How to stop the culture wars: unite on the kernel of liberty

The body count from the killing fields of the Australian culture wars keeps piling up. And don’t imagine the battles are esoteric disagreements among elites. The battles over how free we are in a liberal society seep into every corner of the country, from a dour scientist at a north Queensland university to a glamorous morning television host beamed into Australian living rooms.

Here’s a tally from this week alone. The Australian National University recoiled in response to objections from a few unionists, pulling out of an unprecedented deal with the Ramsay Centre to provide students with generous scholarships and a new course in Western civilisation. The editor of literary journal Meanjin, Jonathan Green, wrote a long, grovelling apology for his white privilege because the latest cover wrongly chose to promote #MeToo feminism over indigenous people in the Balkanised world of identity politics. Television personality Sonia Kruger will have to answer to a government bureaucracy because she expressed a view about Muslim immigration. Go back a few days further, to when a fine professor of physics was sacked for not toeing an ideological line on climate change at James Cook University.

It’s easy to write up what’s wrong with intellectual freedom in Australia. It’s much harder to work out how we work through this mess. A sure way to entrench the madness is to stay in our bunkers, convince ourselves that we, on our side of politics, whichever that may be, hold the high moral ground. That has been the way for the past few decades and things have gone from bad to worse. It must be time, then, to try something different. Per­haps listen to the other side, find points of common ground, admit where we may be wrong, and do all this in the spirit of respect for others, curiosity about ideas and a determination that Western progress genuinely means progress.

Inquirer spoke at length this week with Grahame McCulloch, who has been general secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union since its inception in the early 1990s, and whose working adult life has been with the union movement. The NTEU has been in the press a lot in recent days, lining up on both sides of the culture wars that are ripping apart intellectual learning in this country.

The NTEU, under McCulloch’s leadership, was an early defender of Peter Ridd, the geophysicist recently sacked on trumped-up charges of misconduct by JCU because he spoke out about science that is not properly checked, tested or replicated. Ridd said some people pushing out research were not very objective: “They’re emotionally attached to their subject and, you know, you can’t blame them, the reef is a beautiful thing.”

On March 1, the Queensland division secretary of the NTEU, Michael McNally, wrote to union members at JCU explaining the union’s support for Ridd. McNally said the right to academic freedom was specifically enshrined in the enterprise bargaining agreement with JCU, and “it is not for a university management to determined that such scholarly debate either denigrates or offends others”.

On June 1, the NTEU issued a compelling press statement that asked: “Whither academic freedom?” It demanded Ridd’s immediate reinstatement by JCU.

“The NTEU is obliged to reassert its commitment to academic freedom, even or especially where its expression contains statements that may be at odds with many or most members’ views. Without the maintenance of the core value of academic freedom, our universities would cease to be worthy of the name,” wrote McNally.

Are we more comfortable bashing the NTEU when it does something wrong than paying credit when it does the right thing? After all, the NTEU’s support for Ridd hasn’t received much attention in the press. Whereas the words of one NTEU branch member opposed to funding from the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation has received blanket coverage.

Talking to Inquirer this week, McCulloch said “the NTEU was prepared to consider making some financial contribution to Peter’s defence but in any event his GoFundMe (where Ridd raised $260,000 for legal costs) was oversubscribed so it was unnecessary”.

“I believe in serious intellectual discussion. That is why I am on Peter Ridd’s side even if I am concerned about the methods of delivering his message. But that’s a different point,” adds McCulloch, who grew up in Hobart, was a student leader at the University of Tasmania and then national leader of the National Union of Students.

A few days before we spoke, McCulloch posted some comments on a blog by political scientist and writer Don Aitkin, pointing out that the NTEU has defended many cases of academic freedom in the past two decades, from Ted Steele at Wollongong University to Andrew Fraser at Macquarie University, Judith Bessant at RMIT, Roz Ward at Latrobe, and now Ridd. Andrew Fraser was an academic moved on by Macquarie University in 2005 because he expressed views about the problems of increased crime from African migration that offended the sensibilities of orthodox views on campus. The issue still offends polite circles, and still demands to be debated. The Macquarie branch of the NTEU didn’t like Fraser’s views, but the centrally run union took the view that it raised fundamental questions about individual rights and academic freedom. Supporting him was non-negotiable.

“The union’s support in the Steele, Fraser, Ward and Ridd matters attracted some hostility from sections of our membership and the press,” wrote McCulloch. “The interesting point is that the intellectual perspectives of the academics involved have ranged from the right conservative to radical left poles … this underlines that NTEU has adopted a principled defence of academic freedom — a necessary condition for a viable university — even at the cost of internal and external criticism.”

