SOAS alumni speak out against the suppression of Palestine solidarity
The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, 17 April 2020
SOAS Alumni 4 Palestine write in Mondoweiss:
In October 2023, seven students and alumni of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University in London were suspended for Palestine solidarity protests on campus. An upswell of student and faculty support from across departments and student societies has led to four students being unsuspended, with three alumni still banned from campus.
While the administration has claimed that the suspensions were for health and safety violations, information obtained by student organizers verifies that the real motivations were not health and safety related, but part of a larger plan to crackdown on student organizing to securitize the campus, a mandate that has accelerated since the beginning of Adam Habib’s hiring as director in 2021. No stranger to strong-arm tactics, Habib has tried to ruthlessly squash the faculty union (UCU), cleaner’s union (Unison) & other campus movements going back to his days in South Africa at the University of Witwatersrand.
As SOAS continues to be extractively hollowed out, with key departments like the Neurodiversity Team and Student Advice and Wellbeing Team barely surviving, we have seen an unprecedented and chilling commitment to hiring more external security staff, installing more CCTV cameras, as well as proposals to install permanent checkpoints at all buildings and even create ‘protest response teams’.
In the context of an ongoing genocide in Gaza, we have yet to see any formal attempt by the university to reach out to Palestinian students–much less the larger population of Muslim, Arab, Asian, and other British and International students from the global majority — and continued denials of the institutional abuse and discrimination that are being uncovered at every level of the university. The total lack of accountability from an institution that claims to be progressive and even ‘decolonial’ — touting its famous graduates like Paul Robeson — is nothing short of sickening, especially considering its ongoing financial investments in settler-colonialism, apartheid & genocide in Palestine.
We call on students and alumni around the world to reject the hollowing out of the university for neoliberal and genocidal agendas, and we call on all former SOAS alumni to stand up for their community by standing up to the bullies and abusers in the SOAS administration. For a new era of accountability and transformative justice at SOAS!
SOAS Alumni 4 Palestine
We write as alumni and graduates of SOAS to express our deepest outrage at the university administration’s suspension of four students supporting the SOAS Palestine Society in the September 29 and October 9 protests, as well as several SOAS alumni who have been banned from campus.
By immediately suspending the students without due process, the SOAS administration is in violation of its own disciplinary procedures. Furthermore, suspending students merely for protesting and without the required processes effectively prohibits lawful political expression and protest on campus, which is what we have seen from October 13 onwards when the disciplinary letters were received. While the administration has repeatedly claimed that the suspensions were for “health and safety violations,” the suspended students have revealed that the investigation speaks of creating “protest response teams” and creating extensive watch lists of activist students. This is the same environment in which posters related to Palestine advocacy and against securitization have been torn down off professors’ doors, making it difficult to take the administration’s narrative seriously in this respect.