Marty Sharpe
An activist group has raised $500,000 to fight free speech battles in New Zealand. But how serious is the threat? Philip Matthews reports.
It looked idyllic: this patch of flat, fertile land bounded by a stream and low hills, a 20-minute drive inland from Wairoa, an hour and 20 minutes south of Gisborne.
The picturesque valley was the chosen site for a self-reliant ecovillage of like-minded people wanting to live sustainable, creative and fulfilling lives.
To be known as Kotare Village, it was conceived by respected gurus of the permaculture movement Bob Corker, his wife Kay Baxter, and their charitable trust, the Koanga Institute.
It attracted plenty of interest, largely among well-educated professionals from diverse fields. But when the buyers became concerned about a lack of any development, the peace was shattered.
There have been ongoing claims and counter-claims about the financial position of the trust running the project, legal challenges and a general breakdown of the relationship between the parties.
The institute, founded on Corker’s farm north of Auckland in 1980, collects and stores heritage vegetable and fruit seeds and runs workshops and educational courses. It moved its headquarters to Kotare in 2011.
Corker and Baxter planned to strengthen the Koanga Institute and put it ‘‘at the centre of the transformation encompassed in Kotare village’’.
They made 24 to 28 sections of 400 square metres to 2000m2 available for lease. Anyone buying a lease became a member of the Kotare Community Land Trust (KCLT).
Land trust model appeals
A community land trust is a model of affordable housing and community development. It’s a non-profit corporation that holds the land on which members lease sites and develop a community. They began in the United States in the 1960s and there are now hundreds throughout North America, Europe and Britain.
Land trust structures vary, but usually they are governed by three parties to represent interests of all involved: the residents, the leasees, and a third group typically consisting of professionals like bankers, lawyers or planners, who provide expert advice to the trust. Each has a third share of a governing board.
Importantly, the KCLT consisted of just two parties – one representing the leasees, and one representing the Koanga Institute.
At Kotare, those joining the village leased a site on which to build a house and gardens. They’d have access to community areas, reserves and walking tracks, an opportunity to lease or license other resources within the farm, and to participate in co-operative economic development.
Leases went for between $59,000 and $99,000. They ran for 34 years, to be renewed every 10 years thereafter, essentially making them perpetual.
As interest in the proposal grew, 15 leased sites were purchased, with proceeds paid to the trust.
Some learned of the village through word of mouth. Others heard about it when attending Koanga workshops, and others found it through a link on the Koanga website.
The ‘pioneers’
The first lot of buyers became known as ‘‘the pioneers’’. They were the first of what was to be a 150-strong community. Among them was Matteo Garbagnati, an Auckland-based architect who heard about the village through the permaculture network and while he was learning about intentional communities.
In 2017 Garbagnati and partner Gabriela Kopacikova, also an architect, began looking for an alternative way of living. They had joined other families in looking to start a co-housing development in Auckland, but soon worked out the lack of space and the cost would be prohibitive.
‘‘When we heard about Kotare it sounded very much like they’d already done a lot of the work we were trying to do, such as setting up a legal structure and finding land. It ticked quite a few boxes we liked. We weren’t looking to go rural, but we decided to give it a try,’’ he says.
Like others, Garbagnati and Kopacikova travelled down to the site for a weekend hui involving an introduction and presentation on what was planned.
‘‘We liked it, a lot, so signed up and paid for a lease. With our knowledge of permaculture and organics we were well aware of who Bob and Kay were and of the Koanga Institute. They had a very good reputation.
‘‘We wanted to live in a community. If you live in a city or town you have a lot of houses around you but don’t necessarily know the people around. We also wanted to live lighter and simpler on the planet.’’
The couple paid $79,000 for their lease and began making weekend trips while building a tiny house on the site. They moved permanently in early 2019, intending to live in it until they’d built a larger house nearby.
Renee Morin is another pioneer. The FrenchCanadian reading recovery teacher had been living in Auckland for 11 years. A keen gardener, she learned of the village through her membership of the Koanga Institute.
