The President and Provost Michael Spence sent another blast email to every UCL student earlier today (15 July) to let us know that his grand ideals of ‘free speech’ and ‘disagreeing well’ stop when they come into conflict with the University’s brand image.
Nick Miao, Co-Editor-in-Chief
In an email, the Provost said that the University has ‘formally advised’ the pro-Palestine encampment that it intends to ‘apply for a court order to remove them if they do not choose to go of their own volition.’ He said that ‘we must gain access to the Quad for activities that are so important to the life of the university’, particularly ahead of this year’s freshers’ fair.
This comes just five days after the High Court ruled to allow two UK universities to clear the student encampments from their respective campuses, with the judge claiming that protesters had ‘no prospect’ of showing their human rights would be infringed as a result.
The Provost’s decision adds UCL to the growing list of universities seeking to remove their student encampments off the back of this High Court ruling. Queen Mary University of London, for example, wasted no time at all and sent in bailiffs to remove their encampment last Friday (12 July) after protesters refused to comply with the court order. Meanwhile, the SOAS Spirit reported that the federal University of London, of which UCL is a member, had also filed a similar court order to evict the SOAS encampment near the Senate House Library.
It is worth noting that none of these universities have met the protesters’ demands. In London, the only university to have done so in full is Goldsmiths, which agreed to a new ethical investment policy, a statement calling for a ceasefire, a Palestinian scholarship fund, and a review of the working definition of antisemitism. Other universities have likewise offered glimmers of hope for student protesters, with York and Leicester partially agreeing to similar demands, although protests continue for other unmet goals.
A coalition of pro-Palestine activists at UCL Stands for Justice (SFJ) has maintained an encampment on the Main Quad since 2 May 2024 with the following demands:
- Divestment from arms companies ‘complicit in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians’,
- Condemnation of Israeli war crimes, and
- A pledge to rebuild the destroyed education system in Gaza through collaborations with Palestinian universities and scholarships for Palestinian students.
UCL has so far failed to meet these demands, despite committing to ‘secure philanthropic funding for scholarships for Palestinian students’ and to review its partnership with Tel Aviv University in a meeting on 26 April with activists from UCL Action for Palestine (AFP), a separate pro-Palestine activist group, following their 34-days-long occupation of the Jeremy Bentham Room. Earlier this month, faculty members of AFP had also presented and passed a motion on UCL’s Academic Board urging University management to divest from arms companies and to establish a Palestinian scholarship fund.
There have been no updates on either commitment since then, apart from the Provost’s blast emails in which he insisted that ‘support for academic freedom and freedom of debate requires that a university not adopt an institutional position in relation to any given issue, including an issue of armed conflict.’ Of course, this requirement did not appear to bother the Provost when he adopted an institutional position in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
For all his incessant yapping about ‘free speech’ and ‘disagreeing well in a global university’, the Provost has demonstrated that he is more than happy to steamroll over our right to protest to conceal the University’s level of complicity in genocide from the latest cohort of students.
SFJ has responded to the eviction notice with the following statement:
‘UCL has yet again decided to crush protest rather than divest from genocide. Seas of tents in Gaza have been razed to the ground by bombs and fighter jets manufactured by direct partners of UCL. Universities are now graveyards. Flour massacre, drinking-water massacre, playground massacre, tent massacre. None of this bothers the Administration. They care only about their own lawn, and whether their planned festivities can go ahead. Nearly quarter million dead and you’re evicting us instead.’