Arbitrary Powers in the Marketplace of Ideas: What ANU’s response to Palestine solidarity protestors reveals about the university

On Wednesday May 15th 2024, the 76th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, 7 ANU students were summoned to a meeting with the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), Grady Venville (Gore 2024). What followed was a bizarre, McCarthyite show trial dressed up in condescendingly benign corporate-HR language. Venville began by reminding us how much the university respected free speech and the right to protest, and then we were lectured on how the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment had been an eyesore for many students, destructive to the grass on which it stood and even smelled really bad, an all-round assault on the senses! Venville informed us that we had been identified as participants in the encampment and were therefore being directed to vacate by Friday.

We had only two questions in reply. First, how had we been identified as participants in the Encampment? Venville coldly asserted that the security team had helped to identify us, without giving any further details. She then explained that they intended to serve similar notices to every single student involved in the camp, we were not special. At this point she pushed a stack of blank sheets of white paper and a handful of pens across the table and encouraged us to write the names of anyone else we knew who was involved. Of course, we all refused to list our ‘accomplices’. Our second question was whether we were being accused of breaching the university code of conduct. Venville refused to answer, but reminded us that failure to follow a reasonable directive from the university would in itself constitute a code of conduct breach, so we could be subject to disciplinary action if we did not vacate the Encampment by Friday.

This Kafkaesque meeting was the culmination of a weeks-long campaign by the University administration and supporters of Israel to politically defeat the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment. The Encampment had been established on April 29 as part of a wave of protest camps on campuses demanding that their respective universities divest from Israeli universities and arms dealers that supply the Israeli military. ANU continues to maintain close relations with the massive arms dealer Northrop Grumman, a key contributor to the F-35 fighter jet supply chain, and also hosts the Australian Signals Directorate, Australia’s spy agency which helps run Pine Gap, an institution providing crucial intelligence on Gaza to Israel (ANUSA Environment Collective 2024; Gregoire 2024). These connections represented an unconscionable interpenetration between our university and systems of imperialist war-making before Israel’s war on Gaza began, but in the context of an active genocide it was clearly urgent to sever them.

For two weeks straight after its establishment, the right-wing press, politicians and pro-Israel students had made every effort to slander the Encampment as fundamentally violent, irretrievably anti-semitic and obstinately unreasonable. The student union, ANUSA, had felt pressured by such attacks and made the decision to withdraw their involvement from the Encampment. This retreat emboldened the camp’s opponents to try passing a motion condemning the encampment at the next student union general meeting on May 10 (Chryse 2024). This meeting became a crucial test for how much support the camp had amongst the broader student population in light of the concerted propaganda campaign. In the lead up to the meeting there was a buzz of discussion, debate, preparation, and propaganda vibrating across all corners of the campus. We ultimately scored a smashing victory. In an online meeting of nearly 600 students, only around 20 supported the motions condemning the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment. It
was clear that the supporters of Israel were losing the ideological battle amongst students.

It is no surprise then, that 5 days later ANU management initiated a project of more direct repression by ordering us to vacate. Such a bureaucratic directive, with no political or procedural justification, was a symptom of their side’s failure to isolate the hardened core of Palestine activists from the broader milieu of less engaged anti-genocide students on campus through slander
and insults.

For an institution that prides itself on being a marketplace of ideas, this moment revealed a surprisingly high capacity for repression. In any court of law, the accused are presumed innocent and accorded a level of procedural fairness. DVCA Grady Venville demonstrated that, if ANU management decided that they don’t appreciate a given form of protest, they could arbitrarily direct students to stop participating in that protest without proving their guilt against any given laws or codes of conduct. Such power is dictatorial. Our question regarding how they collected the names of students involved in the encampment remains unanswered, leaving lingering concerns about privacy and how ANU security surveils student protestors. This highlights a troubling reality: university students often enjoy fewer rights on a campus than they do in any other public spaces. Rights that depend on the discretion of university managers are not genuine rights at all. Even when managers permit dissent, they retain the authority to issue arbitrary directives, enforced by threats of expulsion. Consequently, our rights to free speech, to protest, to fair process, and to resist the transformation of universities becoming appendages of the military industrial complex, depend on how effectively we exercise them to mobilise public pressure and hold institutions to account in the face of repression.

In the week following May 15, hundreds of students and supporters rallied in solidarity with those ordered to vacate the Encampment. After that point, the university did not issue further notices to more than a handful of students, leaving dozens more able to sustain the Encampment without official university harassment. This ended on May 27, when ANU called the police to dismantle the camp and arrest anyone who resisted. Hundreds of students, staff and community members defied the order and held their ground for a day, but ultimately yielded under police threat (Reich 2025).

What followed was a stalemate. Students are now more aware, and more critical, than ever of the university’s ties to weapons companies, even as the institution has reinforced its mechanisms of repression. The Palestine solidarity movement has reached unprecedented scale, yet the university remains unwavering in its support for weapons companies, its refusal to condemn Israel’s genocide, and its continued harrassment of anti-genocide activists. The university now stands exposed as the dictatorship it is, and everything remains to be fought for.

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You can read more of Nick Reich’s work in Masters of War: Why Universities Want to Be Complicit in Genocide and A Profile of ANU Council, a socialist pamphlet written for the divestment campaign during the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

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