Deciding who deserves free speech at our universities
By writing his piece The problem with the Government’s proposed ‘free speech’ law for universities, Victoria University vice-chancellor Nic Smith ironically illustrates exactly why legislation to address free speech at universities is needed.
Each year, the Free Speech Union releases a report on academic freedom. In 2023, our report showed that a majority of academics who responded at five of our eight universities disagreed that they were free to state controversial or unpopular opinions. A similar response was found the previous year, even though the right to “state controversial and unpopular opinions” is one of the specific features of academic freedom as defined in the Education and Training Act 2020.
Every week we are contacted by academics who believe the university has rejected its core role. The function of the university is not to be the arbiter itself on complex questions. The function of the university is to create a space where robust and ongoing debate can take place, on any and all questions of interest and relevance to our society.
In this space, academics – individuals – take up the task of making their case. That was what the vice-chancellor of the University of Auckland, Professor Dawn Freshwater, highlighted in her article titled “Let’s recreate a campus culture that enables vigorous academic debate” only three days before Smith’s.
In 1967, a period of significant societal change, the Kalven Committee at the University of Chicago, which was tasked to address questions similar to those raised by Smith concluded: “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars…
“A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.”
It is deeply concerning that a vicechancellor of a New Zealand university (my alma mater, no less) fails to recognise that it is not the university as an institution (thus, really just its leaders), but the university as a collection of academics, that has the crucial role of deliberating. This is to say, academic freedom does not exist for an ambiguous, ill-defined institution or only for the chancellor and vice-chancellor. It exists for individuals who are daring to challenge the status quo, society’s assumptions, and the questions we’re told we shouldn’t ask.
Nic Smith claims that “it is more important than ever that we can trust universities to help us again separate informed debate from the shouting”. If by universities he means a collection of individuals who are tasked to be, as the Education and Training Act states, “the critical and conscience of society”, he is absolutely correct.
Yet if by universities he means the amorphous “institutions”, replete with the pressures of budgetary cuts, middle management ambition, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) statements, and pressure from foreign governments (on whom we are very dependent for foreign students), he is wrong.
...academic freedom does not exist for an ambiguous, ill-defined institution, or only for the chancellor and vice-chancellor.
These are all credible threats to academic freedom and free speech. The cost of turning the university into a business, a culture of “managerialism”, identitarianism, and pressures from actors like the Chinese Communist Party all stand to undermine this freedom.
If the inheritor of academic freedom is the institution, then these challenges will mean more and more opinions and perspectives are silenced and excluded from debate. This will come at the significant cost of the innovation and adaptation we need to face the litany of challenges bearing down on us.
If the inheritors of academic freedom are the individuals who have distinguished themselves in their fields, who not only operate within the institution of the university, but who constitute the university, then their contributions will be fiercely challenged, but on the basis of their merits, not their political or corporate expediency.
Smith calls on David Seymour to “trust [universities] to help us isolate misinformation from information, polarisation from understanding, and absolutism from nuance”.
We call on Professor Smith to trust the thousands of academics who work for him to do this task, freely, as individual agents of progress and the pursuit of knowledge.