The Gordon Aikman Lecture Theatre has cast off its habitual grey and taken on the black, white, green, and red of the Palestinian flag. Banners hang against the concrete, one addressing senior management with quiet severity: “There is blood on your hands.” The glass entrance is dense with posters and handwritten appeals. A space usually passed through with little more than half-formed thoughts of the next lecture now asks to be paused at. Too few of us do.
Protests like the Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society’s (EUJPS) recent occupation are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. They puncture the illusion that a university can stand apart from the realities it studies. Disruption is often dismissed as an inconvenience to be worked around, yet it echoes a broader refusal of “no business as usual,” forcing attention where it would otherwise slip. A university cannot claim to value critical thought while confining it inside the lecture theatre. What does it mean, then, for a lecture theatre to be repurposed as a site of protest, if not a refusal of that confinement? If this truly is a space of inquiry, then inquiry must carry consequences; otherwise, it becomes little more than a rehearsal.
Occupations of university buildings, such as those conducted by EUJPS, are attempts to force the university to reckon with itself. By dragging questions of divestment and global complicity out of policy documents and into the centre of campus, they refuse to let them sit comfortably at a distance. Turning lecture spaces into sites of protest does more than interrupt our everyday; it exposes the fiction that the university is a neutral backdrop against which politics merely unfolds. It isn’t. The university is already implicated, and so it must be held accountable.
If the occupations force the university to confront what it stands for, the University and College Union (UCU) strikes force it to confront how it operates. They bring into focus the uncomfortable contradiction of a university that trades on its “world-class” status while pursuing plans for £140 million in cuts and significant job losses. Where the occupations challenge the institution’s self-image, the strikes expose its material priorities. By stepping back from their work, staff are bringing to light just how much the university depends on the very people it is prepared to lose. Although this kind of pressure may lack the immediate financial impact seen in sectors like transport or healthcare, it is no less revealing. It shows the university as a workplace, where decisions framed as “strategy” or “necessity” are felt directly by those within it.
None of this is to diminish the value of protest, but disruption alone is not a guarantee of change. Occupations are highly visible, but visibility does not automatically translate into policy shifts, particularly when the immediate burden falls on fellow students. Strikes lay bare the university’s internal contradictions, yet universities are relatively buffered institutions; the financial impact is indirect, and the disruption caused is, again, often felt more acutely by students than by decision-takers. In both cases, the effectiveness of protest depends less on the scale of interruption than on how it is received. Does it build solidarity, or is the message being overshadowed by inconvenience?
It is clear that disruption in a university does not operate through pure coercion and cannot force change simply by bringing things to a halt. Instead, it works by reshaping how people within the institution understand their relationship to it. Disruption is most effective when it politicises those it affects, drawing them into a broader coalition rather than pushing them away. This is not to argue against disruption; in fact, without it, much would be swept under the rug. Nevertheless, disruption, for all its force, is not a strategy.
The question, then, is how to ensure that disruption expands the community willing to act, rather than narrowing it. In a university, those being disrupted are rarely bystanders; they are the very people whose support gives protest its force. It only really takes hold when people move with it; without that, it cannot quite hold together. In the end, disruption matters less for what it stops than for who it moves, and those who choose not to be moved at all.
Image by Cordelia Murray-Brown for The Student
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No Lecture As Usual: The Value of Occupations and Strikes at Universities
The Gordon Aikman Lecture Theatre has cast off its habitual grey and taken on the black, white, green, and red of the Palestinian flag. Banners hang against the concrete, one addressing senior management with quiet severity: “There is blood on your hands.” The glass entrance is dense with posters and handwritten appeals. A space usually passed through with little more than half-formed thoughts of the next lecture now asks to be paused at. Too few of us do.
Protests like the Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society’s (EUJPS) recent occupation are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. They puncture the illusion that a university can stand apart from the realities it studies. Disruption is often dismissed as an inconvenience to be worked around, yet it echoes a broader refusal of “no business as usual,” forcing attention where it would otherwise slip. A university cannot claim to value critical thought while confining it inside the lecture theatre. What does it mean, then, for a lecture theatre to be repurposed as a site of protest, if not a refusal of that confinement? If this truly is a space of inquiry, then inquiry must carry consequences; otherwise, it becomes little more than a rehearsal.
Occupations of university buildings, such as those conducted by EUJPS, are attempts to force the university to reckon with itself. By dragging questions of divestment and global complicity out of policy documents and into the centre of campus, they refuse to let them sit comfortably at a distance. Turning lecture spaces into sites of protest does more than interrupt our everyday; it exposes the fiction that the university is a neutral backdrop against which politics merely unfolds. It isn’t. The university is already implicated, and so it must be held accountable.
If the occupations force the university to confront what it stands for, the University and College Union (UCU) strikes force it to confront how it operates. They bring into focus the uncomfortable contradiction of a university that trades on its “world-class” status while pursuing plans for £140 million in cuts and significant job losses. Where the occupations challenge the institution’s self-image, the strikes expose its material priorities. By stepping back from their work, staff are bringing to light just how much the university depends on the very people it is prepared to lose. Although this kind of pressure may lack the immediate financial impact seen in sectors like transport or healthcare, it is no less revealing. It shows the university as a workplace, where decisions framed as “strategy” or “necessity” are felt directly by those within it.
None of this is to diminish the value of protest, but disruption alone is not a guarantee of change. Occupations are highly visible, but visibility does not automatically translate into policy shifts, particularly when the immediate burden falls on fellow students. Strikes lay bare the university’s internal contradictions, yet universities are relatively buffered institutions; the financial impact is indirect, and the disruption caused is, again, often felt more acutely by students than by decision-takers. In both cases, the effectiveness of protest depends less on the scale of interruption than on how it is received. Does it build solidarity, or is the message being overshadowed by inconvenience?
It is clear that disruption in a university does not operate through pure coercion and cannot force change simply by bringing things to a halt. Instead, it works by reshaping how people within the institution understand their relationship to it. Disruption is most effective when it politicises those it affects, drawing them into a broader coalition rather than pushing them away. This is not to argue against disruption; in fact, without it, much would be swept under the rug. Nevertheless, disruption, for all its force, is not a strategy.
The question, then, is how to ensure that disruption expands the community willing to act, rather than narrowing it. In a university, those being disrupted are rarely bystanders; they are the very people whose support gives protest its force. It only really takes hold when people move with it; without that, it cannot quite hold together. In the end, disruption matters less for what it stops than for who it moves, and those who choose not to be moved at all.
Image by Cordelia Murray-Brown for The Student
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