Over a hundred Oxford students, staff and local campaigners gathered at the Careers Office on Tuesday afternoon, calling on the University to drop disciplinary proceedings against thirteen student protestors arrested at a sit-in last year. An open letter making the same demand has garnered over 1,000 signatures.
Protestors gathered from 12.30pm outside 56 Banbury Road, at which the first day of the students’ disciplinary hearing was underway. They carried banners from the student organisation Jewish Students for Justice, and from several local trade union branches. One banner read: “Students, you make us proud! free Palestine! Shame on this uni!”
The sit-in in question happened on 23 May 2024, at the University Offices in Wellington Square. Seventeen protesters from Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P) entered the offices, demanding that the University agree to meet with them.
A statement issued by the University at the time called it a “temporary occupation”, saying students had committed a “violent action that included forcibly overpowering the receptionist.” An OA4P statement in response refuted accusations that the action was violent, and cited CCTV footage which contradicted the claim that protestors had “physically handled” a receptionist.
The seventeen protestors were arrested on suspicion of aggravated trespass. They were all later further arrested on suspicion of ‘affray’, which means “the use or threat of violence to another which would cause a normal person present at the scene to fear for his personal safety”. One was also arrested on suspicion of common assault.
In August 2024, Thames Valley Police told the seventeen that no further action would be taken against them, at which point the University Proctors’ Office began its own disciplinary proceedings. Thirteen of the protestors are Oxford students, and have been summoned to a Student Disciplinary Panel (SDP).
The SDP will decide whether to uphold the Proctors’ recommendations for disciplinary measures. These include “suspensions of indefinite length, fines, and formal warnings.” The open letter states that the disciplinary process has been “opaque” and involved the use of “racist language”. Specifically, it claims that one University employee associated the keffiyeh, a traditional item of Palestinian clothing, with terrorism.
This claim was repeated at the rally, at which multiple students, faculty members, and local activists also spoke to attendees. The parent of one of the sit-in participants expressed support for his son, saying: “They occupied Wellington Square Office because Oxford University is complicit in genocide”, and called the SDP a “phony court.”
A spokesperson from Oxford Stop the War Coalition, which helped organise the protest, told Cherwell: “Oxford University has an endowment of nearly £9bn, and we know for a fact, that which is open for the public to look at, they’re invested in arms companies and they have partnerships with Israeli universities that are supporting the Israeli military as it conducts war crimes that amount to a genocide.”
One sit-in participant no longer at the University also said to the crowd: “I do not trust this University to give my student comrades a fair hearing.” A sit-in participant leaving the building on a lunch break told the rally: “It is not a question for [the University] of justice […] They are not interested. What they are interested in is silencing protest.”
A speaker from Jewish Students for Justice (JSJ) read out a message from the author Michael Rosen, an Oxford alumnus and professor of children’s literature at Goldsmiths University. The message supported the sit-in participants: “It seems that the University has judged them guilty before they’ve defended themselves at a hearing.” Rosen has been an outspoken advocate for Palestine. His poem “Poem for the Children of Gaza” was read out by another JSJ speaker.
Other speakers at the rally included members of the Oxford Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Oxford University and College Union (UCU).
The open letter ends: “We demand that the University drop the proceedings of its unjust imitation court and commit to fulfilling OA4P’s urgent demands for disclosure, divestment, and reinvestment. In making these demands, we stand unequivocally for the right to protest, freedom of conscience, and above all—for a free Palestine.” It has been signed by forty-one anti-war, environmental, and Palestine solidarity groups, as well as hundreds of Oxford students, faculty, and members of the public.
The Stop the War spokesperson told Cherwell: “We today, there’s over a hundred and thirty people I just counted, support the students, they say it was right to protest, and the University’s wrong to discipline them while they haven’t looked at their own house, and looked at their ties to the war crimes happening in Palestine.”
Also on Tuesday, an open letter from “Concerned Jewish Faculty at the University of Oxford” was issued. It called on the Vice-Chancellor, Proctors, and University Chief Diversity Officer Tim Soutphommasane to drop the disciplinary proceedings. It warned the University against using “supposed threats to Jewish safety” to “demonize the movement for Palestinian rights
and to criminalize lawful protest and expression.” It called the University’s stance “needlessly hostile, punitive, and adversarial stance”, and urged the University to sever financial and institutional ties with Israel.
Last week, former Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott issued a statement in support of one of her constituents, a student facing disciplinary proceedings for their role in the Wellington Square sit-in. Abbott said: “It is neither fair nor reasonable for a university to treat principled protest on urgent moral and humanitarian issues as misconduct warranting punitive measures.”
In a statement, the University told Cherwell: “The student disciplinary process is confidential and the University will not comment on ongoing procedures or their outcome.”
