The start of UC Berkley’s game against USC on Saturday afternoon was delayed due to a student protest regarding a suspended professor.
Shortly after the coin toss, protesters wearing shirts reading “Justice for Ivonne” entered the field and sat down on the field on Cal’s logo at midfield.
According to the OC Register, the protestors were referencing professor Ivonne del Valle, whose ongoing suspension has reportedly become the center of a campus controversy.
The demonstrators were handcuffed by authorities and escorted away from California Memorial Stadium, and the game started roughly 15 minutes late.
Professor del Valle was suspended in the fall of 2021 due to stalking and harassing Joshua Cover, an English and Comparative Literature professor at UC Davis, and violating subsequent orders not to contact him, according to KQED.
Professor del Valle admitted to the outlet that she did much of the behavior that is accused in the school’s investigative reports, including keying Clover’s car, vandalizing the area outside his apartment door, posting an image of his partner online, contacting his friends and writing messages including: “I raised a psychopath” outside of Clover’s mother’s house.
She claimed that she was in fact the victim and that her actions were the result of her being hacked and not receiving support from the school.
“I did write outside his door, ‘Here lives a pervert.’ I did that,” del Valle, who has been at Cal since 2009, told KQED. “And again, I’m not proud. If I had the opportunity to do things differently, I would do them differently.”
She also said that she “never received help from anybody” after going to school officials claiming she was hacked.
However, after providing documentation of an analysis of her laptop to KQED, it showed no evidence of hacking or a cyber attack, and she was not able to prove that Clover, or anybody else, illegally accessed her devices.
That mirrored the school’s initial investigative report in 2019, which found there was “insufficient evidence to support a finding” that Clover had “engaged in any hacking of Respondent’s electronic devices,” according to records obtained by KQED.
Del Valle is an influential professor at Cal, and protestors are planning a hunger strike if she is not reinstated, according to the outlet.