‘‘I just really got attracted by the idea of living in an eco-village and, with the leaders in organic gardening, living in a community of like-minded people,’’ she says.
She also attended a weekend hui at the site.
‘‘They gave us this wonderful tour, showing us the land. It was all wrapped in such a way that sounded so good. Of course, I and the others trusted these people.
‘‘So I bought my piece of land, took a year off work, bought a little house truck and I moved in.’’
Anne Hurly, a doctor based in Auckland, had been a long-time supporter of the Koanga Institute.
‘‘I bought their seeds and got the newsletters and everything like that.
‘‘They were promoting the place in their newsletters with a link through to the website. It sort of all sounded very good when you
spoke to them and went along to the hui,’’ she says.
‘‘This wasn’t going to be some little hippie commune with everyone living in sacks and tents
. . . this was going to be a proper village. The people involved were from all sorts of professions. This eco-greenie thing is not just about hippies any more. It’s mainstream.’’
The involvement of Koanga was a major draw for Hurly.
It was registered as a charity and had a ‘‘very big reputation’’. ‘‘You expect a charity to be above board, of course.’’
Carolyn Campbell was living in Whakatā ne when she heard about Kotare through friends. She bought a lease a month after attending a weekend hui in 2015.
She employed a contractor to build a house, which is partcompleted. She now works in Wairoa.
‘‘I trusted that it was what people said it was and would operate in the way they said.
You believe these people because they’re doing good work at Koanga. All that trust has been destroyed now,’’ she says.
What went wrong?
In early 2018, concerned at the dearth of any development, the villagers decided to take a closer look at the trust’s finances. They discovered it had run out of money and was unable to pay its bills. Worse still, the trust was in debt to the tune of nearly $400,000.
The villagers discovered Koanga had paid just $150,000 to the trust for 3.87ha of land (or $3.90/m2), including the only liveable house with all-weather road access, while they, the leaseholders, had paid a combined total of $1.26 million and got 1.75ha of bare land (or $72.40/m2).
They were stunned.
The money paid to KCLT was supposed to have gone towards developing the village, creating the roads and infrastructure such as a commercial kitchen and ablution blocks. Apart from water reticulation and fibre internet cables to each site – installed using volunteer labour – little else has eventuated, the villagers say.
Things became heated between Bob Corker and Kay Baxter and the villagers.
Questions were going unanswered, accusations were made.
Numerous meetings in which solutions were sought achieved nothing.
It quickly became apparent to the villagers the structure of the trust meant they would never be in a position to fix what had gone wrong.
The trust had been set up so the Koanga Institute would have 50 per cent of voting power – meaning it could effectively veto anything the villagers wanted to do.
Corker and Baxter, who were similarly unhappy with the arrangement, resigned from the trust in November 2018, citing ‘‘abuse, harassment and false allegations against them’’.
They said the villagers had denigrated them and deliberately failed to comply with KCLT’s constitution.
The villagers were aided in large part by one of their members, Wendy Booyens, a business analyst who moved from Auckland with husband Joe to live in the village.
Booyens and the villagers began investigating matters.
What they discovered left them flabbergasted and, in June 2019, they wrote to AttorneyGeneral David
Parker and requested an investigation of the trust as a matter of ‘‘extreme urgency’’.
Claims and counter-claims
The villagers told
Parker they’d discovered they were the fourth cycle of residents at the village and that much of the money they had put into Kotare had been used to pay debt incurred by a company behind the earlier village, Woodend Ventures Ltd. Corker was managing director and a shareholder of that company.
The villagers had been told nothing about the former attempts to start the village, they told Parker.
They said that, when Woodend was wound up and its assets transferred to KCLT, five of the 28 sections at the village, with a value of more than $400,000, had been transferred to Corker, Baxter and the Koanga Institute.
They also alleged Corker had invoiced the trust for past wages without any details of the work he had done, and that a private farming company owned by Corker and Baxter had been using trust land for grazing at no charge and without a lease agreement for years.
