Open letters the latest weapon of bullies on campus

Last month, more than 100 academics at the University of Melbourne signed an open letter demanding “swift and decisive” action against one of their colleagues. At the end of 2019, 40 law academics from the University of Queensland signed an open letter calling for disciplinary action against their dean. Again in 2019, 50 academics at the University of Sydney signed an open letter directed to their president, rejecting a new degree program that was in negotiation.

Open letters have emerged as one of the favourite cudgels wielded by academics to silence one ­another and coerce university administrators. While their use in Australia is thankfully isolated to just a handful of examples, in the UK and the US barely a week goes by without a scholar attracting an open letter from their colleagues that denounces them.

The letters that have been signed in Australia follow a pattern. At Melbourne University, Associate Professor Holly Lawford-Smith set up a website for women to anonymously report conflict in women’s only spaces. Concerned by the uncritical ­acceptance of “gender identity theory”, Lawford-Smith built a website in order to collect anonymous stories from women impacted by having to share change rooms, fitting rooms, bathrooms, shelters, rape refuges, prisons and so on with biological males who now identify as female. Naturally, Lawford-Smith’s website has been described as transphobic by her peers. Yet the open letter that calls for her punishment also denounces her academic coursework on feminism because she does not hold appropriate credentials in “gender studies”.

Similarly, the former dean of law at UQ, Patrick Parkinson, was also castigated by colleagues for apparent transphobia after exploring the conflict between gender identity laws and religious freedom. Before stepping down from his role as dean at the beginning of the year, Parkinson had also complained that one of his academic papers on the subject was censored by peer reviewers because it ran afoul of newly imposed dogmas.

In 2019, former chief justice Robert French investigated the state of free speech on Australian university campuses, and the conclusion of his review was that there was no free speech crisis in Australia. Because each of our universities had a policy for ensuring academic freedom, and because incidents such as speakers being deplatformed or shouted down by protesters were rare and isolated in number, there was insufficient evidence to support the claim that free speech was in peril.

What the French review missed, however, was that the dynamics that create a free speech crisis are not necessarily identifiable by looking at administrative policies and speaker deplatformings. Free speech is in crisis when students are too scared to speak their mind in the classroom for fear of censure. Academic freedom is in peril when scholars are too scared to research, publish or make statements on particular topics because they fear being demoted, fired or bullied by peers.

To date, I am not aware of any data relevant to these questions being collected in a systematic fashion within Australia. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that dissident academics do, indeed, face a hostile climate on university campuses, just as they do in other countries around the world.

In a recent report on threats to academic freedom in the UK and the US, Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, identified two methods of coercion authoritarian academics use to stifle a climate of open inquiry on campus.

“Soft authoritarian” methods consist of bias in hiring and ­promotion decisions, refereeing grant applications and journal articles. “Hard authoritarian” methods consist of firings, official warnings and bullying through such things as open letters.

Kaufmann points out that authoritarianism exists on both the right and the left, and that conservatives in general are just as likely to engage in authoritarianism as progressives. The problem on university campuses, however, is that there are so few conservatives that this bipartisan reality becomes an irrelevance. Authoritarianism travels in one direction, and one direction only, at what appears to be an ever-increasing pace.

Kaufmann’s report describes Western universities as increasingly “closed systems” that seek to maintain a homogenous political and moral culture. Dissidents within these cultures are subject to hostile climates, and students who do not fit into the dominant culture either leave or learn to self-censor to get along.

This creates a feedback loop in which moderate students are filtered out and more radical students are filtered in, speeding up the process of homogenisation and ensuring that it replicates for future generations. For example, Kaufmann’s data finds that one in three conservative doctoral students in the US has been subject to disciplinary action, compared with one in 10 conservative doctoral students in the UK.

My sense is that Australian universities have not yet reached the levels of pathology afflicting universities abroad. Our society, is less polarised in general and less riven by entrenched class disparities. Nevertheless, Australia must not be complacent. Research on academic freedom within our universities should be carried out and data should be collected measuring such variables as self-censorship and fear of bullying.

There is a lot at stake. Academic freedom and open inquiry are foundational principles on which the modern university is built. Having a moral and political monoculture that chips away at these principles will only lead to a degradation of our institutions that will take years, and perhaps decades, to unwind.

Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette, an online platform for free thought.