‘You can’t just turn it off’: Monash vice chancellor on confronting hate on campus

Monash vice chancellor Sharon Pickering, in the 11 months since she was appointed to lead Australia’s largest university, has spent a lot of time thinking about hate.

Reflecting on a year when her university, along with so many others around Australia and in other liberal democracies, was engulfed by socially corrosive forces unleashed by the war in Gaza, Pickering says leaders in academia need to do more than take the heat out of campus conflicts.

In an interview with this masthead, Pickering says the first challenge for universities is to get better at recognising hate when they see it, whether it is in the form of an anti-Zionist chant directed at Jewish students or the more subtle discrimination she has observed which makes Muslim students feel excluded from campus life.

Monash University vice chancellor Sharon Pickering: “We can’t just rely on dialling things down.”Credit: Eamon Gallagher

She says it is the essential job of universities to interrogate and better understand the origins, manifestations and impacts of such hatreds, rather than merely suppress expressions of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

“We can’t just rely on dialling things down,” she says.

“You can’t think about a conflict as simply public order management. You have actually got to think about what building peace looks like. You can’t just deal with this as some kind of student conduct matter. It’s not.

“This is deep conflict and disagreement. You have got to think about what we need to build that will start to unknot those big social, political and cultural problems. That means we have to find ways to better understand the prejudice and hate, and we need to find better ways of not just resolving that but creating conditions where you are not resorting to that.

“When we are dealing with prejudice, hate and conflict, you can’t just turn it off in people’s lives, you can’t say just ‘leave it at the door’.”

It is with this mission in mind that Monash University, named after one of our greatest Jewish Australians, John Monash, this year established a Campus Cohesion research program, led by David Slucki and Susan Carland, to study discrimination experienced by Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students and staff, and develop a practical guide to prevent and respond better to hate.

Speaking at the formal launch of the program in November, Pickering’s address to a room stacked with Labor MPs and representatives of Jewish and Islamic communities was noteworthy for the frankness with which she acknowledged the problem confronting her university.

An Israeli supporter and Palestian supporter sit down to discuss the war in Gaza at the Monash University encampment in May.Credit: Justin McManus

“The pain and anguish affecting our staff and students since 7 October last year are the worst I have seen, and prejudice and hate have broken through their thin veil,” she told them.

“Today, the sector is at a pivotal moment. University campuses around the world are at the fulcrum of so many issues for our society. These are issues that we don’t walk away from. Facing them is part of our fundamental purpose – it is also our responsibility.”

In testimony this month to a federal parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism at universities, a hearing held days after arsonists torched the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne and a car in the heart of Sydney’s Jewish community, Pickering said antisemitism was systemic in Australia.

“It is impossible we would have seen a synagogue burned and cars burned in the past week if it was not systemic.”

She also revealed that at the height of this year’s pro-Palestinian encampments, Monash had permanently banned seven non-students from the university’s campuses, temporarily suspended 20 people and initiated misconduct proceedings against 11 students who had crossed the line from causing offence to causing harm.

Members of the Adass Israel synagogue after this month’s arsonist attack.Credit: Simon Schluter

Pickering’s administration provoked the ire of pro-Palestinian supporters when it judged that encampment protest signs declaring “Zionists are not welcome” harassed and vilified Jewish students. Pickering says while she will “die in a ditch for academic freedom and freedom of speech”, these freedoms are not unlimited. “We are a place to challenge and be challenged, but it is not on anyone’s terms,” she says.

In a wide-ranging discussion, held against the backdrop of an ongoing war in the Middle East and a bloodless battle raging in Canberra over the number of international students enrolled at Australian universities, Pickering took aim at the populism that has infected our politics and the reduction of universities to whipping boys for both sides of politics.

She bluntly describes the Albanese government’s proposed cap on student numbers as “some of the worst legislation we have seen” and says the characterisation of Monash as “elite” is at odds with its central, sprawling campus located in a light industrial suburb and nearly 100,000 enrolled students.

Of those, 44,723 are international students, with the foreign intake skewed towards postgraduate and higher degree studies. The recruitment of these students, who have financial support and credentials to gain places in top-tier universities in other English-speaking countries, takes between 18 months and two years.

“It is entirely reasonable for a government to want to have a conversation and approach to think about long-term planning around international student numbers,” Pickering says. “That legislation was not that conversation.

“Provisions within in it and the powers it gave the minister were akin to provisions you might see in counter-terrorism legislation. They were unfettered powers to set limits. To do that to one of your largest industries and to do that to students is entirely unacceptable.”

Pickering makes the comparison with counter-terrorism laws advisedly. Prior to her career as a university administrator, she was an internationally recognised criminologist who specialised in the study of border crossings, migration and human trafficking.

The debate about international students – a class of temporary migrants which both the Albanese government and Peter Dutton-led opposition have tied to public anxiety about population growth and housing shortages – will only intensify as Australia enters a federal election year next year. Pickering says the political distillation of international education to a zero-sum argument about migration is a symptom of a bigger trend in Australian public life.

Pickering describes the proposed cap on international student numbers as some of the worst legislation she has seen.Credit: Eamon Gallagher

“The space to have a sensible conversation about it has basically been lost,” she says. “You are in two diametrically opposed camps and there is nothing in the middle. It’s ridiculous.

“We have got an ageing population, we have got an economy that’s based on digging things out of the ground and selling houses to one another, yet somehow, we can only talk about migration policy as an on-off switch. We have to reach a level of maturity and sophistication where we are capable of having those conversations in a meaningful way.”

The aim of the Campus Cohesion project, which is funded to run for two years, is to bring together political science, psychology, public health, law and education researchers to develop guidelines for students and staff to prevent and respond to hatred and discrimination towards Jews and Muslims.

Pickering says that when faced with the kind of hatred seen on campus this year, universities need to do more than avoid difficult topics or censor debate. “To my mind, it is not about, to be perfectly frank, talking nicely about intractable conflicts; it’s about taking on the responsibility of creating the leaders of tomorrow who will be part of taking intractable situations forward.

“There is a lot of deep hurt and disagreement, but our job is to go beyond where we are now.”

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