Sara Bafo, along with other elected student officers and activists, has campaigned tirelessly against injustices at Goldsmiths, whether against institutional racism with Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action (GARA) or alongside UCU, UNISON, and IWGB for the rights of workers on campus. We know Sara to be a committed, serious, and compassionate campaigner, who is always ready to stand up for others.
As a branch, we believe firmly in the right of elected student officers, and indeed all students, to campaign and to express their views freely. We are therefore deeply concerned to hear that Goldsmiths Senior Management is pressuring the Students’ Union governance structures to investigate Sara. This approach of pursuing punitive actions against student campaigners is consistent with management decisions to suspend and threaten to expel fee strikers, as well as threatening GARA campaigners with police intervention during the occupation of Deptford Town Hall.
GUCU believes that democratic student politics is at the heart of a healthy community of learning, and opposes the use of institutional and legal sanctions to silence student activists.
The targeting of activists in Higher Education should also be understood in a broader political context of attacks on academic freedoms at a national and institutional level. In January 2022 Education minister Nadhim Zahawi suggested taking steps to curtail staff and students’ ability to express solidarity with Palestinian liberation, and the UK gov has now suspended funding for the UK National Union of Students (NUS) while putting pressure on NUS to investigate elected president Shaima Dallali, threatening to remove her from her position for tweets she published when she was a child.
Black Muslim women student activists and leaders are currently being targeted in a disproportionately hostile way in the media, which casts serious doubt on the objectivity of any investigation. In addition, it is particularly worrying that the IHRA definition of antisemitism is being cited by institutions in attempts to curtail and silence student activism, despite the fact that it is a non-legally binding working definition and has been extensively criticised by among others, hundreds of Palestinian and Arab academics, journalists, and hundreds of Jewish scholars and allies.
Student activists should not be targeted for standing in solidarity with a people living under a system of apartheid and dispossession. We reiterate our support for Sara and call for any investigations to be dropped.