VP of UCL EFS invites 100 freshers to halls and says they’re ‘gay’ if they don’t attend

The Vice President and “Head of Mentorship” for UCL’s prestigious Economics and Finance Society (EFS) has sent a flood of homophobic messages on a WhatsApp group chat to first-year students, seemingly encouraging them to flout lockdown rules and meet him at UCL halls and Camden McDonald’s.

The Head of Mentorship, “Shiv” in his Whatsapp name, seems to try and encourage over 100 first years in the EFS fresher’s group chat to break government restrictions and attend a gathering at Astor College at 2am.

He then proceeded to call all those refusing to attend the gathering “gay” and later replied on the group chat saying: “Lovely meeting some of you, rest of you are soft cunts”. He continued sending homophobic messages in the chat, calling freshers who failed to attend “gay”, until 3:46am.

EFS is the largest society at UCL with 804 members and on their website, they describe themselves as “UCL’s most sponsored and most prestigious society”.

Initially, Shiv begins by seemingly insulting everyone in the chat, saying “Dicks… Fuck you all”. His next messages between 2:06am and 2:27am seem to encourage everyone to attend the event taking place at Astor College and he refers to those not attending the event as “gay”‘.

After calling all those not prepared to attend the event “gay” at 2.58am he calls those who fail to attend “soft cunts”.

At 3:10am he begins sending another stream of messages where it could be understood that he was inviting the freshers to another event at McDonald’s in Camden, yet again the option of not attendance leaves students branded ‘gay’:

After the messages were sent, concerned students told The London Tab: “Many freshers were very disturbed by these comments by Shiv and feel this was outward display of homophobia and microaggressions against LGBTQIA+ at EFS.”

A spokesperson for UCL told The London Tab: “UCL does not tolerate bullying behaviour of any kind and we will take appropriate action against any individual who is found to have breached our bullying harassment and sexual misconduct policies. These behaviours are unacceptable and contrary to UCL’s ethos and mission.

“We do not comment on individual cases. But we would like to reassure our community that both UCL and the Students’ Union UCL take complaints of this kind very seriously and will investigate them in line with our disciplinary processes and procedures.

“We actively encourage anyone who has experienced bullying, harassment or sexual misconduct to report this directly to us or through our Report + Support platform.”

EFS refused requests for comment, as the Union told them not to comment. “We always advise groups not to respond to request for comment on articles relating to complaints – that’s covered in their training at the start of the year,” a union spokesperson added.

“Shiv” did not respond to requests for comment.