In the Marie Reay Teaching Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, there is a permanent art installation that pays tribute to the history of student activism at that campus. Dates, photos, and captions are arranged on a wall along a timeline stretching all the way back to 1960. The campaign against the Vietnam War, protests for gender equality, and rallies against fee hikes are all commemorated side by side.

Today students at ANU are fighting for their right to put up posters on their campus. We should remember that university management has never been a friend of campus activism. More often they are the target. Their acts of official incorporation or glib celebration well after the fact are a reminder that history is not always written by the victors.

The authoritarian “poster policy” at ANU has been introduced in the context of a flourishing of pro-Palestine activism among university students and staff across the country. Encampments, public forums, protests, and mass student meetings have rocked our campuses. Universities have become epicentres of resistance to the genocide in Gaza, as outraged students and staff speak up against the daily atrocities in the Gaza Strip and hold their universities to account.

Rather than celebrate these brave students and staff, university managements have chosen to pursue disciplining, censorship, and repression. Protests have been restricted and banned. Students brought up on spurious misconduct charges. Teachers warned about even talking about Palestine.

The People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine was convened in order to shine a light on this situation. After receiving over 150 submissions from students and staff at twenty university campuses across the country, the People’s Inquiry panellists produced a Preliminary Report based on a random selection of thirty-two of those submissions.

The report’s title — Don’t talk or write about Palestine: it’s a career killer — was drawn from a confidential submission made by a PhD graduate at a Group of Eight University. According to their submission, the advice to stay quiet on Palestine came from the director of a research centre connected to the field of human rights.

In the Report, the People’s Inquiry noted evidence that universities were interfering with events on campus related to Palestine. In one case, a guest lecture about Palestine organised by the Muslim Students’ Association at the University of Western Australia was abruptly cancelled by management, supposedly for the sake of “the well-being of staff and students”.

We observed that universities have introduced new restrictive policies in response to increasing pro-Palestine sentiment and activities on their campuses, most notably the Campus Access Policy (CAP) at the University of Sydney. That policy, brought in last year in the wake of the USyd Gaza Solidarity Encampment, initially introduced a requirement of seventy-two hours’ notice for protests on campus. The university later removed some of the more egregious parts of the CAP, including the notice requirement for protests, in the face of serious pushback from staff, students, and the NSW Council for Civil Liberties.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, multiple submissions described universities spying on students and staff under suspicion of sympathy with the Palestinian cause. One submission to the Inquiry detailed a case where a university dean used lecture capture software to eavesdrop on classroom discussions to monitor them for discussion about Palestine. The University of Melbourne tracked down students involved in a pro-Palestine protest by checking when and where they connected to the university Wi-Fi.

Our universities are employing police-state tactics to discipline and punish students and staff for their opposition to the Gaza genocide. The fact that this censorship is regularly couched in the language of “safety” and “well-being” — while Palestinians in Gaza lining up for starvation rations are being gunned down daily — adds a bitter layer of irony to this disturbing situation.

The People’s Inquiry was convened in the belief that the right to speak out against the crimes of the powerful is a right that must be fought for and defended. We aim to contribute to that fight by giving a voice to those who have been silenced.

The Inquiry is now proceeding to public hearings, which we invite all to attend. If you have a story you want to share, please register here. The next hearing will take place in Melbourne on Friday 18 July at 10 am.

Image: Empty poster boards at ANU. Source.