Universities should fight for autonomy: Gareth Evans

Universities must push back against attempts to breach their “traditional autonomy”, says Gareth Evans.

Australian National University chancellor Gareth Evans.

Universities must push back against attempts to breach their “traditional autonomy” and demand “rock solid justifications” for anything which interferes with it, Australian National University chancellor Gareth Evans told a conference on Wednesday.

Professor Evans, a former Labor foreign minister, said that academic autonomy, academic freedom and campus free speech were “critically and fundamentally important” and must be defended at all costs.

But he argued that these principles were not currently at risk in Australian universities.

“Talk to such effect (of a freedom of speech crisis) by the culture warriors in some sections of the media and think tank universe is wildly overstated,” he told the ANU summit on academic freedom and autonomy.

However Professor Evans conceded that a number of recent events were legitimate reasons for concern about university autonomy and freedom of speech and should be examined.

He said there had been “a handful … of instances of invited campus speakers espousing various perceived heresies being disinvited or shouted down by rival activists”. Also “a few instances” of students insisting on practices popular in some US universities such as “no platforming”, trigger warnings” and “safe spaces”. And “a handful of cases which universities have been rightly criticised for censuring academics for making public statements which managements thought unhelpful to their universities’ image”

Professor Evans also singled out the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, saying it had refused to accept the principle of academic autonomy when it refused to commit to the principle of academic freedom in its proposed agreement with ANU to fund a bachelor of Western civilisation. He said this was a key reason why ANU pulled out of the agreement.

He also named the action of former Education Minister Simon Birmingham in vetoing humanities research grants which were approved by the Australian Research Council as another event which raised academic autonomy issues.

Professor Evans said that universities would always have internal differences of opinion in decided how to exercise their autonomy.

“There will always be external pressures to take into account and navigate in making resource allocation decisions, given that university income can only come from taxpayers, students, philanthropy, or contracted research,” he said.

“But no university deserving of the name can yield its independence to the agendas of others, whether those others be governments, or philanthropic foundations or anyone else, when it comes to staffing and curriculum choices.”