USYD Vice Chancellor defends action on antisemitism
In Scott’s testimony to NSW Budget Estimates on Wednesday, he failed to apologise to Jewish students for the psychosocial harm they had experienced on campus
Students will gather at the University of Sydney on Friday to protest Mark Scott’s inaction on antisemitism on campus and demand he resign as vice chancellor.
The rally, which is being promoted by the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, follows Scott’s testimony to NSW Budget Estimates on Wednesday, during which he failed to apologise to Jewish students for the psychosocial harm they had experienced on campus, failed to condemn calls of “intifada” and “from the river to sea”, and generally defended USYD’s handling of protest activity on campus – including the ostensibly pro-Palestinian encampment – since October 7.
“I did feel that the university’s attempt to de-escalate the risk of violence, to bring a peaceable solution to an encampment, to deal with a volatile environment—which was highly fraught on all sides—and to bring a peaceful solution was a worthy aim,” he said.
Saying it had been “a challenging year on our campus”, Scott said he had never encountered an issue which had generated more grief and anguish, anger and concern, than the current saturation in the Middle East.
“I have had representatives of the Jewish community—staff and students—express to me areas of concern that they had. They’ve written to me. I’ve met with them in groups and I’ve met with them individually,” he said.
“Can I add, there were Palestinian students who also came to me with similar arguments to Jewish students. They did not feel as welcome and accepted on campus as they would want to be. Managing that was a complexity for us.”
Scott said “the safety of our community has been our absolute top priority at all times”.
Referencing the encampment, with 28 entry points to the campus, he said the university had “an ongoing engagement with the police to constantly seek assurances from them about the external influences that they understood might be on our campus”.
He admitted being informed in May that the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir “may have been a presence on campus” and said he sought another meeting with police after the 60 Minutes expose about the group aired in June.
“We sought and received assurances about being notified of any relevant information on the encampment that related to extremist, violent and radicalised behaviour,” he said.
“If the Parliament had declared Hizb ut-Tahrir an illegal organisation, then of course they would be banned from campus. They are not.”
Scott said USYD are committed to freedom of speech and academic freedom.
“Free speech at times will mean that people will feel shocked and offended by the actions of others. At the same time, even though protests might be rowdy or spirited, they cannot interfere with the rights and the freedoms of others,” he said.
“I appreciate that well-meaning people will disagree on this—we felt that this [encampment] protest, which was a different style of protest and I’ll talk about that in a minute, fell into broad traditions of the university. If you go back in the university’s history, there were big crowds protesting conscription, the Vietnam War, nuclear disarmament and apartheid in South Africa.
“I think they also felt solidarity with the student movement around the world. Students around the world are protesting and they wanted to be part of it.
“What we needed to say to them, ‘You’re able to protest. There are rights and responsibilities that come with that’.”
Addressing the deal between USYD and the protesters to end the encampment, Scott said the university “simply could not agree to” some of the group’s demands, such as ceasing partnerships with Israeli universities, academic cooperation and student exchange programs.
“All of these things, we felt fundamentally worked against the commitment we have as a university to work in partnership with global universities,” he said.
“They were targeting defence and security contracts that we had in research and we said ‘no, we’re not going to scrap those’. But one of the points they made was that our defence and security contracts were not as transparent as they probably should be. We looked into it and we agreed with that.”
On the use of the phrases “intifada” and “from the river to sea”, Scott said, “Those phrases were used at rallies that appeared outside this Parliament, and no action has been taken because lawmakers have not come to a view that that represents hate speech and that language should be banned.”
Liberal Member of Legislative Council Susan Carter, who was questioning Scott, told The AJN Scott’s answers “were disappointing”.
“He appeared to focus on high level communications but lose sight of the impact of the encampment on individual students,” she said. “Even with respect to the presence of Hizb ut-Tahrir on campus, he was focussing on high level communications with government bodies and not looking at the impact on his own student body.
“Universities should be engaged in teaching critical thinking and respectful communications. The foundation for that rests on a feeling of personal safety, so that students can explore the ideas of others without being personally threatened. The University of Sydney has not successfully created a safe and respectful space for a number of their students.”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Peter Wertheim said Scott’s evidence “only highlighted what Jewish students and faculty have been saying for years”.
“University administrations are deficient in their understanding of what contemporary antisemitism is, and how it is experienced, and about the difference between free speech and hate speech,” he said. “Now is the time for moral clarity and leadership, not prevarication and buck-passing.”
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