Zainab Hakim was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan (UMich) from 2020 to 2024, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in History of Art, Women’s and Gender Studies, and a minor in Islamic Studies. In October of 2024, she got a full-time job as a Program Specialist at the International Institute, at the Center for South Asian Studies at UMich. 

On April 7th this year, Hakim received an email from the Associate Director of UMich Human Resources stating that she was being placed on suspension for that week. The given reason was that it was based on a review of her conduct at a protest on May 3rd, 2024, when Hakim was an undergraduate, six months before she started the job in October. They pointed to video footage and a police report, alleging that Hakim’s actions violated the Violence in the University Community guidelines. The Polis Project was unable to verify either the footage or the report. 

In the interviews to get the job, Hakim emphasized she was “plain about being a student organizer as an undergraduate and participating in the U of M encampment,” she said to The Polis Project. “I was upfront,” she added, “and in fact, afterwards, they told me that it was those [very] experiences that made them think that I would be good at this job, because it was pretty logistically heavy.” 

As of today, Hakim is one of over 20 other students, faculty, and staff members who have been penalized by UMich for pro-Palestinian activity. As a part of our commitment to documenting communities in resistance and to watch the state, The Polis Project sat with Hakim to learn about her experience. 

What follows is an edited excerpt:

The Polis Project: What exactly were the grounds of your termination?

Zainab Hakim: In terms of this policy that they’re alleging I violated, they referenced a police report from a student protest, and some videos from body camera footage of that day. The police report mentions me very sparsely. It just says, “Zainab Hakim had a microphone. We approached her and told her to give us the megaphone, and she complied.” 

There’s no hearing, no trial, or anything. There’s no burden on them to prove that I broke this policy they’re alleging I broke: Standard Practice Guidelines, specifically, Violence in the University Community. They said: you can have an optional meeting with U of M Human Resources sometime between now [Monday] and Friday if you want to respond to any of this or ask questions. But regardless, we are going to give you a decision by Friday. I agreed to the meeting, but I was very confused. I didn’t understand where this was coming from.

PP: What happened during the optional meeting?

ZH: I first got in touch with the union and a lawyer. I was trying to get them to the meeting with HR. I emailed HR and asked if they could come. She responded that only one person could come. I asked her to point me to any policy that explains why, because it seemed reasonable to have the lawyer and union rep at the meeting. She didn’t send any policy, but stood her ground. 

I ended up taking my union representative to the meeting, and we had a plan where he would read out the statement that we wrote together explaining why this is a big violation of the First Amendment, and how this is going to be very damaging for the university’s relationship with the staff union. And also, he was planning to talk about the fact that when I received the suspension, to begin with, the university had an obligation to bargain with the union over the terms of my discipline, based on the Public Employees Relations Act. They flat out refused even the demand to bargain over those terms. This is a violation of labor law. 

At the meeting, the HR person reiterated what she said before, the policies I violated, and asked if I had something to say. Then my union representative asked to speak on my behalf, and with my permission. She cut him off and denied it. So I read the statement. The meeting lasted 15 minutes, from 1:30 to 1:45 pm on Friday. She told me I could schedule another meeting at 3 pm that same day to learn the outcome.

At that point, it was clear that nothing I would say in this meeting would change anyone’s mind regarding this decision. Later that day, at around 4:45 pm, I got an email from them stating that I was terminated, effective today. No details about what’s happening with healthcare, for example, or even just basic instructions on how to wrap up the things that I was doing at work, or turn in my keys, for example. I’ve received no follow-up information from HR since then.

PP: But where does the violence come in? Can you explain that policy for us and how they were interpreting it for you?

ZH: They’re trying to make this very flimsy case about violence, saying that the megaphones are violent to the officers’ ears because of the noise. Even the information I received about their interpretation was so little. It’s saying that during a private event, protesters interfered with law enforcement’s ability to provide invitees safe and secure entry and exit from the premises, despite law enforcement’s presence at the doors and around the building and repeated instructions to refrain from disrupting their efforts. 

It said that I did not comply and interfered with law enforcement actions, including pushing back against law enforcement. These actions, they allege, violate the university’s Violence in the University Community Standards Guideline. That’s what it said in the suspension letter.

But even when I met the HR person, she pointed to the videos showing me linking arms with other protesters and standing in a line. When I showed this to my lawyer, she said there’s no single instance of me showing any aggression towards the police officers. 

PP: Why did it take the university so long, from May 3rd, 2024, to April 7th, 2025—nearly a year—to take action against you? 

ZH: The state prosecutor of Michigan, Dana Nessel, is charging other people for protesting related to the encampment. She’s a Zionist. A big part of the reason [for the delay] is that the University wanted the state prosecutor to pursue this legally, and they were waiting for her to decide whether she would charge [the student protestors].  If she could have charged us, she would have charged us. So it’s evident that there was no legal basis, because there are no charges. She would have done it if she could. I have no doubt. I feel that is the strongest evidence for the fact that they’re kind of pulling this violence thing out of their ass.

