Cai Cafiero, a graduate student in Syracuse University's School of Education, says she will keep fighting conduct sanctions in connection with the two-week campus Gaza Solidarity Encampment in May, even though she and her faculty advisor say they expect SU to still come out on top.
Cafiero’s closed-door, formal university hearing was held last week on Zoom, she says before a panel of three SU staff members, one of whom is also a graduate student in the School of Education.
Last week, the hearing panel upheld a semester of probation, which SU’s Community Standards – the office that oversees the university’s conduct system – first levied against Cafiero in July. Cafiero did not accept that initial ruling, which was why her case went to a hearing.
Now, she is formally appealing the hearing decision as well, as the last step of her months-long conduct process, but not because she thinks her punishment will change.
“I want to exhaust the university-mandated process,” said Cafiero, on the advice of her lawyer.
Students cannot have legal representation present during most SU conduct proceedings, although the university can, but Cafiero has been working privately with an attorney. One that, she says, “has done a lot of these cases at various universities” and told her that exhausting the entire conduct system is necessary should Cafiero want to sue SU in the future over its punitive sanctions.
“To know that I'm going to spend this semester being watched and scrutinized for any misstep, I don't want to take the option of legal action off the table,” said Cafiero. “Keeping that in the toolbox just feels like the right move.”
Cafiero is one of several student protesters being punished for not moving the GSE tents from Shaw Quad, the campus' main lawn, to another part of campus after SU ordered them to by way of an unsigned letter in May. The university was putting up its own graduation tent on the Quad and told the dozens of protesters, if they did not relocate, they would be violating an unspecified university policy.
Cafiero says she never asked SU why that letter didn’t specify the policy because she didn’t want to seem hostile during a hearing and a process that are already intimidating.
“For a process that the university insists is not legal and that you don't need a lawyer, they really like law and order,” Cafiero said.
For instance, at the hearing, she says she could not speak directly to Kyle Dailey, the staff member of SU Student Experience (which oversees Community Standards) who filed the conduct incident report against Cafiero. Cafiero says her questions instead had to go through the head of that three-person panel, which essentially acts as a jury, and she was not told if the panel’s vote to uphold her probation was unanimous.
Cafiero’s sole procedural advisor in her case (students are allowed only one, who cannot speak during proceedings) is Mario Rios Perez. He’s also Cafiero’s faculty advisor at SU’s School of Education, and says he has been frustrated from the start, because SU never tried to prove that Cafiero even received the relocation order.
“If they had identified Cai, then that means they knew Cai’s identity. That means they knew Cai’s email,” said Rios Perez.
Both he and Cafiero say SU never emailed the letter to any student protester directly, or to the GSE's central email address, which Cafiero had access to as the protest's media liaison. Cafiero and Rios Perez say that SU instead relied on the fact that its relocation directive was published in the student-run newspaper, The Daily Orange.
Rios Perez says he also takes issue with SU’s shifting allegations against Cafiero. Before the hearing, he says SU claimed Cafiero’s actions impacted many graduating students, whose commencement events were held next to the GSE, as well as staff who had to work overtime, to put up a temporary fence between the protest and SU tents. However, he says, at the hearing SU could not provide any evidence to support that, and only focused on Cafiero disobeying the relocation order.
“It seems to me that many of these decisions that were made, were made after the fact, to then pursue some type of action against students to ensure that something was done,” said Rios Perez. “So that way the university can show, ‘Hey, yeah, we did do something.’”
SU tells WAER it will not comment on student conduct cases.
Meanwhile, despite a lot of inconsistencies, Rios Perez says the university has been “successful” in punishing Cafiero, who must also create a 30-minute presentation analyzing her decisions in the “incident” and "exploring how to properly educate and support students engaged in demonstrations at Syracuse University, while complying with Syracuse University directives and policies.”
However, Cafiero says she isn’t allowed to hold the presentation for students — just SU conduct officials. She says that compounds the isolation she feels for being singled out among dozens of protesters.
“We make collective decisions, and part of that means that there is no one individual responsible for the strategy and tactics of the encampment as a whole,” said Cafiero.
WAER has been able to confirm less a dozen GSE protesters are facing sanctions.
SU declined to answer whether the university will hold a presentation for potential student campus protesters, to educate them on its directives and policies.
