British universities are rolling back protest rights – we can’t let them

Across the street from Oxford Action for Palestine’s (OA4P) first Gaza solidarity encampment rests a piece of protest history. If you look closely at the brick walls of Keble College, you can still see the words “HANDS OFF VIETNAM!” scrawled in faded graffiti. This serves as a constant reminder: The University of Oxford is no stranger to student protest, and the current encampment continues a legacy of student organising. In particular, Oxford has a rich history of student protest against the institution’s colonial legacy, with the most prominent recent example being the Rhodes Must Fall movement in 2015, where students campaigned to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes – known as the ‘father of apartheid’ – from Oriel College. And like many other universities, Oxford has no problem memorialising the historic successes of these protest movements, while sanitising its own role in perpetuating the very violence that the students are mobilising against. 

Oxford’s long history of student activism makes the current administration’s antagonistic approach towards it all the more disturbing. On May 23, the University unleashed police brutality against protestors, which saw 17 people arrested and many others injured. Last week, the University attempted to roll back protest rights on campus through a slew of amendments to the University’s disciplinary code. Couched within positive reforms on sexual misconduct and harassment were alarming proposals to increase the policing power of University employees and to extend disciplinary consequences to a wide variety of common protest tactics, some as common and innocuous as putting up posters. One change would have allowed “any person with responsibility for any land or building of the University” to ban a student member from that property for up to 21 days, based on their own judgement of whether that student is “likely to cause damage”. At a university with a rampant history of reported racial profiling, this policy would not only have been antidemocratic but also deeply threatening to the safety and wellbeing of students of colour.

In a victory for the student movement, the University withdrew the amendments after a mass mobilisation from students, faculty, and staff. The University plans to resubmit the changes at a future date, after additional “consultation and committee scrutiny”. The timeline for this resubmission remains unclear, but the unprecedented coordination from all sectors of the Oxford community makes it increasingly unlikely that the University will succeed in passing the amendments as initially proposed. But whatever the outcome of this policy battle, the damage has already been done: by calling the police on its own students, the University of Oxford has set a dangerous precedent, which has helped to normalise a wider crackdown on protest rights – in the student context and beyond. On Monday (June 17), the London School of Economics became the first UK university to evict its students from their Gaza solidarity encampment. Several other universities, such as Queen Mary University of London, Nottingham and Birmingham, have also served injunctions against their students, and while the court orders remain pending, the encampments are fighting legal battles to maintain their presence. At Cardiff, Newcastle, and SOAS, the students have faced greater police repression than their campuses have seen in years.

With over 4000 members of the University of Oxford supporting the current protest and its demands, the OA4P encampment has become one of the largest student movements in Oxford history. After a month and a half of camping on two of the University’s lawns, OA4P has secured a number of victories, including a historic agreement to regular meetings between the University administration and encampment representatives, commitments to investment review and disclosure from Oxford Colleges, and unparalleled faculty support. But while the movement is making progress, the administration has yet to provide any assurances about meeting its demands. The urgency of the genocide in Gaza requires immediate action, not the mere possibility of action being taken at an unspecified future date. By investing in Israeli weapons manufacturers like Elbit Systems, the University of Oxford is actively facilitating crimes against humanity in Gaza. These horrors continue to unfold – earlier this week, Israel bombed a group of people waiting for humanitarian aid near the Karem Abu Salem border crossing in Rafah, killing at least nine people and injuring 30 others. By attempting to restrict protest rights and taking legal action against student encampments, UK universities are deliberately shifting the focus away from Palestine in an attempt to silence our global opposition.

The global student protests are in response to our universities’ and governments’ complicity in a genocide. We will not stop until our institutions sever their ties with Israel, and our determination sparks fear that extends far beyond University administrations. The Prime Minister himself has tried to pressure the shutdown of UK encampments, and these efforts parallel the UK Government’s efforts to silence the protests at their own doorstep: since October, hundreds of thousands of Londoners have marched against Israel’s attacks each weekend, and the Government has responded with police violence and mass arrests. On May 21, the High Court ruled against the Government, overturning anti-protest measures – enacted earlier this year – which lowered the threshold at which police could intervene in civic disruption. This is a welcome piece of good news in a political climate in which free speech rights have become increasingly corroded. All of these efforts have failed to distract from the simple reality: these institutions are aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and students are refusing to look away. 

It is always the student movements which drive universities forward – a fact that universities themselves are all too happy to commemorate in retrospect, painting themselves as bastions of rare moral clarity in the face of atrocity. But for eight months, the University of Oxford has watched the death toll in Gaza climb above 37,000 and refused to act. It is far too late for the University to absolve itself of its complicity, but it can still choose to take action on its students’ demands instead of attempting to silence us. It can join the growing tide of universities who are severing ties with Israeli apartheid – but if this is to have any impact on stopping the genocide, then it must happen now. 

The University of Oxford has been contacted for comment