After months of construction, UCL’s Portico opened up with a light show spectacle highlighting 200 years of “groundbreaking” UCL endeavours.
Stories focussed on UCL allowing women into higher education, academics producing research "starting transformations that ripple across society", and narratives around UCL "confronting injustices" — carefully sidestepping the less glamorous and inspiring UCL histories of empire, eugenics, and exploitation.
Students part of Action for Palestine took the opportunity to shine light on the stark difference in UCL’s proclaimed values and its actual institutional practices, both past and present.
As ‘UCL200’ projections lit up the University, a further projection appeared on the Portico. The writing on the wall is shaky but clear: “Free Palestine”.
The hypocrisy is glaring and unavoidable, UCL supposedly a brave change-maker, free-thinker, challenger of status-quos, refuses to cut ties with arms companies facilitating genocide.
"Understanding our past helps us make sense of our present" blasts from the UCL speakers set up in the quad. Indeed.
UCL has long been cosy with imperialist endeavours, not least through its large investments in British companies profiteering from white supremacy in South Africa, as well as through its ties to eugenics research that justified racial domination across the British Empire.
Indeed, until as late as 2018 a ‘secret eugenics conference’ – the London Conference on Intelligence – was hosted on our campus.
Today, the University continues to hold research relationships with arms companies like BAE Systems and Airbus. These companies are both funders, partners, and collaborators of UCL’s departments/centres (like UCLse and Mullard Space Science Laboratory) and arms suppliers to Israel, involved in crimes and human rights abuses, like the ongoing Nakba of Palestinians.
As students, we understand that the relationships our institution holds to such companies link us, here, to the dispossession and slaughter of people in Palestine and around the world — from Yemen to Myanmar.
Yet, those advocating for an end to these imperial institutional ties are facing immense repression.
On 12 February, a few hours before UCL’s last UCL Illuminated spectacle which included a section on how "words question traditions and change public thought", the Metropolitan Police arrested a student protestor joining the national student walkout for Palestine over the use of the word ‘intifada’.
This is a clear escalation from the disciplinary processes it has previously employed to repress student activism around Palestinian liberation.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that UCL is revving up its repression engine on the same day it has a progressive facade to uphold. How dare students point out that UCL’s supposedly ‘radical’ and ‘progressive’ reputation is largely image not praxis?
When Palestine is free and UCL celebrates another anniversary, I am sure it will proudly speak of its role in "bringing peace in the Middle East". Indeed, in a recent BBC broadcast reflecting on UCL200, Michael Spence has already mentioned that one of his favourite moments as Provost at UCL was the shabbat dinner hosted at the UCL encampment for Palestine in 2024 — the same encampment his administration evicted by court order.
As we continue to fight to detangle ourselves and our institutions from global exploitation, we must not fall into the trap of forgetting that this University has done painfully little to support its student ‘change-makers’ taking action to cut our ties to global exploitation — people like Qesser Zuhrah who was held in prison from November 2024 to February 2026 for their actions against Elbit Systems.
I call on all UCL students, staff, and media organisations to join the UCL Action for Palestine coalition and use any opportunity you get to shine light on UCL’s complicity in genocide and its participation in the degradation of civil liberties in the UK.
How much longer will we allow UCL to get away with proudly "acknowledging its difficult past" but not tackling its violent present? Help us hold our complicit university to account to the "progressive", "groundbreaking", and "socially transformative" standards it sets for itself. Free Palestine.
Jules is a pseudonym and not the writer’s real name.