PP: Is there anything that you can do to appeal this decision? What steps might you want to take moving forward?

ZH: I’m still thinking about it. When it comes to such discrimination [on the basis of speech], there’s supposed to be an appeal process. That’s what my lawyer told me. For me, the university HR just told me I was terminated. They also said I could never be rehired by the university. That’s a huge thing because I live in Michigan, Detroit, and the university is the biggest employer in the state. So, getting a rehire ban from the university is severely limiting your job prospects if you want to live here. 

So now I’m still figuring out where to go from here, but as a starting point, I just wanted people to know that this crazy thing happened.

PP: Do you know of others targeted by UMich for their pro-Palestine activities that are not international students or academics? 

ZH: Yeah, I know several. Four other students received these suspensions and have since been fired, but I was the only full-time staff person. 

This is the latest round of the university taking action against student protesters. I’ve already gone through the student disciplinary process two times. And those processes had already been manipulated by them. For example, they paid around $700,000 to an [external] consultant to come and bring complaints against us. Whereas, the official rules say that it has to be two members of the campus. They were just flagrantly violating all of the rules of the process to try to get some academic discipline against us. 

But despite that, I did it two times, both times the various deciders said that I was not responsible. And then both times, the Vice President of Student Life just overturned the decision and insisted that I’m guilty, according to the student conduct. Many other people I know have various kinds of bans from campus, like being banned and can only go to class, or being banned from certain buildings. There are hundreds of other examples of people getting repressed by the university for student protests. 

PP: How, if at all, does the university protect the students against ICE and the DHS?

ZH: This has been a huge conversation lately because I think around 22 people [international students] at UMich have had their visas revoked, and so it’s frightening. The university’s response was to tell us to call DPSS [campus police] if we saw ICE on campus. So, essentially saying: Call the police if you see the police. A lot of people, reasonably, were upset, and said there was just no way that if they saw ICE, they would call another law enforcement agency. That seems like the only thing that could make the situation worse. 

PP: Has this experience shocked you, or confirmed things you always knew about the university and its relationship with the government? 

ZH: That is something that I have thought about a lot. People have this idea about what the university is supposed to be like and the values the university is supposed to hold. But I’ve been involved in student organizing for as long as I was an undergraduate at Michigan. So I had any illusions about the morality of the university only for a very short time. These things that the university is doing now, it wasn’t like they were not doing them before Trump was in power. 

Yes, certain things are worse, like the visas. But also, they wanted to repress us last year. They were Zionist before Trump was in power, and they’re Zionist now. It’s like a convenient shifting of blame, in my opinion, to say: Well, now we have to cancel DEI because Trump is in power.

But in reality, they never really cared about DEI. They didn’t care about international students. They definitely didn’t care about the 400,000 Palestinians whom they were complicit in the murder of. The university is no better than the state, in my opinion. 

PP: What do you think the situation will be like moving forward at Umich?

ZH: In my opinion, this is a sign that anything can happen to anybody. The university can pretty much manipulate policies or procedures at whim to silence anybody they don’t like. I think that can continue to escalate in ways that are probably impossible to imagine, unless people take some sort of collective action to stop it. 

For example, I had this joke with my supervisor when I was a student and she said: Just so you know, if you protest as a staff member, you will get fired. Staff have way fewer rights than students. And then, when I got fired, I told her: You told me that I would get fired if I protested as a staff, but you didn’t tell me I would get fired if I protested as a student! The point is, this is something that you would have never imagined would happen, because people imagine that students have certain rights, and that the university has certain ideals. But ultimately, they don’t care about anything except their financial ambitions. 

The important part is that Palestine is the thing this is happening around, and it’s important to remember that. But won’t be limited to Palestine.

PP: Do you see anybody banding together in a way you feel hopeful about?

ZH: Yeah. The union and the coalition of organizers in Michigan have been supportive. Even people from my office have been helpful. As for immigration, there’s a lot of organizing at Michigan. It’s difficult because so many things are happening every day, and it’s often the people who are at risk of immigration threats who also have to do the organizing, which is a huge burden to take on.

Just yesterday, we had a beautiful event: a sit-in, but a work-in to make it about labor, in one of these big campus buildings with a view of the HR offices. Around 300-400 people came. Everybody from the office where I worked came. And it was cool because when we would plan stuff like that, we would get mostly students. But this was an even split of faculty, staff, and students, the first time I’ve ever seen in all of my on-campus organizing. 

It was interesting: people who could avoid confrontation with the university until this point had to witness it for the first time. Which, again, sucks. It sucks that I lost my job, and that is a really stressful situation to be in. But if it gets people to see that the university is not this moralistic, idealistic place that it presents itself as, that’s at least some form of progress to me.