A Year On: ANU’s Complicity, Corruption, and Our Unbroken Conviction
It’s been one year since the ANU’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment pitched its tents on Kambri lawns, and still the Australian National University remains willingly complicit in genocide.
Photo: ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Kambri Lawns taken April 2024
It’s been one year since the ANU’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment pitched its tents on Kambri lawns, and still the Australian National University remains willingly complicit in genocide.
In Palestine, the lives of the country’s indigenous people are left to the whims of global colonial powers and their regional allies. As U.S. administrations come and go, the massacres in Gaza and across Palestine continue all the same. Trump claimed to have achieved a ceasefire in the immediate leadup to assuming office. But we all knew that his backroom dealings were a temporary distraction from what was to come, an expediting of the most documented genocide in history, against a resilient yet defenceless indigenous people fighting to stay on their land.
The Zionist regime’s weapon of choice in Gaza has long been a brutal and calculated campaign of starvation, that systematically denies Palestinians access to food, water, medical supplies and basic necessities essential for survival. Meanwhile, the state of Israel continues to expand its empire into neighbouring sovereign states of Lebanon and Syria, exporting its violence and targeting other populations of the region.
As students, a year on from establishing the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, we ask ourselves: Have we done enough? Should we be doing more? Is there anything else left to be done? These questions haunt us and echo louder with each passing day as we helplessly witness a genocide live streamed into the palms of our hands. We watch the so-called ‘adults in the room’ - the university leadership, the politicians, the corporations - fail us, fail Gaza, and fail humanity. A year since establishing the encampment, and still ANU is complicit in genocide. Of course, they did ‘consult’ us and the wider ANU community. Yes, they updated their Socially Responsible Investment policy, but what has changed? A year from the encampment, and we are still complicit. A year on, and genocide is ongoing. A year on, and it feels like we have regressed more than ever before.
Photo: Gaza_will_haunt_you_4_ever. Artist: Unknown
The situation in Gaza is monumentally worse than it has ever been. The death and destruction unleashed on the Palestinian people is of immeasurable proportion. Meanwhile, ANU continues to murmur along, a failing institution gripping at nothing, standing for nothing. Despite all of their lamenting over the grass on which tents were pitched and the presence of student campers, we have since learned of the deep corruption of ANU’s leadership. ANU executives accused the encampment of threatening campus safety and claimed that the students were dividing the ANU community. Yet it is now clear that university leadership has little regard for the safety, wellbeing, or trust of their own staff and students.
While they directed blame and hostility towards student campers, it is the administration’s own conduct that has truly undermined the integrity of the university. The university executive, so preoccupied with targeting, monitoring and repressing students from their ivory towers, has now been exposed in article after article detailing allegations of corruption, misuse of funds, and the use of intimidation to silence dissent.
Most importantly, the Australian National University continues to invest in weapons companies, entities that profit from the devastation we see unfolding in Gaza. Symbolic gestures have not translated into substantive change. As Gaza endures unprecedented annihilation and loss of life, ANU continues along a path of institutional decline, aimless and complicit in genocide. University leadership devoted far more time and energy complaining about the presence of a student camp on campus lawns than confronting its own record of financial mismanagement, ethical failure, and complicity in crimes against humanity.
We are acutely aware that the university is teetering on the brink of collapse, with a community exhausted, anxious and everyday fearing job losses and that its executives are drowning in corruption. In all their talk of how to “Renew ANU”, they have only managed to Regress ANU. Class sizes doubled, staffing gutted. Good luck if you are a student about to graduate. Your core subject has been cut and your specialisations reduced to a meaningless label. But hey, at least you’ll have a testamur bearing the ANU name regardless of the quality or coherence of course delivery and teaching.
Despite extensive efforts to silence and discredit us, the events of the past year have only strengthened our conviction. We are more certain now than ever that we stood — and continue to stand — on the right side of history. We stood and continue to stand against injustice when those in power remained silent.
It is time for the university to take responsibility: to end its investment in weapons research and manufacturing, to restore integrity to its governance, and to rebuild a university that acts in service of its students, its staff, and the broader global community.