How would you act if your very life depended on it?

An open letter to UK Vice Chancellors, inviting them to engage with the reality of their students’ plight and with the underlying drivers of recent campus disruptions.

Vice Chancellors, colleagues, friends,

This week students across UK universities have begun taking nonviolent action on our campuses to confront the wall of silent complicity and lying-by-omission that surrounds our collective failure, as educators, to respond to the accelerating death of nature crisis.

As you consider how you will now respond to their actions, we urge you to first ask yourself why these young people have found it necessary to take this step. To what extent have universities themselves left their students in a position where this has become necessary?

It is past time that all of us working in HE who know full well what has driven them to such measures now hold ourselves publicly accountable to this understanding. You may feel that your role obliges you to remain silent on matters of the heart, or that HE institutions cannot be seen to endorse law-breaking of any kind by students, irrespective of your personal view. We put it to you that the predicament which has been visited upon the young, and the silence and evasiveness on this predicament from university management teams, are now untenable and are tantamount to a form of intergenerational neglect and abuse (1).

On 15th September you were sent a letter by the Secretary of State for Education warning of her “extreme concern” about Just Stop Oil’s incitement of illegal student activity across UK campuses. The intent of the Education Secretary’s intervention is unambiguous: it asserts the UK Government’s right to lie and lie again about the unthinkable harm it is visiting upon these young people’s lives and their familial bonds; it asserts this government’s presumed entitlement to actively impose incalculable suffering and despair upon younger generations and those yet to be born.

The Education Secretary has either misunderstood what is happening on our campuses, or is lying about this too. Our students are not being driven into criminal behaviour by Just Stop Oil. Just Stop Oil are our students, our colleagues, our peers. What is driving these students’ disruptive behaviour is the unbearable and widening dissonance between what an honest assessment of the climate and nature crisis reveals, and the embarrassed silence of our HE institutions in the light of that information. Within this gap we make matters worse by continuing to gaslight them with talk of life carrying on as normal and bright graduate futures.

You know in your heart what is happening here. Your students know it too. The very least we can offer them, in the light of our generation’s fundamental failure to protect climate, nature and so young people’s futures, is to set aside role, rank and privilege and join our students in the work of facing this crisis together, acknowledging and bearing witness to the unthinkable scale of its implications and what those implications now call us to do.

The question before you this week is not, as the Education Secretary would have it, ‘What will you do to stop this criminal behaviour from spreading on your campuses?’. Given our and older generations’ catastrophic refusal to act on the evidence that we ourselves produced, and given where this refusal now leaves our students, the real question before all of us this week is ‘What, then, can I do to help?’. And there are many ways to help:

In friendship and collaboration,

Mat Osmond

Senior Lecturer, Falmouth School of Art

UCU Green Rep

Falmouth University

Ali Rowe

CAMHs specialist, Medical Ethics

(1) psychiatrictimes.com/view/psychiatry-in-the-courtr...

(2) Motion proposed to UCU by the newly formed (advisory) Climate Emergency Committee 10.11.22 (Proposer: University of Leeds); Falmouth University UCU unanimously adopted this motion 16.11.22:

Title: “Supporting civil resistance on climate”

This meeting reaffirms UCU’s commitment to climate justice and a just transition from fossil fuels. Scientific evidence on climate change is clear. There is little time left to avert climate tipping points which will take us way beyond 1.5° warming to a very dangerous future, already starting in the Global South. We must transition from fossil fuels quickly and invest in insulating homes, clean energy generation and public transport. The UK government is doing the opposite by enabling new North Sea oil and gas licences, and by subsidising the obscene profits of oil companies whilst people can’t afford their energy bills. Petitions, protest marches, meetings with ministers and scientific reports haven’t changed government policy. This meeting supports the campaigns using civil resistance to demand the changes which are desperately needed. This meeting resolves to encourage members to support Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, Extinction Rebellion and Enough is Enough.