Degrees now depend on woke ideology

Making students mouth a form of political speech and assessing their fervour is nuts – but it’s happening.

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A couple of weeks back, in response to a column about politics infusing law schools, a reader named Anthony said: “You’re undoubtedly a redneck, Janet, but on this one I agree with you completely. Congratulations.”

Thanks, Anthony. Twenty-five years a redneck then – if that’s the new term for being a classical liberal. It may be unfashionable, even bogan, in many academic, political and social circles today to have classical liberal values.

Nonetheless, that has been my foundation over more than 25 years of writing.

There are many challenges to classical liberal principles today. That’s probably why I’m still writing. Free speech, for example, is not so free any more. Intellectual diversity is non-existent in the very places it should thrive.

We learned this week that Macquarie Law School is compelling law students to mouth a form of political speech, being assessed on it and told they will fail that component of their course if it’s not delivered with enough fervour.

If someone had asserted this, with no evidence, I would have said it’s absurd, far-fetched, dismissed it as too wicked, even for the nutty professors at some of our universities.

Except it is true.

Macquarie Law School’s marking rubrics show that if students in one of its legal courses – Age and the Law – don’t deliver an acknowledgment of country in the right way, they will fail that component of the subject.

As one reader put it, Macquarie University says it can’t take disciplinary action against an academic for anti-Semitic remarks but it’s OK with a lecturer failing a student for not doing an approved acknowledgment to country. Picture: Justin Lloyd.

Inquirer has been contacted by many students at Macquarie Law School. Each student was fearful of repercussions for speaking out. So, we’re not using their real names.

“Jordan” is a fifth-year honours student who was compelled to deliver an acknowledgment of country last year as part of an oral presentation unit that forms part of this student’s honours course.

This is politics. Compelled politics. The worst kind where no debate was invited or allowed about the value or meaning of an acknowledgment of country.

Punishing someone for not mouthing, with fervour, a set of words decreed by a higher power is the antithesis of living in a free country. This is a line that no free society should cross. It’s behaviour common in North Korea, Iran, the old Soviet Union or Putin’s Russia today.

Jordon’s thesis was in an area of the law that had zero to do with an acknowledgment of country. Jordan was told to find a connection, nonetheless.

It was, says Jordan, “bound to be entirely tenuous and superficial given my area of concern. The ridiculousness of this cannot be overstated.”

The honours student says they felt punished for not choosing a honours area that covered Indigenous issues.

“Many students (perhaps with a greater degree of prescience than myself) wrote a thesis on Indigenous rights and the like. You can imagine how that choice was reflected in their final mark.”

The convener of this thesis unit was Dr Holly Doel-Mackaway.

Macquarie law associate professor Holly Doel-Mackaway.

“The honours program is generally considered one of, if not the most important part of undergraduate legal studies,” Jordan told Inquirer this week.

“The proper function of such a program is to encourage students to think critically about an area of law of interest to them, and to draft an extended paper proffering a unique interpretation to some issue or concern within that area.”

When another mystified student asked Doel-Mackaway about the relevance of an acknowledgment of country to an honours thesis, the lecturer said: “Good question … it’s all about acknowledging your positionality as a student of law on this unceded land.”

The question is good. The answer is bonkers. It’s got the whiff of a preacher taking confession from a parishioner, which is curious for a secular institution.

Positionality and unceded are not legal terms. They are political.

If you want to be a positionality change agent – a concept beloved by critical race activists – the appropriate path is to put your hand up for a seat in parliament, or set up a lobby group, or find any other avenue that does not involve forcing students to utter words with which they may not agree in an assessment. As to unceded, an apparent shorthand reference to Indigenous sovereignty being unceded – this is legally fatuous.

The Macquarie law professor might want to re-read Coe v Commonwealth, where chief justice Anthony Mason made clear that the Mabo decision “is entirely at odds with the notion that sovereignty adverse to the Crown res­ides in the Aboriginal people of Australia”.

The law can be a serious pest for the politically minded.

Doel-Mackaway is also the current course convener of Age and the Law, another subject where an acknowledgment of country is mandated and assessed, with threat of a fail mark if not done in the approved manner.

Another Macquarie honours student, “Damien”, told The Australian: “Law students are inherently vulnerable in this circumstance because their future careers are highly dependent on their success in assessments; they’re unlikely to express an opinion that effectively risks reduction in marks or even failure.

“Macquarie University is exploiting this vulnerability.”

Tragically, while this political activism has no impact on those academics who dispense it, it does severely harm to the job prospects of its students.

