Australia’s universities should be penalised for crimping intellectual freedom

Financial penalties may bring our universities into line over intellectual freedoms.

Professor Sally Walker, former vice chancellor of Deakin University.

It was entirely sensible that the Morrison government called for a report into the state of academic freedom in Australian universities. The report by former High Court chief justice Robert French found that free speech and academic freedom needed greater protection, and it set down a recommended model code. It is fair enough that there is a further report into how universities are implementing French’s recom­men­dations. But can we please have a guarantee that there will not be a report into a report of a report?

What comes next? Events since the French report suggest that universities cannot be trusted to improve the intellectual health of our universities. The recalcitrance of vice-chancellors is on the record. Their lobby group, Universities Australia, worked hard to ignore the French report after it was handed to the Education Minister in April last year. Maybe the VCs counted on the Morrison government being tossed out at the federal election last May.

They may try to whitewash, and wriggle out of, this latest review too. But they will have to dupe, or woo, Sally Walker, the former Deakin University vice-chancellor. Appointed by Dan Tehan, Walker has a stronger record of fostering academic freedom than all the VCs of Australia’s biggest universities combined.

When she was VC of Deakin University, law professor Mirko Bagaric and Deakin law lecturer Julie Clarke wrote a controversial article in 2005 for an American law journal advocating the use of torture in some circumstances. After an extract ran in The Age, the two academics were pilloried by fellow academics, refugee advocates and politicians ranging from then foreign minister Alexander Downer to Greens MPs.

Walker could have done the usual VC schtick: duck for cover and mutter that the controversial views don’t represent the values of the university. Instead, Walker stared down critics and delivered a crystal-clear defence of academic freedom.

“Professor Bagaric, as an academic staff member, is entitled to express his opinions as are those members of academic staff who disagree with him,” Walker said in a written statement.

“After all, the ability to freely and publicly raise these issues and debate them are hallmarks of a free and open democratic society and the defining characteristics of a progressive university.”

Walker, who also set about fixing the finances at Deakin, seems perfectly positioned to make tough calls that are not popular. It might help that Walker is not part of the VC bubble that surrounds the Group of Eight universities. Though she was acting VC at the University of Melbourne for a period before joining Deakin, Walker will surely know that academic freedom has gone from bad to worse at universities that should be setting the gold standard in how to promote a robust learning environment.

That said, transforming the intellectual health of our universities is not for the faint-hearted. The starting point for Walker is that the most beautifully drafted code of academic freedom is meaningless unless it is implemented. In simple terms, academic freedom must be measured against evidence, not model codes.

Evidence such as the disgraceful behaviour of administrators at the University of NSW earlier this month. Human Rights Watch Australian director Elaine Pearson, who is also an adjunct law lecturer at UNSW, was interviewed by the university’s media department. Pearson called for a UN special envoy to be appointed to monitor human rights in Hong Kong in light of new national security laws. The interviewed was published on the UNSW website and linked in a UNSW tweet.

Her comments upset the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times and a small, vocal group of Chinese students who claimed that Pearson’s views were hurtful. Rather than uphold the Western tradition of intellectual diversity, UNSW sided with a communist regime. The university pulled the article and the tweet. UNSW tweeted: “The opinions expressed by our academic do not always represent the views of UNSW. We have a long & values relationship with Greater China going back 60 years.”

A public uproar about the university’s cowardice forced UNSW administrators to reinstate the content, but on other platforms.

This is a textbook case of how academic freedom works at Australian universities in the 21st century. Last year, UNSW vice-chancellor Ian Jacobs said: “Campus is a place for people to express all sorts of different views. Some of them will offend quite a lot of people; some of them will be patently ridiculous; I don’t mind. I want people to be able to give those views and other people to be able to object.” But when push came to shove, the first instinct at UNSW was to ditch academic freedom because it offended the Chinese Communist Party.

When not kowtowing to China, universities are more concerned with parading their woke credentials. In February when University of Sydney vice-chancellor Michael Spence announced his departure from the top job at the end of this year, he said one of the things he is “most proud of is our work to embed diversity and inclusion in the culture of the university”. Does that stretch to diversity of views? We don’t know because the VC didn’t mention fostering academic freedom.

Only gutsy recommendations will refocus the minds of VCs on their core mission. Walker might start by recommending that a tertiary institution can call itself a university only if academic freedom and intellectual diversity are a reality rather than empty pledges. Walker could also recommend that universities receive taxpayer funds only if they prove their commitment to academic freedom and intellectual diversity. That means a university must report actual indicators and outcomes to show how academic freedom thrives on their campus.

One clear measure of academic freedom is that feathers — meaning egos — are ruffled. If your core business is collegiality, open a day spa. James Cook University, for example, won’t be able to hide the fact it has spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars pursuing respected professor Peter Ridd, claiming he acted in an uncollegial fashion by challenging the quality of climate science at JCU.

The University of Queensland would have to account for its suspension of student activist Drew Pavlou for, among other things, his outspoken views on the Chinese Communist Party’s activities in Hong Kong and UQ’s links with the CCP.

Walker might make it clear that waffly statements from VCs won’t cut it any more. She could recommend that governing councils of universities be held responsible for breaches of academic freedom and intellectual diversity, just as board of a company is liable for corporate failures.

These recommendations will need to be coupled with an overhaul of what can only be described as the educational swamp. A mix of ideology and inertia within the federal Education Department and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, the university regulator, has allowed increasingly corporatist managers of Australian universities to ignore their current funding obligations to foster academic freedom and intellectual diversity.

Given that VCs have overseen a decline in academic freedom, there must also be continued monitoring. There could be a sliding scale of penalties depending on the nature of breaches. JCU, for example, would be docked at the top punitive rate if it treats another academic in the manner it treated Ridd. And a future VC of cash-strapped Sydney University might think again about caving into a small group of vocal, intensely political academics who oppose a course in Western civilisation funded by the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation.

The easiest recommendation is to suggest that the Morrison government mandate an academic freedom code for all Australian universities. Unless that code is implemented, monitored and penalised for breach, it will be as worthless as another review into a review of a review. By contrast, it will take only a few instances of docked funding to focus the attention of VCs on improving academic freedom.

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