What does student safety mean in a more hostile world?

On Saturday 18 April 2026, I got to brunch 30 minutes late.

My preparation was derailed by a text from a friend warning me that a far-right march expecting over a thousand people was going to start by my flat. It was the second one in two months.

Emptiness, frustration, non-surprise, and a small sting of self-reproach for having let my guard down rushed through me. I let it settle for a second, before having to neatly repack all I was feeling.

An hour later, over eggs and French toast, I shared the reasons for my delay, with animated revolt and sarcastic laughter, the way you do when you are trying not to show yet another scar that has been reopened before it had a chance to heal.

The first time I was told Britain First planned a gathering a few hundred metres from my door, I did what others would do – I looked online. The information was sparse, fragmented across local news and social media.

So I waited for my university to say something. When nothing came, I went to my students’ union, before seeking information from academic staff. The response I received framed the event as outside the university’s purview because it was off-campus.

So I ended up moving through that Saturday without guidance, relying on educated guesswork to decide how to safely find my way around my own city.

Right to safety

After the weekend had passed, deciding that the careful, considered version of my frustration deserved the most senior audience I could find, I wrote to the head of security and the vice president with clear questions on how the university determines the thresholds for what warrants communication to keep its students safe.

The response was swift and thoughtful. Senior leadership acknowledged that the gap between institutional process and lived student experience was real. They recognised that while public events in Manchester city centre do not automatically fall within the university’s operational remit, the impact on students whose experience extends well beyond the physical boundaries of the campus does.

They expressed willingness to review how the university assesses foreseeable student impact. The machinery of institutional reflection, it seemed, had been set in motion.

Less than two months later came a bigger march, a larger police presence, and the same silence. This time, I did not know until the morning of.

People organising in large numbers because they do not want you here is a very particular kind of violence. It is something that, unfortunately, some of us have had to get used to. But the specific, corporeal knowing that hundreds of people have invested time, money, and something far more venomous to protest your presence is an eerie feeling, hard to describe, and harder to live with.

Over the twelve years since I was last a student in the UK, the relationship between the state and the migrant student has hardened. To come back, I have satisfied every condition this system has placed on my presence. I have my Right to Rent. I have my Right to Study. On these two occasions, I could not find my Right to Safety.

I am not asking universities to resolve the structural conditions that make racist mobilisations possible, and I understand that institutions cannot neutralise the environments they operate in. What they can do, however, is know enough about those environments, and the people moving through them, to build the conditions that mean no one has to face it alone.

That is not politics. That is duty of care.

The yes, but reflex

I cannot know what internal conversations took place between February and April, but I have sat in enough institutional meetings to recognise the shape of what happens between private acknowledgment and public silence. It is a phenomenon I have come to think of as the “Yes, But” reflex.

Yes, we care about student safety. But this event is not on university property. Yes, we understand the impact on marginalised students, but if we communicate about this march, do we have to communicate about every protest? Where do we draw the line? Yes, we want to be ahead of the issue, but what if our communication is interpreted as endorsing a counter-protest? What if we expose ourselves to legal risk?

Each “Yes, But” is a small, reasonable-sounding step away from action, and each one is defensible in isolation. Cumulatively, they form a wall of institutional caution that treats the university as a legal entity first and a community of care second, and it can make the management of liability feel more visible than the fulfilment of duty.

A red herring

The fear of setting a precedent is a red herring, because thresholds can be defined based on proximity, scale, and impact on the student population. This is not a conceptual leap so much as an administrative adjustment.

What happened outside my flat in February and April was not an aberration, and any institution treating it as one is planning for a world that has already gone. HOPE not hate counted 251 anti-migrant events across 77 locations in the second half of 2025 alone, and what started as a local flashpoint in Epping has hardened into a repertoire – hotel pickets, flag campaigns, vigilante patrols – that can be assembled in almost any town in the country within days.

The universities that handle this year well will be the ones deciding now, in September, what their threshold for communication is and who owns the decision, rather than the ones drafting a statement on the morning of a march while the phones are already ringing.

That preparation also means being clear on what communication does, and does not, amount to. And I should be clear here: telling students that a protest may affect their safety or wellbeing, and giving them practical information to navigate it does not make the university a participant in the politics of that protest. A lawful demonstration in a city centre is lawful, and nothing I have described asks a university to prevent one, to police what is said at it, or to take a position on whether it should happen at all.

The problem comes when caution around freedom of speech becomes caution around communication itself. Collapsing the two is how institutions talk themselves into believing that saying nothing is the neutral option. It is not neutral. Silence is an institutional choice and its consequences on the student community are not borne equally.

Given that in England, the regulator is consulting on free speech guidance as I write, it would be a poor outcome if the effect were to make providers more nervous about giving students the information they need to move safely through the places they live and study.

Already waiting in her inbox

Institutional silence has a cost. It costs peace, it costs focus, and it costs the hours spent writing this instead of the research I came here to do. And it costs something harder to recover than time – the confidence that my university stands behind its own words.

Nevertheless, without proactive action we will manage, out of necessity, to handle these situations alone. When the next protest comes, we will adjust our routes and keep our heads down, relying once again on the informal networks that remind us through their care that our full membership in this community is not a burden.

In the meantime? Well, I am speaking up again. In the hope that the next time a student like me wakes up to a text message warning of a march against her existence, a university email is already waiting in her inbox, reminding her that her institution has her back.