Robert French’s code is a beacon for freedom of speech

Australia has just witnessed a game-changing event regarding the issue of academic freedom of speech that will hopefully ripple across the universities of the Western world.

It is not the case of Peter Ridd v James Cook University, where judge Salvatore Vasta found this month that JCU had broken its own rules about intellectual freedom. It is the report of the High Court’s former chief justice, Robert French, who proposed a code for the protection of freedom of speech and academic freedom.

This code would make academic freedom of speech a “defining value” of a university that should not be restricted by other rules invented by the university.

French has proposed that his code should be voluntary. ­Government should make it mandatory. It will show the way for other Western countries, all of which have similar issues.

It will not solve all of the many problems that afflict our universities, but it will be a good start at ­encouraging our self-censoring academics to come out into the open.

The response of the universities to the French review has been mostly stony silence.

Why are they not rushing to publicly embrace his obviously sensible suggestions in the way they would with more politically correct matters?

Perhaps they realise they are in breach of the code, and they do not like the idea of relinquishing their power over what academics can say, or what might be able to be said by visitors to their institutions.

Let me give you an example of how a university can crush academic freedom while pretending to support it. I will use the example of JCU, but other universities are no better.

JCU has an excellent clause in its enterprise agreement that ­theoretically allows academics to speak about controversial matters and to express their disagreement with the university administration.

However, it also has a code of conduct that it insists should be applied. This code is so vague and nebulous that almost any heated intellectual debate will result in the code being broken.

I suspect that even an angry stare or a huff of disgust would ­offend a protagonist enough to break the code.

This application of a code of conduct is exactly what Robert French insists must not infringe academic freedom.

Luckily for me, the JCU enterprise agreement has a vital sentence stating that the code of conduct does not detract from academic freedom, and that is one of the reasons why I won my Federal Court case against JCU. I was unlawfully dismissed by this university for exercising intellectual freedom — a concept the court found had been misunderstood by JCU.

The university misunderstood its own rules that it is more important to have an unhindered debate than to prevent hurt feelings.

But here’s the rub. I fought my case on an old enterprise agreement. For the new JCU agreement, the vital sentence about the supremacy of intellectual freedom has been removed.

In the latest negotiations with the unions, JCU was successful in removing an important pillar of academic freedom of speech.

We can question why JCU wanted to do this and why the union acquiesced, but this could not have happened if Robert French’s proposal were implemented. It is also hardly a surprise that JCU has not endorsed the French review. This example also shows that at present, the only ­organisations that can stem the systematic crushing of freedom of speech at a university are the ­unions.

The government, or the community, has no say despite providing most of the funding.

It is easy to be critical of the ­unions for allowing this to occur, but it is a crazy system that relies on the union to carry out a function that is at best secondary to its main function.

In any case, most university employees are administrative staff who may not have the same interest in freedom of speech as academics whose professional life depends on the exercise of intellectual freedom.

If administrative staff had a choice between missing out on a 2 per cent pay rise, and the curtailment of intellectual freedom, you could forgive them for choosing the cash.

It is for the government, not the unions, to insist upon academic freedom of speech.

You may think that the JCU example is worse than most. This university has, after all, been dragged through the courts and lost. However, other universities are sometimes worse. For example, the University of Sydney enterprise agreement states that the codes of conduct must be obeyed — there are no exceptions.

It would be very risky for an academic to make a truly controversial argument under these rules. One may get away with it for a while, but once a senior manager has had enough, there would be more than enough rope with which to be hung.

Professor Peter Ridd was unlawfully dismissed by James Cook University after he criticised the university and one of its scientists over claims about the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef.