Abuse of academic freedom can never be condoned

Sacked Sydney University academic Tim Anderson in 2016.

According to Tim Anderson, who was sacked from the University of Sydney last month, academic freedom entitles him to display, as teaching material, the flag of the state of Israel with a swastika ­superimposed on it.

Anderson is not alone in objecting to the university’s decision to terminate his employment: his protests are backed by a swag of colleagues who portray him as the latest victim of the vast right-wing conspiracy they believe spawned the Ramsay Centre’s proposed program of study on Western ­civilisation.

And the expressions of concern go beyond the paranoid fringe: the Institute of Public Affairs, which hardly sympathises with Anderson’s views, has criticised his dismissal in these pages and lists it among the actions by the university that are “hostile to freedom of speech”.

To call those claims confused would be an understatement.

It is, to begin with, misleading to suggest that Anderson is being prevented from expressing his opinions; he remains entirely free to publicise them, as he indeed does. Rather, the fundamental issue is whether academic freedom gives him an untrammelled right to use the classroom as he wishes.

That it doesn’t, and never has, ought to be obvious. On the contrary, academic freedom has ­always been accompanied by stringent obligations that it is the responsibility of universities to enforce and protect.

As the University of Chicago’s Edward Shils put it in a report on academic ethics published in 1982, those obligations reflect the function universities exist to serve, namely “the methodical discovery and teaching of truths about serious and important things”.

As a result of that function, universities are society’s custodians of the best methods involved in the pursuit and transmission of knowledge. And just as it is the first duty of physicians to heal their patients, so it is the first duty of academics to preserve and advance those methods and to impart them, and the truths they uncover, to students.

Of course, nothing in science is ever over and done with: to be fallible, and hence subject to revision, is in the nature of what we think we know. But it does not follow that any proposition is as good as any other, much less that there is no difference between fact and opinion. Rather, what follows is that teachers must, as best they can, scrupulously distinguish truth from falsehood, identify areas of uncertainty, and separate political or ethical judgments from scientific or scholarly statements.

To say that is not to deny that many issues which can and should be dealt with in teaching are controversial. Nor is it to suggest that academics ought to pretend that they do not have views on those ­issues — views that can, at times, be extremely unpopular.

But as Max Weber argued exactly a century ago, far from ­undermining the academic’s obligation to highlight the point where fact ends and opinion begins, controversy makes that obligation all the greater, as it is only by dispassionately explaining the scope and substance of the contending views that students will learn the skill of judgment and acquire the capacity to make informed judgments of their own.

Insisting on absolute clarity in that respect is not, in other words, an attempt to stifle pluralism; it is the only way of defending it. And because it is an inescapable reality that many students will be unable or unwilling to challenge a lecturer who exploits their ignorance, it is, as Weber wrote, “of all abuses, the most abhorrent” for an academic to pretend that controversial assertions have greater authority than the best scientific and scholarly evidence can justify.

“Like everyone else,” he said, “the professor has other opportunities for the propagation of his ­ideals. However, the professor cannot demand the right as a professor to carry the marshal’s baton of the statesman or the cultural reformer in his knapsack.”

Yet that is just what an academic does when “the unassailability of the university podium” is used to vent the passions “his God or daemon demands”, so betraying the vocation of teaching.

But Anderson’s assimilation of Israel to the Nazi state is not just a grotesque distortion of the historical record, which in and of itself would warrant his dismissal for conduct inconsistent with scholarly ethics. It is also, as the university concluded, “disrespectful and offensive” — or, to put it more straightforwardly, anti-Semitic.

It therefore breaches the obligation public institutions have to show equal respect to all Australians, regardless of their race, ­religion or ethnicity.

There are, for sure, many difficulties involved in distinguishing hostility to Zionism and legitimate criticisms of Israeli governments, on the one hand, from anti-Semitism on the other: the close ­association between Jews and the state of Israel makes the distinctions all the harder to draw.

However, the difficulties are not an all-purpose alibi, providing a get-out-of-jail card for those who cross the line. On the contrary, precisely because of the risks involved, teachers, and especially those funded by taxpayers, have a special duty of care when they venture into the area where criticism of Israel might veer into ­hatred of Jews.

They must, for example, avoid applying one standard to the state of Israel and another to its counterparts, which would amount to singling out for special and discriminatory treatment the country with which Jews are most closely associated.

That Anderson, in his rush to demonise and delegitimise Israel, cavalierly disregarded that requirement — accusing Israel of crimes that parallel the Holocaust, while presenting Bashar al-Assad, who has been responsible for the death, often by torture, of more than 400,000 Syrians, as a “mild-mannered eye doctor” whose country is the innocent victim of a Western plot “to destroy an independent nation” — is beyond ­dispute.

Nor should anyone be surprised that he acted as he did: this is, after all, a man who believes it is not inappropriate for academics to wear badges that call for “death to Israel” and a “curse on the Jews”.

Yes, academic freedom in this country is under threat — but not from Anderson’s dismissal. Rather, it is threatened by those academics, including Anderson, who want to retain the privileges of the academy while flouting its obligations. However, if academic standards are trampled on, public support for universities will wither, and the freedoms the universities have enjoyed will wither with it.

The many serious scholars our universities employ and their students deserve better. And so do taxpayers, who pick up the bill. Good on the University of Sydney for finally making a start on tackling the issue. It has plenty more to do if it is to get its house in order.