They alleged mismanagement of finances, reckless spending, failure to manage debt and operating while insolvent, and asked Parker to investigate ‘‘so that we can be free of the breaches of trust of these people, and the ongoing legacy of harm they leave behind them’’.
Parker told the villagers he couldn’t investigate the trust because it wasn’t a charity. An attempt to have the trust registered as a charity in 2015 had been refused by Charities Services because its purposes were not considered to be exclusively charitable.
Relations between the parties reached a low point in December 2019.
The villagers informed the Koanga Institute that KCLT had cancelled its lease, changed locks on the house belonging to the institute, chained gates and employed security guards.
It meant Koanga trustees were locked out of the house for about five days, until matters settled and new keys were handed over.
Within days of being locked out, Corker, Baxter and the other Koanga Institute trustee, Peter Alexander (owner of Chantal Foods), went to the High Court seeking to put the trust into liquidation. They wanted the land to be sold and proceeds divided equally.
They said the villagers had acted in bad faith, had been dishonest, and had caused financial loss.
The villagers rejected the claims and filed a counter-claim.
They allege the trust had been formed primarily as a means for Corker to raise funds to avoid the insolvency of Woodend Ventures, and that the price the trust paid for the land, $753,000, was based on the amount owed by Woodend, not the value of the land, which had a rateable value at the time of around $450,000.
In total, the Koanga Institute trustees had received $998,406 from 16 couples or individuals for leases.
Financial review raises serious questions
In the early part of 2020 the villagers invited Corker, Baxter and Koanga Institute to jointly instruct forensic accountants to undertake an independent examination of KCLT’s financial dealings.
When that invitation was declined, the villagers engaged Crowe NZ Audit Partnership to undertake a review of the trust and related activities, without Corker, Baxter and Koanga Institute’s participation.
The review, completed in July 2020, raised some serious questions.
‘‘The structure of the entire arrangement raises many concerns given the highly interrelated nature of the entities and parties involved,’’ it stated.
The report said the fact Corker controlled Woodend and was a trustee of both Koanga and the village trust meant he ‘‘was involved and could significantly influence the decisions made throughout the entire process’’.
It noted several costs incurred by Koanga and Woodend had been paid for by the village trust and that, in the period up to March 2016, the trust had taken on debt in the form of loans from members to the tune of $389,085 – none of which had been documented or authorised by trustees.
The report also said the Koanga Institute trustees were not meeting their duties required of a charity under the Charities Act and found evidence of ‘‘significant conflicts of interest’’ that had not been managed.
‘‘Trustees have a number of legal duties and responsibilities. There is little evidence that those duties and responsibilities have been appropriately met (in regard to trustees of KCLT) and legal advice should be sought as to whether breaches of duties and responsibilities have occurred,’’ the report concluded.
‘‘Trustees have a number of legal duties and responsibilities’’
Koanga Institute launches legal action
The Koanga Institute (which in the latest financial reports received $475,000 in gifts and donations) applied to have the villagers’ counter-claim struck out. Justice Francis Cooke heard the application in the High Court at Napier on February 2 last year.
He accepted there was a basis for the villagers’ claims under the Fair Trading Act and that the claims could not be struck out. He did, however, say the claims could not be made on a representative basis, and must be pursued individually. He told the villagers to file an amended statement of counterclaim within 20 working days. Because the villagers had been substantially successful, they were awarded costs.
The amended statement of defence and counterclaim was filed with the court in March last year. That was followed a month later with Koanga filing a statement in reply to the counterclaims, in which they were denied.
The parties tried mediation, but nothing of note was achieved. Koanga offered to buy out the five villagers who had taken the legal action against them, but that was declined. Other offers, by both sides, have been made since.
The legal fight has been a costly exercise for all concerned.
The matter was down for a callover hearing last week, but was put off because Koanga said it was looking to find funds to buy most of the villagers out and to settle debts.
Where to now?
While some villagers were happy to be bought out, others were not.
