The University of Maryland, College Park and Maryland’s attorney general have asked the state to approve their joint request to settle a First Amendment lawsuit brought by the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.

The request to settle the case, which was not previously publicly available information, was revealed in a memo detailing the agenda for an impending meeting of the Maryland Board of Public Works, which oversees matters impacting the state university system. The university’s settlement, according to the agenda posted to BPW’s website ahead of a Wednesday board meeting, would provide $100,000 to defendants through the CAIR Legal Defense Fund, an arm of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. 

“The University of Maryland College Park and the Office of the Attorney General recommend paying $100,000 to settle all claims, including attorneys’ fees, as in the best interest of the State,” the memo reads. 

The University of Maryland declined to comment to Jewish Insider about its request to settle and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown did not respond to JI’s request for comment.

On behalf of UMD SJP, CAIR and Palestine Legal filed a lawsuit against the university’s College Park campus last September alleging a violation of the students’ free speech after UMD President Darryll Pines announced that the school had canceled an SJP-sponsored anti-Israel rally slated for the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. 

UMD initially granted SJP a permit last August to hold the Oct. 7 demonstration on the campus’ central McKeldin Mall, prompting swift backlash and calls from campus groups including Hillel and the Jewish Student Union — and from former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who was running for the Senate at the time — for the school to reverse course. 

After the university canceled the protest, SJP filed a lawsuit stating that its First Amendment rights had been violated and a federal judge wrote in an opinion that the group “has demonstrated a substantial likelihood that it will prevail [in its lawsuit] on the merits of its freedom of speech claim.” The university then backtracked a second time and ultimately allowed the demonstration to take place, but the lawsuit moved forward. 

Pines said at the time that the initial decision to cancel the event — and all events scheduled for Oct. 7, other than university sponsored ones — was made following a “safety assessment,” which, he added, did not identify any threats to the campus. 

Einav Tsach, a rising senior studying journalism and business, told JI that amid turmoil around the SJP demonstration, Jewish students still “came together as a strong, vibrant Jewish campus community to mark the one-year anniversary of the horrors perpetrated by Hamas.” 

As the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks approaches this fall, Tsach, the former leader of  Mishelanu, an on-campus Israeli-American cultural association, said that Jewish UMD students “remain focused on marking this solemn day in the most meaningful way possible.”

Other than the controversy around last year’s demonstration, UMD, which has one of the largest Jewish student populations in the country — nearly 20% of the College Park undergraduate student body of more than 30,000 is Jewish — has largely avoided egregious incidents of antisemitism that have occurred on other college campuses.