This UVA Law Student Was Threatened With Expulsion for Sitting Outside With Protest Signs
Kirk Wolff set out to peacefully protest Trump's plan to take over Gaza. Then an administrator and a police officer drove by.
When Kirk Wolff sat down to do some homework on the law school campus of the University of Virginia (UVA) earlier this month, he didn't expect that he'd be threatened with expulsion. Wolff had brought two poster board signs with him as he sat outside—one read "GAZA RESETTLEMENT=WAR CRIME." On the other, he had written, "REFUSE ILLEGAL ORDERS."
On February 7, Wolff set up his folding lawn chair outside the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Legal Center and School, a training school for U.S. military lawyers hosted on the UVA campus. Wolff, who is a law student and a Navy veteran, wanted to make a statement in response to President Donald Trump's proposal that the U.S. take over the Gaza Strip. He hoped his presence would "remind those officers who are going to be making that decision of their moral and legal obligations to not comply with those orders because they would be unlawful," he tells Reason.
Before protesting, Wolff says that he scoured UVA's rules around student speech, going so far as to look up the land survey to ensure he was on UVA property, not the property of the JAG school. Still, when he sat down with his signs, he wasn't expecting trouble. He says that friends and classmates expressed concern when they learned about his plan to protest and asked whether he needed a legal observer. "I responded, 'No, this is totally innocuous….I'm just doing my homework," Wolff says. "It won't be a big deal. And it turned out that they were completely right, that I had every reason to be scared."
Within a few minutes of sitting down, Wolff says a University of Virginia Police Department vehicle drove by "really slowly." Every 15 minutes after that, he said, police cars continued to drive by where he was sitting, about half a dozen passes in total. The final police car contained a UVA administrator, who stepped out accompanied by a campus police officer and confronted Wolff, telling him he had to leave.
"I actually know my First Amendment rights very well and my rights as a student here," Wolff says in a video of the encounter obtained by Reason. "I'm not on JAG school grounds, and I'm not doing anything against the rules."
The administrator—whose name has been redacted in the video at the request of Wolff, who expressed concern that she might face public or professional backlash—continues to press Wolff to leave for several minutes. As the video progresses, Wolff calmly reiterates that, as a student, he has a right to stay where he is.
"Are you willing to comply?" she asks.
"No….Comply with what?" Wolff replies.
Eventually, the administrator reads Wolff a "final warning," telling him, "You are instructed to comply with university policies or leave the area immediately. If you do not comply or leave you will be issued a no trespass order barring you from university property for up to four years. Students will receive possibly an interim suspension. And that would disenroll you from your classes."
Soon after, Wolff stopped recording and called Kelly Orians, one of his law professors. Wolff says that a few minutes after calling his professor, the administrator reversed course and told him he wasn't breaking any rules and could stay.
Three days after the incident, Wolff met with UVA Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Marsh Pattie. Wolff says that Pattie told him that, based on the officer's body camera footage, the university had determined that the original administrator hadn't followed procedures correctly and that the university would change its policies to no longer send police officers to speech-related incidents. (Wolff's characterization of the discussion with Pattie was confirmed by Orians and another UVA law professor, Thomas Frampton, both of whom attended the meeting.)
"I was like, 'Why? Why are police officers involved?' I understand if somebody is being disorderly or yelling, but I actually hadn't even said a word to anyone," says Wolff. "I'd been sitting just quietly in a chair with a law school book." (The University of Virginia police department did not respond to a request for comment from Reason.)
Wolff also says that Pattie told him that the response had nothing to do with the content of his signs. But Wolff says, "I can guarantee you that if I'd been standing there with a sign that said 'Thank you for your service,' I would not have had a police officer in my face." Reason reached out to both Pattie and the UVA communications office for comment on this story, and a university spokesperson responded with a statement that reiterated the idea that Wolff's experience had nothing to do with the fact that his signs were about a touchy political issue. "The content of the expressive activity in question was irrelevant to this encounter," the statement reads.
The spokesperson framed the incident as the administrator's attempt to "gather information about their expressive activities on Grounds," adding that "once it was determined that the individual was affiliated with the University, his expressive activity continued that day, as well as the following Monday." However, after Wolff identified himself as a student, the video clearly shows that the administrator continued telling him he had to leave for more than three minutes, only stopping after Wolff called a law professor.
In the days following the incident, the university seemed to contradict what Pattie told Wolff. In a statement to Virginia Law Weekly obtained by Reason, the same UVA spokesperson had added a key phrase: "No University policies were violated by University officials."
Despite not facing disciplinary action, Wolff is frustrated with the university's response. Ever since the university cracked down on a pro-Palestinian encampment last spring, he says that the university climate has been marked by pervasive self-censorship. "Basically what I told [Pattie] is that the environment at UVA is one of abject fear," he says. "People do not feel like they can speak freely."
Wolff says that what he really wants is for the university to release a statement assuring students of their rights to protest. "You don't have to say about Palestine or Gaza….just say, 'Feel free to protest. If you don't like what's going on, feel free to protest. And that's it.'"
"I spent almost 10 years in the Navy, from my time entering the Naval Academy until getting out and going to law school," Wolff adds. "I spent those 10 years without First Amendment rights. And I'll be damned if I'm going to be told that I can't exercise my rights when I can."
