Rediscovering crucial freedoms

Physicist Peter Ridd’s reversal of fortunes in the full Federal Court is bad news for informed public debate about science and is unlikely to undo the reputational damage that James Cook University has inflicted on itself by its pursuit and dismissal of Dr Ridd. The court decided that a guarantee of intellectual freedom in the workplace agreement could not save Dr Ridd from serious misconduct findings under the university’s code of conduct. His troubles arose because he called into question the rigour of university-linked research on the health of the Great Barrier Reef under climate change. It’s not necessary to agree with him to grasp that this is an important issue where there should be wide latitude for robust viewpoints. This basic value of academic engagement in debate eluded the university, which got lost in the censorial machinery of its disciplinary processes. At one point it even issued Dr Ridd with a “no satire” direction, something indeed beyond satire.

We know from last year’s campus free speech report by former High Court chief justice Robert French that university codes of conduct can be hostile to the freedoms they purport to uphold. In the Ridd case, it’s possible his behaviour did not constitute serious misconduct. He did not challenge that finding, and the full Federal Court majority pointed out that much of JCU’s conduct code was couched in such “vague and imprecise language” it was difficult for staff to know when they might offend. Moreover, the majority judges highlighted the fact that across higher education there is simply no consensus about the meaning or limits of academic or intellectual freedom.

So, the Ridd case is just the latest reason for the federal government to nudge indifferent universities to craft policies to enable open inquiry and dissent from orthodoxy. Last week, British Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said universities would have to “demonstrate their commitment” to free speech to qualify for financial bailouts. All this is necessary but far from sufficient because the problem goes deep and wide within cultural politics. It’s true much of today’s flight from rationality was launched on campus especially since the 1990s, but it has spread far beyond. Postmodernism weakened the idea that despite bias and different life experiences it is worth the effort to pursue knowledge as a common human project. And, while all politics involves group belonging, identity politics intensifying gender and racial division has undermined the individualism that paradoxically brings people together.

“Truth” is torn free from factual moorings and becomes a tribe-specific battering ram in an unending power struggle. The village square where people from myriad backgrounds could meet, talk and compromise — or disagree with goodwill — began to empty out. Anonymous mobs of trolls took to social media, shouting insults.

A narrow “progressive” ideology once confined to campus bull sessions has gone mainstream — think of “critical race theory” as the fuel in the tank of the Black Lives Matter caravan — and has colonised education systems, sections of journalism, tech platforms and major corporations, where box-ticking gestures look cost-free. For every case in the news, such as Dr Ridd’s, there are legions of academics, public servants and journalists who know that if they go with the progressive flow, their work will attract collegial high-fives and no real scrutiny. If they challenge a hot-button orthodoxy — solar and wind as near certain saviours of the planet, for example, or racial victimology as an all-powerful explanatory tool — their conduct will be interrogated according to unforgiving standards and their reputations smeared. But it is soul-destroying to live with such conflict between inner truth and public conformity. A rising generation, we hope, will rediscover the value of free speech and honest debate, without which society’s problems simply cannot be fixed. Reform won’t be easy or quick.