G8 universities are missing in action on hate speech

University leaders stand firm for the principles of academic freedom and institutional autonomy when it suits them. When it doesn’t, they want to pass their problems to government. Opponents of Israel’s right to exist have congregated on a handful of campuses this week, intimidating Jewish students with their chant “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and calls for “intifada”. It has created a question for vice-chancellors: Does the right to free speech extend to statements that go way beyond opposition to the Israeli government’s campaign against the Hamas terrorist organisation and can be cover for outright anti-Semitism?

It is a question universities, based on the belief that scholarship and debate are the foundations of intellectual freedom, should be well-placed to answer. So what did elite Group of Eight university vice-chancellors Mark Scott (University of Sydney) and Peter Hoj (University of Adelaide) do? They wrote to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus asking for authoritative advice as to whether the phrase and word contravene federal law.

This is in stark contrast to widespread disquiet and outright opposition across the university system when Coalition education minister Dan Tehan commissioned a free-speech code and required universities to adopt it. They did, but only after considerable complaint that they had their own codes and did not need instruction from a minister. Which rather makes Mr Tehan’s point. In 2019, he wrote in The Australian that universities should “send a clear signal to students and to the broader Australian community that not only are universities places of robust and open inquiry but that respectful discussion, debate and disagreement is a fundamental Australian value that lies at the heart of our democratic system”. For vice-chancellors to attempt now to outsource a decision on what is acceptable as robust and respectful debate damages the standing of our universities as intellectual and ethical exemplars.