Uni heads fail leadership test

Perhaps vice-chancellors do not get that the time for weasel words is long gone and that they must stand up for what they profess to believe: that anti-Semitic abuse and violence on campus are wrong – no ifs, no buts.

Macquarie University vice-chancellor Bruce Dowton gave evidence at a parliamentary inquiry last week following public statements by university academic Randa Abdel-Fattah that he agreed were anti-Semitic.

So what is he doing about it? Sod all; Professor Dowton said there was no legal definition of anti-Semitism and Dr Abdel-Fattah’s employment was covered by the university’s enterprise agreement. Neither of which prevented him from testing whether she breached the university’s rules and conventions of respect for staff and students.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare gets this. He has asked the Australian Research Council whether on Dr Abdel-Fattah’s own admission she has breached a research grant.

At the same inquiry, Queensland University of Technology vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil said she already had apologised unreservedly for the conference at her campus where Dr Abdel-Fattah spoke. Professor Sheil said she had commissioned a retired judge to investigate what had occurred.

But why does she need a judge to investigate whether what occurred at QUT breached its code of conduct? In outsourcing the issue and delaying decisions she might need to make, she could create the impression, however unintentionally, that displays of anti-Semitism on campus were an administrative inconvenience.

The choices of these two vice-chancellors demonstrate the failure of our universities to lead. Across 16 months, Australia has endured escalating anti-Semitism, first on university grounds and then across the community.

Some vice-chancellors have ducked, failing what has become a test of national character – the right of Jews to walk, work and study where they choose without fear of abuse and worse from morally malformed individuals who use opposition to Israel’s war of self-defence against Iran-proxy terrorists as cover for anti-Semitism.

In a shameful display at QUT’s ­National Anti-Racism Symposium last month, as Natasha Bita wrote on Saturday, Monash University doctoral candidate and teaching associate Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak praised the Hamas terror attack on Israel, when terrorists killed 1175 Israeli and foreign nationals and took 251 hostages, as an “anti-racist practice”.

The problems might not have escalated if vice-chancellors, including Mark Scott at the University of Sydney and Genevieve Bell at the Australian National University, had stood up and spoken out from the start – by shutting protest encampments on their campuses and providing Jewish staff and students with the protections that were theirs under law.

University leaders should have spoken up for the core function of higher education – to advance the cause of humanity through research and debate, to be places where the book-burners never win.

It is not as though they lacked examples. In May 2024, Western Sydney University chancellor Jennifer Westacott wrote in this newspaper: “The hate speech and anti-Semitism occurring on our campuses is a direct assault on Australia’s multiculturalism and its principles.”

Last month she warned that once anti-Semitism took hold, other hatred followed. At Western Sydney University they stand with their leader – its campuses have been largely calm. Not the silence where thugs enforce acquiescence; the calm that occurs where reason and respect prevail. Australians with a love of learning and a core belief in the power of ideas look to universities for leadership. Vice-chancellors have failed us.