In the early 1960s, Australian university students and staff protested against conscription and South African apartheid. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Monash University students and staff were at the forefront of protests against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. And in the 1980s and 1990s, students demonstrated against the introduction of HECS and later, rising HECS fees.
Some protests have centred on how other students treat their peers. In 1953, The Daily Mirror ran a story about hundreds of Sydney University students protesting against insults levelled at two thousand new students. They claimed the student newspaper Honi Soit had described them as ‘suckers’. The story said the students had been ‘duped into paying fantastically high fees’ to attend ‘Sydney’s number one degree factory’.
This rich history of university protest is also visually represented in photos from the Australian National University and University of Melbourne archives. Most show protests taking place on grassy areas on campus, while a few show students occupying buildings.
In one, ANU students staged a sit-in at the chancelry’s Mills Room in April 1974 to protest about overcrowded classrooms and the lack of student say in course content. Some sit around the large horseshoe-shaped heavy wooden table while others sit inside the horseshoe.
Other photos show the Melbourne University students ‘locked-in’ the Raymond Priestley building, the administrative building, in 1971 to protest admissions policy. In 1974, students fighting for on-campus childcare facilities barricaded the vice-chancellor in his office until the police came to his rescue. And in 1989, Melbourne University students forced their way into an administrative building to protest the introduction of HECS.
Universities have always been places for students to exercise free speech about social, political and economic issues of the day. It’s part of the university’s core values to uphold freedom of expression and to promote learning and debate, which goes to the essence of defining a university. Protests are very much a part of this, which is reflected in universities’ polices, which support peaceful protests.
Fast forward to 2024. During the year, pro-Palestine students and staff set up encampments at some Australian universities including Sydney and Melbourne. At Melbourne University, where I was tutoring last year, a lot of the protest activity occurred inside buildings.
'Melbourne and Sydney universities have weighed up the right of people to protest inside buildings with protecting staff and students’ safety and students being able to get on with their education. Protests will continue on the campuses manicured lawns and cobblestone pavements.'
In May, about 200 students brought in tents and occupied the multi-storey Arts West building for 10 days, affecting thousands of students. Classes were initially cancelled and then went online. Staff and student safety was cited as the reason for university authorities closing the building.
In June, the Baillieu Library was invaded overnight by an anti-Israel group calling themselves ‘the Lion’s Den’, the name used by a Palestinian militant group. They destroyed expensive book scanning equipment, smashed windows and defaced the library with red paint. The library was closed for four days during a time when students were preparing for exams and completing end-of-semester assignments.
In October, anti-Israeli protestors invaded physics professor Steven Prawer’s office. The mainly masked protestors subjected him to a tirade of chants and vandalised his office with posters and stickers. He is among a group of academics and researchers associated with a joint PhD program between Melbourne and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Prawer, who wears a yarmulke, was the only one targeted. The program helps PhD students researching how birds navigate, as well as new drug treatments.
Never before have Melbourne University staff and students witnessed such a long and increasingly vitriolic protest, and chants where it could be argued that the lines between free speech and hate speech became blurred. When I read stories on the ProQuest newspaper database about student protests, articles suggested that Melbourne University was one of the quieter campuses during the Vietnam War protests.
In his essay, Mindless, published in the current edition of The Jewish Quarterly, Cary Nelson makes a similar observation about the pro-Palestine university protests. Across campuses worldwide, he writes, people ‘witnessed the most rapid politicisation of higher education in our lifetimes’.
In response to buildings being occupied, a new Melbourne University policy came into effect the beginning of semester banning indoor protests. ‘From 3 March 2025 a specific rule makes it clear that indoor protests on our campuses, and protests that obstructs entries or exits of buildings, or that unreasonably disrupts university operations, are prohibited,’ new Vice-Chancellor Emma Johnston said in an email to staff.
She said this policy was introduced to ensure safety, to uphold ‘respectful debate and discussion’ and to ensure ‘all individuals can participate in and have access to our world-class education and research, free from hate and discrimination’. Sydney University banned indoor protests and encampments in July last year and in November, an external report Hodgkinson External Review Report, recommended the bans be maintained, which the university has accepted.
The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Authority is seeking to set boundaries for outside agitators entering universities. It is currently seeking feedback on its ‘interim guidance on managing external actors,’ which includes the suggestion that staff and students be required to show identification and produce it to security when requested.
‘In the Australian context, it has been widely acknowledged that external actors have participated in protests and encampments on university campuses,’ the interim guidance says.
‘Many of the more serious incidents that occurred during the protests and encampments involved external actors.’
The outcry over the bans on indoor protests at Melbourne University has been swift. A joint statement from the University of Melbourne Student Union and the National Tertiary Education Union University of Melbourne Branch said the policy ‘imposes new subjective prohibitions onto all protest activity on University of Melbourne premises’. (In fact, the rules only refer to indoor protests). The statement said the university had taken an ‘authoritarian approach that does not address racism or cultural safety on campus’.
The UniMelbforPalestine group, a collective of students, staff and alumni, condemned the new rules as draconian and smacking of ‘political repression’ on social media. They said they would ‘not apologise for supporting Palestinian liberation by any means necessary’.
Those words are a chilling reminder why boundaries need to be set. ‘Any means necessary’ suggests that intimidation, violence, vandalism, targeting academics and deliberate damage to buildings and equipment are legitimate forms of protest. Some of these activities, it could be argued, are criminal and were used in protests inside buildings at Melbourne University.
It is a sign of a healthy democracy when people have the freedom to protest. But protests do not mean that anything goes.
The university has a legal obligation to ensure students and staff can go about their business in safety and without fear. Across the country, there are workplace health and safety rules to protect people from intimidation and being targeted because of their race, and universities are no different. Last year, a group of University of Sydney Jewish staff made a SafeWork NSW claim against ‘a vicious, racist campaign’ which had made the campus ‘a psychologically unsafe environment for Jewish staff and students.’ Universities also have an obligation to ensure the safety of protestors.
The Hodgkinson report makes an interesting point that if the policy to ban indoor protests at Sydney University continues, it would make all buildings safe.
‘The continuation of a policy prohibiting protests within buildings would have a number of other benefits. Firstly, it would result in every building on the campus being a safe place in which anybody could seek refuge, particularly in circumstances where activity taking place outside of buildings was making them feel unsafe.’
Forms of protest also need to be weighed up against students’ access to education. It’s estimated that more than 6500 students had their studies interrupted during the occupation of the Arts West building. Protests are about disruption, but this must be balanced against students’ freedom to pursue their studies. The occupation did interfere with students’ educational experience for an extended period and the university has an obligation to ensure students can get on with their studies. By and large, the outside protests did not curb students’ ability to attend classes.
At a recent staff forum featuring the Melbourne University vice-chancellor, a couple of National Tertiary Education members outside the building she was to speak in were handing out flyers saying, ‘Am I breaking Vice-Chancellor Emma Johnston’s new protest rules by handing out this flyer?’ No, is the answer. Melbourne and Sydney universities have weighed up the right of people to protest inside buildings with protecting staff and students’ safety and students being able to get on with their education. Protests will continue on the campuses manicured lawns and cobblestone pavements.
Dr Erica Cervini is a freelance journalist and sessional academic.