Universities have gone from bastions of free speech to mollycoddled safe spaces | David Penberthy

Donald Trump’s war with Harvard looks more sympathetic when contrasted with one of this country’s biggest uni’s treatment of one of its best journos, writes David Penberthy.

On the face of it, Donald Trump’s decision to go to war with Harvard University looks like a victory for the unenlightened and an assault on freedom of thought and speech.

I know Trump has plenty of supporters who are level-headed reasonable people with legitimate concerns about immigration, crime and the loss of jobs through globalisation.

He’s got plenty of supporters who are barking mad, too.

People who hate science, religious nuts who dispute the fossil record and evolution, conspiracy theorists who think Covid was organised by big pharma and Bill Gates.

Macho jerks who hoard tins of chick peas and semiautomatics and are barely bright enough to read their survivalist manifestos.

For these people, the very existence of a university is an anathema to their dark age, flat earth thinking.

But there is an element to Trump’s war on the university which invites some sympathy, if not with the manner of its execution, but the sentiment behind it.

Rather than being champions of free speech and free thought, some universities have become their opponents.

President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office of the White House on June 5. Picture: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

There was a remarkable and depressing story this week by my friend and colleague, news.com.au political editor Samantha Maiden, which really was a tale for these times.

Like me, Maiden got her start as a journalist in the early 1990s writing for the University of Adelaide student newspaper On Dit.

With that background, Maiden was invited a few months ago by the editors of Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit to speak at a student journalism conference. She happily agreed.

This week she received an email saying she had been uninvited.

“We have received community concerns about your political coverage and reporting on the Palestinian genocide,” the email stated.

“As a left-wing newspaper, Honi Soit recognises that Israel is committing an ongoing genocide in Palestine and we do not feel that our values align, or that we can platform your work as a result.

“It is important to us that the speakers at the Student Journalism Conference have views that we can stand by, and in light of the reception to the announcement of your event, we do not feel that we can host you as a speaker at our conference. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Maiden told some of her fellow guests about the situation, including the author and journalist David Marr, who you could fairly describe as an ABC and Fairfax lifer who aligns to the left of politics.

To his great credit, Marr wrote to the organisers saying he too would now be unavailable to attend.

Author and journalist David Marr. Picture: Lorrie Graham

News.com.au political editor Samantha Maiden.

“I’ve just learned that you’ve deplatformed Sam Maiden because of “concerns” about her “political coverage”,’’ he wrote.

“That’s not my idea of how a good newspaper – let alone a student paper – should behave. Isn’t the point of Honi Soit and a conference of this kind to examine different – and perhaps uncomfortable views – about the big issues of the day?

“I’m out.”

The whole episode is a telling insight not just into how universities appear to have been infected by left-wing group think, but also the lamest mollycoddling at the apparent risk of presenting progressive young minds with opposing or challenging views.

The other really weird part of the deplatforming of Maiden is that as far as she can tell – and as far as I can recall – she’s not known for dipping her pen into the thorny question of Middle East politics.

But in this world of safe spaces, sensitivity readers and trigger warnings, it’s been decreed that it is better to urge on the side of caution by withdrawing Maiden’s invite, lest anyone be distressed.

The decision of the Honi Soit editors is emblematic of the censoriousness which has infected the left.

The worst of our Writers Festivals are an orgy of agreement on progressive issues of the day. Many of those so-called “Festivals of Dangerous Ideas” should be prosecuted for false advertising and renamed festivals of identical ideas.

What an intellectually barren, hermetically sealed world these sorts of censors inhabit.

One of the most powerful demonstrations of the open university at work took place at New York’s Columbia University in 2006, where in a balls-out display of the most freewheeling freedom of speech, the university invited demented Iranian tyrant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus.

Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, gave him this introduction, with the then Iranian President sitting next to him shifting uncomfortably in his chair as an interpreter translated the following words:

“In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a fabricated legend,” Bollinger said by way of introduction.

“One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers. For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. When you would come to a place like this, this makes you quite simply ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

There were people who criticised Columbia for giving Ahmadinejad a platform at all, and controversy ensued.

But as Bollinger said in a subsequent media interview:

“I think that free speech is hard, and engaging in robust speeches is hard and not easy. If you’re going to have someone like this with the views and the actions that he has taken, it’s extremely important to speak honestly, authentically and directly to those beliefs and actions. That’s what free speech is.”

Bollinger is right. Free speech is hard. But at Sydney University, and in all those other safe spaces and trigger-free zones, free speech isn’t hard. It’s just dead. Good luck to the Honi Soit kiddies for their looming orgy of agreement.

Originally published as Universities have gone from bastions of free speech to mollycoddled safe spaces | David Penberthy