The Polytechnic University where I work has missed another opportunity to do the right thing.
On July 15, 2025, the Academic Senate voted by a majority against the Motion for Gaza presented by a group of senators. The Motion called for two simple actions, expressing “deep outrage and condemnation of the ongoing massacre of the civilian population in Gaza”:
- 1. Public and duly motivated refusal to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) to participate in calls for collaboration between Italy and Israel;
- 2. Public communication addressed to Israeli universities, stating our University’s intention to suspend existing international agreements and not to sign new ones.
The negative Senate’s vote on these simple points is an expression of the technocratic, corporate, and essentially patriarchal approach with which the Polytechnic University of Turin operates.
Now, some colleagues are starting to say no. A petition has been started to express our individual ‘not in my name’ stance regarding this latest decision by the academic senate.
For me, it is important to emphasize that this ‘not in my name’ cannot be limited to the latest vote by the Senate, but must be traced back to the epistemic and material structures underpinning the Polytechnic University of Turin.
In my fourth month of work at this university, in 2021, very few of us said ‘not in my name’ regarding the agreement with Frontex. An agency working with the so-called Libyan coast guard and engaged in extensive pushback, ultimately killing asylum seekers at the border. Even then, the senate gave its best, with two votes that were as problematic as the one on Gaza today (here, or even earlier, here).
In 2023, before October 7, it was—for students and for very few of us—a ‘not in my name’ in relation to the direct collaboration agreements that bind this Polytechnic to producers of weapons and death such as Leonardo.
Then came years of encampments. Of occupations. Of demonstrations, assemblies, and public debates in every media outlet, where few of us continued to say NO and propose concrete alternatives to a certain kind of service-based research.
Now, in July 2025, there are a few more of us saying NO. Really good! But at this junction, all need to remember that saying ‘not in my name’ today cannot stop at a simple nominal dissociation related to the latest nefarious vote in the Senate. For the historical, material, and political reasons that link the genocide of the Palestinian people to the death industries some of us have been fighting for years, our collective NO today must also be a NO to those industries. A NO that changes the political and economic structure of the Politecnico. Otherwise, it will be nothing more than a mid-summer fling. A momentary lifting of our eyes from the Excel spreadsheet, rather than an honest collective raising of our heads.
We need to address the political economy that structures the academic-military-industrial complex in Italy and beyond. That is a form of radical change that is not required by history or that must be done for posterity, but rather must come from a simple respect for all human life here and now.
