Last week, I visited one of the encampments for Palestine happening on university campuses to speak about Prevent and how it is being weaponised to suppress student activism.
We sat in the sunshine under the trees, a collection of diverse student societies united in purpose, with integrity and principle.
The beautiful simplicity of this was juxtaposed by the ugly presence of Prevent, and the way in which it has complicated, intertwined and imposed itself on this activism and student life.
Universities as incubators of positive change
The university has always been a space for challenging and changing outdated power structures and ideologies; they have never been about enforcing students to succumb or sustain to a particular system or ideology.
In 859 CE, a Tunisian woman named Fatima al-Fihri founded the world’s first University, Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco. It was established as a mosque-college and offered studies in politics as well as philosophy and the sciences.
Al-Qarawiyyin was never intended as a site for rote learning, but rather a space for critical thought and debate, and it was recognised as a hub for intellectual exchange between Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars.
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Centuries later, in Europe, when the first university was established, the University of Bologna, it was founded and governed by the students themselves. The University focused on law and civil society, encouraging students to interrogate legal norms and challenge societal structures.
In England, the oldest university, the University of Oxford, has been known for its commitment to philosophical and theological inquiry and has often found itself at odds with political and ecclesiastical authorities.
From Fez to Bologna to Oxford, the roots of university study lie in educating students to lead the necessary challenges to injustice, nurture new radical thought and even organise dissent.
Disrupting the core purpose of tertiary education
Universities are the home of those who push boundaries, speak uncomfortable truths, and bring positive change. For this, students and staff must be allowed to imagine, voice and challenge their ideas for different futures.
But today, the word “radical” has been turned into a warning sign and a threat under policies like Prevent. In educational spaces today, it’s being used to signal danger, and a propensity to violence, rather than positive transformation.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the way universities are responding to today’s student encampments for Palestine.
Across the UK students for over a year have been organising encampments to protest their institutions’ complicity in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. They are calling for an end to partnerships and investments that link their places of learning to this violence and occupation.
In doing so, these students are fulfilling the very purpose universities were built for: to question power, to speak truth to it, and to build a better world.
But instead of being recognised as part of a long tradition of student-led change – from the anti-apartheid movement to protests against the Iraq War – these students are being surveilled, silenced, and smeared.
When speaking up is the only ‘evidence’ required
We have documented how Prevent has operated in the background of university activism: fuelling fear, enabling surveillance, and intimidating students, especially those who speak out in support of Palestine.
One student had their personal details shared between the university and officers who had noticed that this student had also been part of other activist movements.
Meanwhile, academics have been disciplined or even suspended pending Prevent referral “investigations”, a misnomer since Prevent cannot investigate anything – it relies on assumption rather than hard evidence, due to its precrime nature.
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Prevent has also become a presence in tertiary institutions that allow authorities to avoid accountability for unjust actions against students, and limbo through rights safeguards.
In his review of Prevent, William Shawcross highlighted that “too few referrals were being made in universities” – implying that more would be in order.
In this, he inadvertently called for more surveillance and more blocking of legal activism in environments that were once the incubators and strongholds of the change, justice and new thought that have positively shaped Britain.
How Prevent undermines education and undermines itself
When you consider this position – adopted wholly by the Home Office – together with the fact that most Prevent referrals don’t even come from academic staff, it’s clear that Prevent isn’t based on genuine evidence or risk.
Rather, it is driven by a culture of suspicion and institutional fear, a culture that undermines tertiary education and can even make it toxic.
And those who are hopeful that Prevent can be tinkered around the edges to be made more palatable have failed to understand that the very foundations of Prevent are flawed.
This is blatantly obvious in the way Prevent works. Students who are thinking critically, such as the students in encampments, are viewed as a risk. However, one of the “signs of radicalisation” that underpin Prevent include a lack of critical thinking.
Like many aspects of the foundational risk factors that determine a Prevent referral, the policy does a good job in contradicting itself.
Encampments for Palestine must work with shifting goalposts
One question that was asked last week by one of the students at the encampment seems worthy of raising again: whether a future government might finally define “extremism”, and whether this would change things.
I explained that Prevent’s deliberate vagueness is exactly what makes it so useful to those in power and so dangerous to all of us.
Without a legal definition, the goalposts can be moved again and again. What is considered “decent” one day becomes “extreme” the next, , depending on who holds power.
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A video circulating from King’s College London captures this perfectly. In it, a member of university management who would be responsible for enforcing Prevent, instructs encamped students: “Guys, at least have the decency to talk. So you’re not decent enough to talk, no? OK. But don’t be surprised if the goalposts change tomorrow.”
The message is clear: speak on our terms – or be punished. Be silent – or be criminalised.
And yet, despite the threats, students persist. They are refusing to be co-opted or quietened. They are studying, debating, building solidarity – in tents instead of lecture halls – and embodying the very essence of what universities were founded for.
Whether universities who have vested interested in a genocide recognise it or not, these encampments are a classroom, the students protests are a lecture and the collective action demonstrated is a curriculum in justice and humanity.
Photo: Ananya Sreekumar
Related…
‘They don’t know how patient I am’: Reflections of a case worker on Palestine and Prevent (Cases, 2025)
