Our disruption of graduation ceremonies in protest at complicity with genocide has widespread support despite management slurs report Edinburgh students

Graduates of the University of Edinburgh have disrupted every single one of their own graduation ceremonies in protest of the university’s extensive financial complicity in the Israeli genocide. A UN report by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese singled out Edinburgh University as ‘among the UK’s most financially entangled institutions’, with over £75 million of direct and indirect investments in companies facilitating the ethnic cleansing and the illegal, expanding occupation of Palestine.

The University is a colonial institution, from direct involvement with slavery to its deep entanglement in the colonisation of Palestine. Arthur Balfour signed the Balfour declaration, pledging Palestine to the Zionist movement, in 1917 during his tenure as Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh. Such a legacy places the university in a position of unique responsibility.

As the atrocities accumulate daily in Gaza, the call for divestment has never been more urgent. Over 58,000 named Palestinians have been killed by Israel, with thousands more unnamed or unidentifiable. It should come as no surprise to senior management that the patience of their student body has run out.

Walking out en masse during speeches from University management—many personally responsible for stalling divestment—graduates displayed their outrage at the continued funding of genocide. During the fifteen-day graduation period, not one ceremony was undisrupted; hundreds walked out. Support for the protesting graduates is widespread across the community, with parents and alumni holding banners in solidarity. It is clear that we are not a select few dissenters. We are the majority.

Time and again, the student body has called for divestment, only to be dismissed and smeared by senior management; graduating students have leapt at the opportunity to vocalise their demands where University management cannot turn away and hide. This has not stopped them trying. In a desperate email, Vice-Principal Colm Harmon pleaded for graduates to stop the disruptions, while Principal and Vice-Chancellor Peter Mathieson even claimed ‘senior members of University [were] feeling unsafe’ due to the students’ peaceful protest. Such transparent vilification has long been the university’s response to student protests, as it has across Britain. Senior management repeatedly claim that pro-Palestine students represent a ‘small minority’, ignoring the Student Association motion supporting divestment passing by 97%; these protests reiterate that the vast majority demand an end to Edinburgh’s complicity.

Mathieson himself is embroiled in further financial scandal. When grilled by MSPs, the principal admitted he does not even know his own salary (over £418,000), while proclaiming the university to be in financial crisis and laying off staff. The university is facing a critical time with calls for Mathieson to resign. Between the failure to keep the university financially sound, to forcing staff cuts, to cosigning a genocide, the university will collapse under this leadership.

The administration has resorted to utilising on-campus security to suppress student protest. An Edinburgh alumnus attending a friend’s graduation ceremony was profiled by security staff, despite tickets being unnamed, and denied entry, accused of being a student protestor from the

previous year. Suppressing dissent is evidently the primary role of Edinburgh University security, not the protection of students; earlier this year, security observing a pro-Palestine demonstration on campus did nothing to intervene—despite multiple student warnings—when a violent stranger barged into the crowd and slashed a student with a knife, resulting in their hospitalisation.

With pressure mounting on senior management, their bureaucratic stonewalling and suppression tactics are insufficient to stifle the will of their students. The University of Edinburgh’s commitments to social good have crumbled and its precious reputation is not far behind—the only question is just how much more they will sacrifice at the altar of Zionism.