The University of Sydney has announced its intention to intervene in the student union and potentially undermine democratic elections.
The announcement follows a controversy, concocted by the right-wing Murdoch media, about an election ticket contesting this year’s Students’ Representative Council election. The ticket, called Globalise the Intifada, drew hysterical condemnation from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, federal Education Minister Jason Clare and a spokesperson for NSW Premier Chris Minns. Albanese told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph the slogan “is an absolute outrage that has no place in Australia”.
Vice-chancellor Mark Scott and chancellor David Thodey joined the chorus of condemnation. In a statement released on 29 September, they said: “We deplore the manipulation of the recent election campaign to spread hurtful and distressing language across campus”.
The university also said it will commission an independent review of the SRC’s “current affiliation and funding arrangements ... to ensure compliance with legal, regulatory, and psychosocial safety requirements”. The review will also focus on student and staff codes of conduct and on campus security.
Behind closed doors, Scott and Thodey floated even more drastic measures. A source present at last week’s University Senate meeting told Honi Soit, the student newspaper, that Scott raised the possibility of the university taking control of student elections and conducting them online. A university spokesperson refused to answer Honi Soit’s questions about the discussions.
The university’s investigation rests on the spurious claim that phrases in support of Palestine, such as “globalise the intifada” and “from the XXXX to the sea”, threaten the safety of Jewish people.
In Arabic, “intifada” simply means “shaking off” or “uprising”. It commonly refers to the First and Second Intifadas, mass movements of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism. The phrase denotes the steadfast resistance of the Palestinians to decades of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
Governments, corporate media and university managers spend huge amounts of time and energy painting these phrases as calls to violence. Meanwhile, they turn a blind eye to the very real violence that Israel is committing in Gaza and the West Bank. New satellite imagery of the city of Rafah in Gaza illustrates the scale of Israel’s assault. Before 2023, the city looked like any other: houses, public squares, parks. Today, the city is a wasteland, all the buildings reduced to rubble.
Our government and our universities are complicit in this violence. Many universities maintain research partnerships with weapons companies that sell arms to Israel and conduct exchange programs with Israeli universities. Yet we are expected to believe that student activists campaigning against racism and genocide are the violent actors!
These attacks on student political organising don’t come from nowhere. This confected crisis is taking place in the context of the sham royal commission into antisemitism. Vice-chancellors grovelled before the commissioner as they were grilled about why they allowed Palestine solidarity protests on their campuses. The conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism has been a constant of the entire affair.
Universities are under significant pressure from both the government and pro-Israel organisations to clamp down on free speech and solidarity activism on campus. This aligns with their own self-interest in squashing mounting criticism of their complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and their desire to attract funding from arms companies and the broader corporate sector, which by and large supports Western imperialism and Israel.
Widespread hostility to university ties to Israel among students and staff has been on display recently at Sydney University. The controversy around the ticket has distracted from the fact that the election also included a referendum on the administration’s complicity in Israel’s genocide. More than 4,000 students voted, and an overwhelming 92 percent of students voted in favour of breaking the university’s ties with arms companies and Israeli institutions.
Anyone who supports Palestine, who supports student unionism or who supports freedom of speech must speak out against Sydney University’s recent decision.
