Published: August 27, 2026
MONROVIA — Every member of the University of Liberia’s Board of Trustees is now unwelcome on the Capitol Hill campus, students said Tuesday after driving Rep. Thomas Romeo Quioh off the grounds and warning that any trustee who returns while the university stays closed will be treated the same way.
Quioh, who sits on the board, was booed during a visit to inspect what he described as the state of the university, and police walked him out as tensions rose. Members of the Students Unification Party said they chased him.
Cephas Noring, propaganda chair of SUP, said students read the visit as an empty gesture because the university president had already assessed conditions on campus while the board had produced no solution to the dispute between faculty and management.
“So, we saw it as a pretense. We saw it as a mockery, and it angered the students; it angered the militants, and then they had to go and chase him,” he said.
Noring said the confrontation was planned and that the party would repeat it. “No regret, and no apology. That was intentionally done, and if he comes back on campus, we’ll do it any day, any time,” he said.
He said the party holds the entire board responsible for the failure to reopen the university, not Quioh alone. “It goes to all of them, it goes to all of them. We are not being selected by anyone on campus,” he said.
Liberia’s largest public university remains closed. The University of Liberia Faculty and Staff Association voted Friday to continue its go-slow action despite an intervention by President Joseph Nyuma Boakai, telling an emergency assembly attended by most faculty members that it will not return to class until management provides a clear timeline for addressing outstanding issues.
The standoff has already cost the university its vice president for fiscal affairs, who resigned.
Students have staged several demonstrations in recent days over the delay in reopening. With faculty still refusing to teach, academic activities remain suspended.
Quioh and the Board of Trustees had not responded to the students’ action as of press time.
