This academic year alone, The Cheese Grater has reported on an incident between UCL Friends of Israel and pro-Palestine protestors, the banning of events held by UCL Students for Justice in Palestine (UCLSJP), and a violent altercation involving UCL conservatives.
I can’t help but feel that our university is becoming a re-enactment venue, with global conflicts morphing into local fault lines and political battlefields being routinely imported onto campus.
These recent events have not been trivial student spats. Even Israel has acknowledged that at least 70,000 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October, those in power are failing to acknowledge the climate crisis, and global democracies are plagued by rampant populism.
We're witnessing raw and emotional reactions to the state of political order, be it humanitarian tragedy or the endless culture wars inhibiting reasonable discussion. My issue lies with what’s happening with these emotional reactions: life on campus is being filtered through a national climate of polarisation, and UCL is making little effort to understand this complexity.
To pretend that this complexity is anything new would be dishonest. Britain’s left-right culture war has grown increasingly feral, and UK universities are a casualty of this — a recent article in the Mail Online exposed Britain’s ‘wokest’ universities, ‘naming and shaming’ institutions whom they felt may exile Paddington Bear, or implement anarcho-communism.
A further casualty involves ourselves: in a world where everything is politicised, it’s far too easy for student debate to slip into mindless tribalism, as difficult issues are squeezed into ideological boxes. This tribalism is worsened given the deficit of structured debates happening at UCL, paradoxically opposing Provost Michael Spence’s favourite mantra of ‘Disagreeing Well’.
I worry that a similar paradox might appear if I used this piece to plant myself on one side of the issues that UCL has seen in recent times, even if the result of me voicing my concerns is instead a woolly, The Rest Is Politics-esque advocacy for the middle ground. It somehow feels like a double standard for me to complain about polarisation whilst advocating for one side over the other.
Expressing political opinion is becoming increasingly difficult, for supporting one view automatically entails wholehearted opposition to another — perhaps it’s better for me to save my own diatribes for an article that doesn’t revolve around our incessant political feuds.
Polarisation on campus isn’t helped by UCL’s seemingly asymmetric attitude towards freedom of speech and expression, despite their protestations that ‘Disagreeing Well’ does in fact underscore academic life.
We’ve witnessed the Administration withdraw from LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall in an example of upholding ‘academic freedom’, but also obtain a High Court order to forcibly remove a pro-Palestine encampment, such to not disturb their 2024 freshers’ week festivities.
It’s also clear that the right to protest does not extend to everyone in the UCL community, following a 2024 Cheese Grater Investigation uncovering intimidation tactics used against over 200 outsourced security workers. The inconsistencies are obvious, and underscore a threat to our student democracy if left unchallenged.
The idea of UCL as a bastion of ‘progressive thinking’ simply cannot hold if we have no proper platform for voices to be heard without fear of repercussion. Admittedly, the university faces a very difficult task — managing safety, expression, and community simultaneously at a time of such polarisation results in a weird sort of administrative paralysis, evident through their flip-flopping on what constitutes freedom of expression and what doesn’t.
But the carefully-written statements following campus incidents satisfy nobody, in language so neutral it feels like it’s been ironed flat. This performative neutrality is futile if it’s purely responsive; UCL needs to be proactive in improving their understanding of perspectives.
Championing dialogue, discourse, and ‘Disagreeing Well’ can only function effectively if the University applies this logic consistently. We need real platforms to discuss real problems. Students are rightly addressing complex political issues using the tools available to them, but in a polarised environment, perspectives simply boil down to left vs right, or pro vs anti.
Such platforms to reduce this polarisation already exist within the University’s ecosystem, like the UCL Israel-Palestine initiative, but these are ultimately superfluous if nobody uses them — they need your support to function effectively. In times of such division, forums for education and discussion will bring people together. I think it’s time that more of us joined in.