The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization has designated the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as a hostile campus due to the threat to the safety of Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish, and other students, staff, and faculty who stand against occupation, apartheid, and genocide.
Despite its public declarations of diversity and inclusion, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has repeatedly demonstrated a pattern of hostility toward Muslim and pro-Palestinian students. Beneath the surface of its polished rhetoric lies a university administration that has actively suppressed student speech, targeted Palestinian advocacy, and institutionalized discrimination through double standards and selective enforcement. UIUC’s actions, including surveillance, arrests, criminal charges, policy crackdowns, and the silencing of Muslim-led student groups, reveal a campus environment where standing for Palestinian rights comes at the cost of safety, dignity, and academic freedom. This university has not merely tolerated Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian repression; it has facilitated and escalated it.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign purports to “remain fully committed to fostering inclusion and respect and will never tolerate hate, discrimination or violence.” Yet its actions toward Muslim, Palestinian, and allied students tell a very different story. Students at UIUC who have spoken in support of Palestine have endured censoring, doxxing, bullying, arrests, disciplinary charges, and policy changes by the UIUC administration that systematically suppress their voices and create a deeply hostile campus environment. Many Palestinian students reported concerns that the University has an anti-Palestinian bias and does not uphold the rights of Palestinian students. A Palestinian UIUC law alum reportedly described experiencing administrative retaliation after speaking out for Palestinian rights, illustrating the administration’s chilling effect on political advocacy tied to Muslim and Arab identities. UIUC further institutionalized inequity by reportedly establishing a Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Jewish and Campus Life while failing to provide equivalent representation for Muslim students, effectively excluding their concerns from university decision-making.
In 2024, UIUC police reportedly dismantled a peaceful pro-Palestinian encampment near the Alma Mater statue, arresting two individuals. Following these initial arrests, the university escalated its response by allegedly actively surveilling students, using license plate readers, social media monitoring, and video footage to identify protest participants, and later allegedly charged at least eight additional individuals with felony “mob action.” This aggressive use of surveillance technologies against student protesters shows how the UIUC administration supports a hostile culture.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at UIUC articulated their demands clearly: divestment from weapon manufacturers and institutions linked to Israel, full disclosure of the university’s financial assets, severance of ties with corporations involved in genocide, and amnesty for all student protesters, yet SJP was reportedly disbanded by the university, further silencing student activism on campus. Civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois, publicly denounced the university’s criminalization of peaceful dissent and warned that UIUC’s actions were endangering student rights and free expression. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) petitioned for UIUC to drop charges against students alongside SJP and the organization called for transparency on definitions of antisemitism. Faculty members also allegedly spoke out, with dozens signing open letters calling for the charges to be dropped and urging the administration to respect student protest rights.
According to the 2025 Free Speech College Rankings, UIUC received an overall score of 49.9 out of 100. One student responded, “The school is very anti-Palestine and punishes students for being for a free Palestine.” In a 2025 statement, the ACLU of Illinois reportedly determined the university used its updated speech regulations on campus to impose new punishments for student speech. The ACLU reportedly criticized UIUC for implementing new speech regulations designed to impose harsher punishments for traditional protest methods such as chanting, chalking, and leafleting, without meaningful consultation with students or DEI bodies. These new restrictions have disproportionately targeted Muslim, Arab, and pro-Palestinian students while UIUC leadership continues to posture about diversity and inclusion. Steven Salaita, a Palestinian American scholar, reportedly sued UIUC after his tenured faculty appointment was rescinded in 2014 over his critical social media posts about Israel. The case was settled in 2015 for $875,000. UIUC also allegedly earned a formal censure from the American Association of University Professors for failure to adhere to principles of academic freedom.
UIUC has made it undeniably clear: Muslim and pro-Palestinian students are not afforded the same rights, protections, or dignity as others on its campus. From weaponized surveillance to felony prosecutions, from silencing student organizations to excluding Muslim voices from university governance, UIUC has not simply failed to protect its students — it has actively endangered them. Its administration hides behind platitudes of inclusion while implementing policies that criminalize dissent, erase Muslim perspectives, and uphold systems of apartheid and colonialism. This is not a misunderstanding. It is a deliberate, institutionalized campaign to marginalize a vulnerable student population and suppress a global justice movement. For these reasons and more, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign must be recognized as a hostile campus where Islamophobia is not only tolerated — it is enforced from the top down.
