UTS to apologise to AUJS

The head of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students has described the University of Technology Sydney as “one of the worst places to be a Jewish student in this country”, after the National Student Ombudsman found the university had wrongly named the group as a club that dodged event rules.

AUJS president Jeremy Suss said the Ombudsman’s report, Procedurally Unfair, released on Tuesday, was “a very clear vindication for the students” who had repeatedly been treated as though they were to blame.

“UTS has proven itself to be incapable of protecting its Jewish students and unwilling to do so,” he told The AJN.

The report traced the claims against AUJS to ActivateUTS, the not-for-profit body that approves student events at UTS, and found its conduct was “not explainable outside some form of bias against AUJS with respect to this event”.

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.

Mr Suss said UTS owed “a lot more than an apology” and needed to explain how this had happened and what would change.

He said Jewish students were told to trust university procedures, but at UTS “sometimes these channels are the ones that are stacked against them”. Young Jewish Australians finishing Year 12 were now “needing to decide what university to go to based on their safety, which is completely unacceptable in Australia”.

The dispute centres on an Open Table Discussion AUJS held on 2 April 2025 about the impact of the October 7 attacks, with speakers who included Israel Defense Forces reservists.

UTS had commissioned an external review after a protest on campus a week earlier, at which an external speaker singled out a Jewish counter-protester. The university widened the review to cover the AUJS event and told the reviewer to interview only ActivateUTS about it. The reviewer’s draft had been positive about the event; the final report found AUJS had bypassed ActivateUTS’s processes.

The Ombudsman found the documents showed otherwise. AUJS applied 17 business days ahead, well inside the required 10, and ActivateUTS emailed approval with no conditions attached.

UTS then published an action plan in August 2025 naming AUJS, without giving the group a chance to respond. By contrast, it took no action over a protest against the AUJS event that it had warned would be unauthorised. The Ombudsman called the university’s decision to stigmatise AUJS “inconsistent and unfair”.

UTS told the Ombudsman it “did not hold the view that AUJS ‘avoided the processes of ActivateUTS’ or was non-compliant”. Acting Vice-Chancellor Kylie Readman wrote: “We are sorry for the impact this has had on the students.”

David Knoll, chairperson of 5A, the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism, which represents Jewish university staff, said there was “substantial evidence before the Royal Commission” supporting Mr Suss’s view.

He said universities needed to adopt the IHRA or Universities Australia definition of antisemitism in full, make breaching it a breach of their code of conduct, and enforce it. “We are aware of only three that have attended to item two, and they are all hesitating to enforce,” he said.

Mr Knoll said 5A had put an action plan to the Royal Commission, and three universities had committed to consultation on it.