,” they said. “[She said] you’re gonna be blacklisted from every single job ever. And you’re gonna be a part-time student and you’re gonna have to come home and whatever. I was thinking all those things myself and I was feeling bad about myself anyways. But it definitely was tough to think about the fact that my parents support me attending school here and I was jeopardizing that.”
Despite the ban’s physical and emotional toll on Scripps students, many of the banned students emphasized how they felt supported by other students and faculty during this difficult time.
“People offered their houses for us to meet in, professors offered their spaces to have conversations with banned students and suspended students,” one anonymous student said. “It was really powerful to see how much more supportive we were of each other versus the response we were getting from the administration.”
In contrast, they felt like they had little to no support from Scripps administration, since Scripps didn’t reach out to banned students until it came time for their disciplinary processes with Hebert.
King stated that this lack of support felt unsurprising given Scripps administration’s actions for most of the fall 2024 semester, including their closure of the Motley over a Palestinian flag hung on the wall and stationing of private security around Seal Court and Denison Library.
“Scripps admin has a long history of choosing not to support students of color and marginalized students, so I personally didn’t feel supported [during this process], but I think that’s also kind of par for the course as a student of color at Scripps,” King said.
She ended by emphasizing how Pomona’s actions in the past year have worked to normalize strict repression measures at the other Claremont Colleges.
“If you walk around campus, things feel different,” King said. “People don’t act the same because they don’t feel safe to express themselves in the same way. Because it’s been made so abundantly clear that if you don’t fall in line with the rhetoric that the college considers acceptable, they’ll do whatever they need to do to make sure that they quash it completely, even if it means that you have to graduate later, or that your life is turned upside down.”
Photo Courtesy of Frances Walton ’26