Among those wishing to stay are
Garbagnati and Kopacikova, who had a son, Leo, in mid-2020. They moved to a house in Wairoa in March 2021.
They go back up to their tiny house every now and then, and still hold hope of one day building their house on the site.
‘‘We’re still attracted to the potential the village holds, and being part of developing that. But as it stands, we’re not sure what the future holds. We’ve been in deadlock for a long time now. It’s hard to see how we can get around that with Bob and Kay still involved,’’ Garbagnati says.
Campbell also wants to stay. She lives in a caravan at the site and sees Corker and Baxter on the land occasionally.
‘‘I have a beautiful site here. I’m building a house, and I’m happy with that, but we do need to sort the governance out and the money that is missing,’’she says.
Morin, who now lives and works in Wairoa, says she could never return to live at the site, despite having a tiny house on her lease block. ‘‘It’s still there. It’s beautiful, but I couldn’t live there. It’s toxic.’’
Hurly, who is also in Wairoa, thinks it unlikely she will return to the village. ‘‘I just can’t see a future tied up with those people. Unless Bob and Kay packed their bags and moved out absolutely and completely and left everyone alone, I won’t be back,’’ she says.
Koanga vows to ‘vigorously defend’ allegations
Lawyer Jol Bates, on behalf of Corker and Koanga, says allegations and claims raised by the villagers are being ‘‘vigorously defended’’, and it is for the High Court to hear and make determinations. ‘‘My clients see little is to be gained by rehearsing in public through trial by media the various factual and legal positions they have in their defence.’’
His clients are endeavouring to put together a new proposal for ‘‘full and final settlement of all matters in dispute’’. The court adjournment had been proposed for the purpose of exploring settlement, to avoid costs.
‘‘It is disappointing [that] . . . there are apparently some who wish to continue making disparaging comments about my clients when there are efforts to resolve all matters, and ultimately the allegations are still before the court to determine the merits of if a settlement is not achieved.’’
He says the Crowe report was not an audit, not independent and ‘‘none of our clients were spoken to in the course of its preparation, and nor were they provided with the material fed to Crowe’’. ‘‘In short, the authors of this untested document are merely borrowing the watch of the counterclaimants to tell them the time.’’
The Koanga Institute continues operating at Kotare, with Corker and Baxter living on the site.
Two or three villagers, including Campbell, are living on their leased sections, and another two or three live there occasionally.
The other sites, most of which have some form of liveable structures on them, are vacant, though a couple are leased to Koanga Institute employees.
It’s a far cry from what was to have been, according to Corker and Baxter’s promotional material, ‘‘a shared dream of embracing a regenerative future through independent village living, local economies and co-evolution’’.
The cancellation was both bizarre and completely predictable. Even those who were cancelled didn’t look entirely surprised by it.
This happened in Auckland on Tuesday. Activist Daphna Whitmore hoped to present a public talk at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) on the subject of ‘‘feminism, advocacy and free speech’’.
Those on campus would have heard Whitmore lead ‘‘a discussion about free speech in the context of often polarising transgendergender-critical feminism debate’’, according to a Facebook post.
Ninety-nine people on Facebook said they were interested. Eighteen said they were definitely going. Or weren’t going, as it turned out.
The back story is that Whitmore took on the Palmerston North City Council and won after the council cancelled a booking for her group to speak in a library in 2021. The group, Stand Up for Women (SUFW), had issues with amendments to the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act that allows people to identify their own gender on a birth certificate.
The law passed in 2021 and transgender people can now identify their gender without medical, financial or legal barriers, as Internal Affairs Minister Jan Tinetti put it.
Small but vocal groups of activists on both sides made this an issue out of all proportion to its actual impact, especially on social media.
But the greater point was that SUFW won a ruling in which Justice Gerald Nation said the Palmerston North City Council failed to recognise SUFW’s rights under the Bill of Rights Act. It was later revealed that the council spent $30,436 on fighting the group in court.