Whatever we may think of a government imposing Ward’s Safe Schools agenda, if we believe in academic freedom at universities, it must apply equally to Ward and Ridd and Fraser.

The NTEU has 28,500 members, 16,000 of them academic staff. Union coverage among permanent teaching and research staff in universities is high, between 35 per cent and 50 per cent, and between 15 per cent and 20 per cent among professional staff. It has been a swift transformation given that academic labour was one of the last workforces, before enterprise bargaining, to become unionised.

Since its inception, the NTEU has been fighting to include academic freedom clauses in collective bargaining agreements with all 37 public universities in Australia, to sit alongside internal review panels, which Ridd did not have access to at JCU. McCulloch explained the fine pedigree of academic freedom clauses, drawing on the Humboldtian universities in Germany, the liberal philosophy of John Newman, John Dewey who created the American Association of University Professors, and models of academic freedom in Canadian universities. The NTEU deserves praise for this pursuit.

Now for the hitch. The general secretary of that same union has nothing to say about the hijacking of education by Matthew King, the NTEU branch president in the ACT who opposed ANU accepting money from the Ramsay Centre to teach a course in Western civilisation. King used an article in Quadrant by Tony Abbott, a Ramsay board member, to launch spurious objections to the Ramsay donation.

McCulloch’s silence on this matter is unfortunate. After all, the craven hypocrisy of ANU and King is obvious. If they are so concerned about relinquishing academic freedom, what about ANU’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies which, as The Australian reported this week, receives money from Middle Eastern countries such as United Arab Emirates, Iran and Turkey? A Dubai foundation is listed as member of the centre’s advisory board. Six Australian universities host Confucius centres with money from Chinese donors who also assign a teacher to each program and have control over what is taught.

ANU’s pusillanimity is doubly clear. It had almost sealed a deal for students to learn the great books of Western civilisation, then caved in to a few rowdy voices. The next time ANU cries poor, the Education Minister surely will recall this episode as severely denting its credibility. And, by the way, why isn’t one of our premier universities already offering a course on the great books of Western civilisation, without outside money?

The head of a tertiary education union could have a lot to say here. What McCulloch will say is that he has had enough of the rising corporatism in universities that causes administrators to run for cover whenever there is a controversy. Vice-chancellors don’t want a Roz Ward or a Peter Ridd, or anyone who ruffles feathers. University bosses want calm waters so they can carry on with their marketing and advertising, domestically and especially overseas. Craven corporatism causes a university to lose sight of its mission as a place of learning, inquiry and debate. It explains why Bjorn Lomborg couldn’t find a home at an Australian university. It explains why University of Sydney vice-chancellor Michael Spence tried to stop the Dalai Lama from speaking on campus in 2013. Once leaked emails appeared in the media, the university tried to use logistics to justify its position, but emails pointed to a university keen to disassociate itself from a man who upset Chinese sensibilities. The same craven corporatism that explains JCU’s treatment of Ridd also explains ANU backing out of a deal with Ramsay. In fact, the NTEU branch manager exploited the cowardice of university administrators, writing to ANU vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt that the association with Ramsay “could potentially damage the intellectual reputation of the humanities at ANU and the ANU more broadly”.

McCulloch will say only this: “I have consistently, across many universities, had it put to me directly by senior management, up to and including deputy vice-chancellor level, that the profitability, and more particularly the reputation, of the university is the primary consideration in these matters. That we can’t afford to have things that might put our brand reputation in the international marketplace or in the research race … in jeopardy.”

McCulloch says this corporatist attitude is a seriously conformist and stifling influence on internal debate at all levels of a university. The NTEU boss has no beef with corporations but worries when university leaders “have swallowed this management jargon bible and intellectual discourse has been lost in an arid sea of performance-management indicators that lack substance”.

Is McCulloch’s silence over ANU and Ramsay a case of the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes story, a union boss staying quiet to support a union comrade at the branch level? Or is there another way to join the dots here? Given the NTEU’s public statements on other matters such as Ridd, McCulloch’s silence over the Ramsay debacle may suggest deep dissent within the NTEU and disagreement with the actions of a rogue branch at ANU. Either way, it doesn’t pay to tar everyone with the same brush. There is too much at stake. Equally, left and right occasionally joining forces won’t settle the culture wars. That will happen only when the warring sides find more common ground to embed fundamental principles of liberty and en­lightenment in our universities, and beyond.

A good place to start is learning about what is good, not just bad, about Western civilisation.