UTS to apologise to AUJS

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The University of Technology Sydney will publicly apologise to the Australasian Union of Jewish Students after the National Student Ombudsman found the university had wrongly named the group as a club that dodged event rules.

The Ombudsman’s report, Procedurally Unfair, released on Tuesday, traced the claims against AUJS to ActivateUTS, the not-for-profit body that runs clubs and societies and approves student events at UTS.

It concluded ActivateUTS’s conduct showed “a consistent, ongoing display of impaired judgement that is not explainable outside some form of bias against AUJS with respect to this event”.

The dispute centres on an Open Table Discussion AUJS held on campus on 2 April 2025 about the impact of the October 7 attacks. Three student societies had asked UTS to cancel the event because its speakers included Israel Defense Forces reservists.

UTS had already commissioned an external review after a National Day of Action for Palestine protest on campus a week earlier, at which an external speaker singled out a Jewish counter-protester, saying “Jews […] should feel uncomfortable”. The university later widened the review to take in the AUJS event and told the reviewer to interview only ActivateUTS about it.

The reviewer’s draft report had been positive about how the AUJS event was organised. After the ActivateUTS interview, the final report found AUJS had bypassed ActivateUTS’s processes.

The Ombudsman tested each of ActivateUTS’s claims against the documents and found none held up.

AUJS lodged its application 17 business days before the event, well inside the required 10.

ActivateUTS emailed approval on 18 March 2025 with no mention of conditions. A list of external guests was only required for events after 10pm or on weekends, and ActivateUTS sent AUJS no written requests for more information after approving the event.

ActivateUTS has since dropped its claim that AUJS ignored such requests.

In August 2025, UTS Vice-Chancellor Andrew Parfitt published an action plan adopting all the review’s recommendations, including better coordination between UTS Security and ActivateUTS “to ensure that clubs, like AUJS, do not avoid the processes of ActivateUTS”.

AUJS was not given a chance to respond before publication.

The Ombudsman found UTS failed to check the facts and accepted the reviewer’s findings uncritically. It also contrasted the treatment of AUJS with the university’s handling of a protest against the Open Table Discussion, which UTS had warned in advance would be unauthorised. UTS took no action over that protest.

“The decision not to take action against the protest organisers was open to the University, however the decision to publicly and incorrectly stigmatise AUJS as supposedly being non-compliant was inconsistent and unfair,” the report said.

AUJS members told the Ombudsman some students avoided their stall on Orientation Day for fear of being associated with the group.

The report also found UTS mishandled complaints from five students about the March protest. Two received no response at all.

UTS accepted six of the Ombudsman’s seven recommendations, including public apologies to AUJS within a month.

It rejected a recommendation to reissue its action plan, saying the plan had been taken down from its website and no further plan was warranted.

In its response, UTS said it “did not hold the view that AUJS ‘avoided the processes of ActivateUTS’ or was non-compliant”.

Acting Vice-Chancellor Kylie Readman wrote to the Ombudsman that UTS accepted it should not have published the recommendation without first scrutinising it. “We are sorry for the impact this has had on the students,” she wrote.

AUJS president Jeremy Suss said universities had spent almost three years telling Jewish students “that the problem is them”.

“UTS owes those students far more than a one-paragraph apology. ActivateUTS must explain how this happened and what it will change,” he said.

AUJS advocacy manager Liat Granot called the report “a complete vindication for AUJS students at UTS”.

“Jewish students should not need a federal ombudsman to be believed,” she said.