The students are not the problem

The student group Uni Melb for Palestine are currently occupying Arts West – a prominent building on campus.

When I left campus this evening they’d been there for around 28hours. Here are some quick thoughts.

If anyone is observing the sit-in from afar, it is important to note that university leaders and administration will do their best to position the sit-in as disruptive. They will point to cancelled classes as evidence of this. This is a tactic of power.

And when they do this, we should all know that the university chose to cancel classes in Arts West yesterday afternoon. The university sent an email this morning telling us that Arts West would be closed all of today and to ‘avoid the area’, without giving any information as to why. Honestly, they’d tell us more if there was a power outage.

Their threats to call the police on their own students will become calls to the police, and they will say they were “forced”, when the students have a clear list of demands regarding divestment from weapons manufacturing which the University is not willing to discuss. And so rather than address the ethical problems of being financially and intellectually invested in violence, they will frame the students as violent in order to justify police presence. As Sara Ahmed has told us time and again, ‘If you expose a problem, you pose a problem; if you pose a problem you become the problem’.

I walked into Arts West at lunch time today with no problem. I chatted with the students inside and then I sat in the sun outside to mark assignments. TV crew were hanging around. It was calm and quiet all day.

Students in my afternoon classes (not in Arts West) told me their tutors had simply moved classes into courtyards and carried on with very minimal disruption.

Students complained to me about the way news presenters from commercial TV studios were framing questions to people passing by the building.

Students asked permission to leave class early to attend a snap rally.
The students are not the problem.

The students are exposing a problem.