By admin 
After dividing lawmakers and barely clearing the Legislature last month, a bill pushing for greater transparency on the implementation of campus protest rules at California’s public universities has been vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
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Assembly Bill 2551, authored by Assemblymember Sade Elhawary, D-Los Angeles, would have required the California State University and requested the University of California systems to provide annual data on student code of conduct violations during protests disaggregated by race and gender. The reports would also have had to include descriptions of the disciplinary action imposed on those students. It was an attempt to address concerns that protest rules strengthened after sweeping demonstrations against the ongoing war in Gaza in 2024 had disproportionately targeted students of color.
In addition to data collection, the measure asked that campuses host open forums before the end of 2027 to elicit student feedback on current time, place, and manner policies that restrict when, where and how protests are conducted on campuses.
In his Sunday, Newsom said the CSU and UC systems already have regularly scheduled meetings where the campus community can express themselves, rendering AB 2551’s open forums unnecessary. The universities also have “established communication channels” with their student associations, he wrote.
“Given the numerous ways that the campus community can already provide perspective to policy leaders, it is unnecessary to require an addition forum outside these established processes,” Newsom said.
The governor did not address the data disaggregation provision of the proposed bill in his veto message.
“Our goal was to collect more data with the existing reporting requirements,” Elhawary said. “That was not acknowledged in the veto statement. We wanted to ensure that we were able to see how enforcement is being handled, how discipline and punishment is being handled. Given that we’ve seen uneven and disproportionate enforcement, it’s really a disappointment for us. But we want to continue moving forward to do everything we can to protect our students who are on campus exercising their First Amendment rights.”
The UC and CSU systems were opposed to the bill throughout. Among other things, they worried that data disaggregation could compromise student privacy and enable easy identification of involved students, given the number of total violations in a year is small.
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The debate over current campus protest rules has its roots in 2024 legislation. At that time, following encampments and rallies protesting the ongoing war in Gaza that swept campuses statewide, the Legislature required the UC and CSU systems to develop uniform protest policies.
With Jewish groups reporting increased antisemitic incidents on campuses, the state passed a law asking the CSU and UC systems to enforce those protest restrictions and “prohibit violent, harassing, intimidating or discriminatory conduct” that creates a hostile environment on campus. The UC and CSU prohibited encampments, restricted masking to conceal identity when violating policies and put in place disciplinary actions to be utilized against those in violation.
Meanwhile, hundreds of student and faculty who participated in pro-Palestinian protests had already been slapped with legal and academic repercussions amid a crackdown on the movement.
In the time since, some students say the implementation of protest policies and the disciplinary actions meted out to violators didn’t just create a chilling effect on campuses but also disproportionately targeted Muslim, Black and Brown students.
In a 2025 report, the Council on American-Islamic Relations-California — a sponsor of AB 2551 — raised concerns over the newly strengthened campus protest restrictions, especially given what it called “targeted enforcement” of the existing policies. The report said several California universities used law enforcement disproportionately in response to pro-Palestinian protests when compared with other events that violated the same policies. The University of California Student Association, a coalition of student governments across the system, voiced similar concerns. However, these allegations of inequitable implementation are so far only anecdotal; there is no data to substantiate them — a hole that the vetoed bill sought to fill.
An earlier version of Elhawary’s bill attempted to repeal the provisions of the 2024 law. After strong opposition from Jewish California, an umbrella advocacy organization for Jewish groups statewide, the bill left the protest rules intact while pushing for greater conversation about their implementation. Jewish California eventually took a neutral position on the bill, but some legislators who opposed the bill said they worried its eventual goal remained to do away with the 2024 provisions.
“Time, place and manner policies have made universities safer for all students, including Jewish students,” said Jewish California CEO David Bocarsly in a statement Monday. “We’re happy to work with Assemblymember Elhawary to protect these policies and ensure their fair and equitable enforcement.”
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