As Jordan pointed out, employers in major law firms “would look at this stuff and think, ‘That’s crazy. I don’t want to hire a kid who’s been taught by people like this because what’s his or her understanding of the law going be?’ ”

Another student, “Chloe”, told Inquirer: “For a long time now it has felt like going to university is simply ticking a very expensive box to be allowed to one day practice. We are forced to sit and listen to the same political opinions of the unit conveners without being allowed to question or challenge their point of view.”

It raises the question: Who’s really in charge at Macquarie University? Who’s actually accountable for the quality and integrity of university courses?

The national regulatory body, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, is responsible for promulgating the higher education standards framework that prescribe the overarching standards universities should meet. But it’s a small outfit and hardly a policeman on the academic beat.

The big universities in Australia are self-accrediting, meaning they set their own courses and degrees. So we must look to vice-chancellor Bruce Dowton, chancellor Martin Parkinson and a council stuffed to the gunwales with apparently accomplished people, including deputy chancellor Louise Mason, Professor Jacqueline Phillips, Michael Book, Associate Professor Nikola Balnave, Lyn Cobley, Professor Catherine Dean, Deborah Hadwen, Mikaela Jade, Jingmin Qian, Jongho Roh, Dr Stuart Upton and Frank Zipfinger.

Macquarie University vice-chancellor Bruce Dowton. Picture: Jane Dempster/The Australian.

Ladies and gentlemen, what on earth have you been doing? Do you approve of this kind of politicisation of your institution? Do any of you care that students are being compelled to mimic the politics of their lecturer? That the law school’s reputation is getting worse? What have you done about it?

Dowton earns more than $1m a year to run Macquarie University.

The university told Inquirer this week that an acknowledgment of country has been removed from the honours thesis marking rubric. But they’re sticking to their guns about imposing compelled political speech in Age and the Law.

Even in a half-serious classroom, the university’s answers would be marked as a fail for lack of logic. An acknowledgment of country takes only 30 seconds, a spokesperson said.

So does a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Or singing the first verse of the national anthem. Or chanting over and over again: “We love you, President Putin.”

These same “intellectuals” would be howling if political speech they disagreed with were mandated in any class at university – and students were marked down, potentially failed, for not doing it with just the right tone of cultural respect. The university said it’s just an elective course. So, no big deal. Law students don’t have to take it.

Except that once students pick this subject, they have no choice about being required to deliver a form of compelled speech. The marking rubric for this is not available until a student has chosen the subject.

Why not put this compelled political speech assessment online so all students understand what’s involved before they choose this elective? If you can’t throw some hospital-grade bleach on this dirty practice, why not at least some sunlight? Macquarie didn’t respond.

Transparency would allow taxpayers to know how our money is being used, and by whom. It would help the chancellor and vice-chancellor understand what’s happening under their noses, because I’d put money on them having no clue about the level of political suffocation that students endure under their watch.

As one of our readers put it, Macquarie says it can’t take disciplinary action against an academic for anti-Semitic remarks but it’s OK with a lecturer failing a student for not doing an approved acknowledgment to country.

So how did things get so bad?

In a nutshell, as Professor Simon Haines wrote earlier this year, all the focus is on money and research.

Haines, the founding chief executive of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, told Inquirer this week that once university management focused on research, it was inevitable that academics would follow.

“Some academics say the only thing they ever get asked is, how many research grants have you got? How much are they worth? Not what are they about,” Haines says.

This obsession with chasing grants has led to teaching as a profession being devalued, he says.

Another problem with this research obsession is that lecturers end up teaching their research to students – regardless of its quality.

“That’s where the Macquarie example is relevant,” says Haines. In a research-driven world where some academics also become more and more activist, “their ‘research’ into identity politics or other activist subjects channels directly into their teaching”.

“Instead of an analytical, truly critical absorption of an academic discipline, students are getting a kind of exhortation to go out into the world and do something about fixing injustice or whatever.”

We’re all familiar with “the long march through the institutions” – Rudi Dutschke’s strategy to enact revolution from within.

Judging from large swathes of the legal profession in this country, that march is already turning our legal system into a playground for activists.

Not a day goes by without a barrister or law firm telling us that Australia is stained by original sin and must repent. Judges are among the most active dispensers of acknowledgments of country. They give licence to the politicisation of law schools.

What will become of the quality of our legal system when the next generations of comprehensively indoctrinated lawyers graduate and begin practice? When lawyers, for example, stop believing that everyone is entitled to a defence? When fundamental legal principles are replaced with the politics of the day? When citizens are subjected to the rule of politics, not the rule of the law?