Macquarie law student claims must be heard by external inquiry

Macquarie University, at Macquarie Park, Sydney.

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The Australian’s recent reports and commentary articles about Macquarie Law School raise important questions, not only about what law schools should teach but also the abuse of power by university lecturers.

Janet Albrechtsen and Noah Yim first broke the story about a lecturer requiring students to write a welcome to country or acknowledgment of country as part of an assessment. The optional subject is Age and the Law, which is not obviously about Indigenous people. That assessment task is disturbing for all the reasons Albrechtsen has given but it may be the tip of the iceberg of problems.

Current law school students, writing under pseudonyms, have reported other issues. Damien S wrote that major assessments covered Indigenous issues in units such as remedies or commercial law in a way that felt “awkward and forced”. He also complained of students being required to express opinions contrary to what they believed to get good marks.

Chloe B makes other disturbing allegations. She writes that students are told if they have jobs or positions of power, this is because they stepped “on the shoulders of others”, and if they are not Indigenous then they’re “visitors” or “guests” in our own country. Among other things, she says, they “have been taught families can be genderless” and they “should not question this reality”.

Rogue lecturers, who use their classrooms as a political soapbox, have been with us, perhaps in every discipline, for generations. Nothing new there. Neither is it new that lecturers have focused on their pet topics or social concerns to the detriment of balance in the way they have taught a subject.

Many lecturers are passionate about the injustices experienced by Indigenous people. Is there, however, a systemic problem with which the legal profession should be concerned?

The apparent focus on Indigenous issues at Macquarie Law School is entirely unsurprising to me; for its context is a revision of the Australian Law School Standards that occurred in 2019-2020 while I was dean of law at the University of Queensland.

These standards have been developed by the Council of Australian Law Deans as a basis for accreditation of law schools. CALD says it believes the law demonstrates “systemic discrimination and structural bias against First Nations peoples”. It offers no evidence to support this claim.

In the 2020 revision of the standards, there was a strong focus on Indigenous issues. Part of the background was that Universities Australia had committed all law schools to “have plans for or have already in place processes that ensure all students will encounter and engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural content as integral parts of their course of study” by 2020. The primary focus in our revision of the standards was on making Indigenous cultural competency an essential graduate attribute.

That required changes to the curriculum. The 2020 standards require that it “must include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives on and intersections with the law”. That means, the document explains, “the Law School curriculum should be designed with a view to fostering Indigenous cultural competency”. Each law school needs to show evidence of this.

That wording leaves a lot of room for different law schools to determine how they do this. At least some people would have liked to see Indigenous perspectives mandated in every subject.

In some areas of law, of course, Indigenous issues are front and centre. No property law course could be complete without a section on native title. A family law course needs to consider appropriate parenting arrangements for Indigenous children.

Macquarie University vice chancellor Bruce Dowton. Picture: Damian Shaw

However, in other subjects, such as the law of trusts, it is hard to see how Indigenous perspectives would add value. If such perspectives are to be shoehorned into every subject, it can be only at the expense of other important content.

There are a lot of other demands on the law school curriculum. At UQ, while I was Dean, we sought to encourage discussion in every relevant subject of how technology might assist or transform legal practice in that area. Technology is having a huge impact on the legal profession, and will directly impact students’ job prospects. We wanted our students to be ahead of the curve.

What a law school prepares its students for matters. It also matters how it seeks to develop them intellectually and how it uses power. Damien’s and Chloe’s allegations are, for that reason, very concerning.

Lecturers, in whatever subject, who insist that only certain opinions are acceptable fail their students. The task must be to support students in formulating their own opinions and being able to justify those views by clear evidence and cogent reasoning. Lecturers, in whatever subject, who impose viewpoints on students and punish them with low marks for not adhering to the political world view of the lecturer are not just engaging in pedagogical malpractice. They are engaging in professional misconduct. Law students are particularly sensitive to marking criteria in their competition for the best jobs in the top law firms.

For this reason, a formal, external inquiry into the complaints about Macquarie Law School is warranted, even if, as is highly likely, these issues are not confined to one law school.

The internal review commissioned by Macquarie’s vice-chancellor is quite inadequate. If students are too afraid to reveal their names publicly for fear of reprisal by lecturers, why does he think they will talk openly to their dean?

Emeritus professor Patrick Parkinson was dean of law at University of Queensland and before that a professor of law at the University of Sydney.