Profits Over People: What the ANU Encampment Revealed About Institutional Conscience

The ANU GAZA Solidarity Encampment represented one of the strongest grassroots movements on the university campus. It called for recognition from our national university demanding that its practice align with the ethics it teaches. It exposed the cognitive dissonance between what we learn in lecture halls about justice, democracy, and human rights, and how our institution acts when confronted with the reality of state violence and genocide.

Months into the ethnic cleansing, struggling to reconcile what was happening in Gaza, I was conversing with an older colleague of mine. With encampments popping up all over the world, he emphasised how students must stand in solidarity, and be prepared to be tested, to be treated as though they are too, Palestinian. What I hadn’t understood then was that oppressors, too, can stand in solidarity with each other. The university’s inaction revealed precisely that: a solidarity of power, not of conscience.

Seeing that the students had come forth, shining the spotlight now on the ANU, I felt compelled to lend myself to the cause, to at least see what it would become. That same night, as a greyed student who hadn’t set foot in a classroom in years, I realised I had become far removed from what my institution had become. The encampments became a brief glimmer of hope against a genocide built on years of displacement and apartheid.

At the encampment, I found a collective awake in every sense; alert, principled, unflinching. It was led by our brothers and sisters of Palestine. Donations flowed in, food was shared, and spirits were high despite the constant surveillance and pressure. For weeks, the encampments were barraged with nonsense about being an “eye-sore”, memos about garbage, illegal surveillance under the guise of safety. We stayed steadfast, organised, we weathered storms of rain and warning leaflets.

Amongst all the distractions, our demands remained clear. The focus of our movement, to funnel the sheer horror, emotional turmoil, frustration and despair of what we were witnessing.  We believed that the global academic community could, and must, use its moral authority to cut through the fog of denial. Amongst our demands, one of our goals was simple and precise: to compel the university to divest from all weapons manufacturers complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Specifically, “that the ANU disclose and divest from all companies complicit in the genocide in Gaza, including all companies on the BDS list.” It was a demand rooted not in ideology, but in ethics.

At the time, our demands were for a redistribution of what amounted to roughly 0.1% of the total endowment of our university. It would act as a powerful symbol that our institutions are not ambivalent to their own participation in systems that sustain the breakdown of international law and society, and genocide. It would have shown that education and ethics are not mutually exclusive.

My belief that this was achievable stemmed from a naive understanding of the university’s financial ethos, shaped by my own experience. In my early years of study, I joined the student-managed fund, a portfolio formed from ambition, with students from all faiths and backgrounds. For me, automating our investment strategy, initially, it was all about the numbers, the thrill of performance metrics. But as we matured, we realised that a truly modern fund needed an ethical backbone. Returns alone were not enough.

Luckily, minds other than mine have tried to address the lack of ethics in finance. The twisted irony is that moral bankruptcy is a great way to maximize profits. Raising our concerns with the faculty through our mentors, we proposed removing assets in industries and companies that lack a measurable net positive social or public benefit. Industries directly responsible for accelerating our already deteriorating society are unfortunately quite widespread. The list writes itself: fossil fuels, chemical pollution, pornography, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and, importantly, weapons.

Unsurprisingly, that conversation shone a light on ANU’s own investment portfolio, still knee-deep in many of these industries. Only years later did a new cohort of students finally succeed in ratifying exclusions, by which time the student fund had been absorbed and sanitised into an official university course. Still, those students managed to enshrine the exclusion of weapons and armaments from the fund’s ethical investment framework. This was approved, ironically, by the same university that continues to invest in them institutionally.

Months into the encampment, amid countless inspections and intimidation tactics, we secured a meeting to speak directly with university executives. The meeting offered a chance to comment on the ambiguous ‘Socially Responsible Investment’ policy, a policy so vague it could justify anything.

We asked for transparency: What are the ethical exclusions? Who defines them? Why are student and academic recommendations ignored? What we sought was not confrontation but coherence and an explanation of how a university that teaches ethics could rationalise financing genocide.

Unfortunately, rather than a fruitful discussion on how the policy operated, what we received instead was a half-baked answer: that the university had divested from alcohol and fossil fuels, as if ethics were a tick-box exercise. No mention of weapons. The silence was deafening, a silence that revealed complicity as policy. When I pressed again specifically, the official before us, someone who sat on the very investment advisory committee that once endorsed divestment within the student fund, could not, or would not, answer. Her microphone remained muted, literally and figuratively.

In the weeks that followed, thousands of students, staff, and alumni signed a petition demanding immediate divestment from weapons manufacturers. The university’s response was bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, a nothing-burger: a negative screen that excluded only “controversial weapons,” defined through outdated international conventions, excluding anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions, chemical, biological and nuclear arms. All weapon systems which have been deemed illegal to manufacture and use for years. It was moral minimalism dressed as reform. By abstracting culpability through technical language, the institution turned complicity into compliance.

Our executives now hide beneath a cloak of partnerships, endowments, and research grants. Under the surface lie blood-stained profits, laundered through the language of progress. Each endowment accepted, each silence maintained reinforces the same truth: our institutions are not neutral. They are active participants in violence, their moral indifference subsidised by student fees and academic prestige. With ANU’s recent financial troubles, it appears the price of conscience has become unaffordable. What the executives failed to understand is that many of us entered higher education precisely because we believed in humanity’s capacity to learn from its mistakes. We believed that knowledge could illuminate our failings and guide us toward a more just future. To see our university turn away from its own teachings was not just hypocrisy. It was a betrayal.

The bottom line, in every sense, is clear: profits over people. What began as a movement to demand ethical consistency revealed a much deeper crisis, one of integrity, of meaning, of courage. The students at the encampment were not asking for charity or symbolism; they were demanding coherence between word and deed. If a university cannot uphold justice in its own financial conduct, how can it claim to educate others about justice at all?

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Banner image: @ashdjokic