When the talk finally went ahead, it drew an audience of about 20 people.
And then history repeated at AUT. Whitmore and Jonathan Ayling, the chief executive and spokesperson of the Free Speech Union (FSU), made a short video that asked the rhetorical question, ‘‘Is there no end to woke intolerance?’’
Ayling said AUT told the FSU there was a bureaucratic hurdle. But Ayling and Whitmore were sure that lobbying led to the cancellation.
Indeed, the Rainbow NZ Charitable Trust applauded AUT’s decision to cancel, and said in an online posting that ‘‘AUT spokesperson and trust board member Jessie Lewthwaite said ‘AUT will not allow hate speech masquerading as free speech to be platformed on any of our campuses’ ’’.
Lewthwaite is AUT’s rainbow community co-ordinator, but is she really a spokesperson?
‘‘No,’’ says AUT’s corporate communications manager, Cathy Wood. However, ‘‘she’s a highly valued employee at AUT and we’re grateful to have Jessie’s knowledge, connections to the community and skills to support our students’’.
Wood reiterated that a technicality saw the FSU banned from campus.
‘‘AUT recognises the right of trade unions to host meetings with their members on our campuses. An event planned by the Free Speech Union had been advertised as a university lecture and as a result, AUT cancelled the room booking.’’
One way of thinking about what happened at AUT on Tuesday is that banning a group draws much more attention to a marginal cause than letting a relatively small meeting go ahead.
This is known as the Streisand Effect.
The ban only strengthens the FSU’s case, as nothing proves there is ‘‘woke intolerance’’ like the woke actually being intolerant.
Ayling says the FSU is taking legal action and will be holding the event again. He also says his paperwork was in order and the AUT’s line was ‘‘a quintessential bureaucratic dismissal’’.
As for the greater purpose, ‘‘we have academics who are union members at every university in the country, and the purpose of these events was to both grow our membership and support those whose speech is being undermined in the academic contexts’’.
‘Authoritarian impulses’
Yes, he said ‘‘events’’. Whitmore’s event was to be the first in a series, followed by former newspaper editor Karl du Fresne talking about safe spaces and free speech in Wellington on Thursday and former National Party leader Don Brash talking about ‘‘the unfinished work of free speech’’ at Massey University in Palmerston North on May 5.
The Brash event is another sequel, or possibly a victory lap, as he was cancelled by the same university in 2018, before his talk was reinstated.
The series of provocative oncampus events follows a survey of New Zealand academics, who were asked about academic freedom.
Working with polling company Curia, the FSU found the email addresses of around 17,000 academics and sent them a questionnaire.
They got 1266 responses, or around 7%, and Curia principal David Farrar has conceded that the low response rate and the fact it was self-selecting was a ‘‘limiting factor’’ but he felt the range of opinions meant a reasonable crosssection of academic staff were consulted.
Ayling says this was the FSU’s first annual survey on academic freedom, as ‘‘we see the cultural shift which is occurring, where free speech is viewed with suspicion at best, and often just outright antagonism, as stemming most aggressively from the university’’.
This partly refers to the stoush over mā tauranga Mā ori and science, which saw seven leading academics fall out with their own university.
Ayling believes the FSU survey is the first of its kind in New Zealand, which is ‘‘problematic, given the responsibilities
universities have under the Education and Training Act 2020. As a statutory duty, more work should be done to assess the reality of academic freedom and free speech on campuses.
‘‘It is either well protected, and universities can then demonstrate they are doing a good job, or it’s not, and our law requires them to do better. Of course, our results show they really must do better.’’
But what are the results? The academics were asked generally about the freedom to express ideas, and then specifically about the Treaty of Waitangi and colonialism, and sex and gender issues, which have been recurring subjects for the FSU and its campaigners. While there were regional variations, these were also the main concerns of respondents.
As the FSU press release says, ‘‘In terms of freedom to debate or discuss Treaty issues, 30% said it was very low and 36% said it was very high. It is unknown if this correlates to what their actual views on Treaty issues might be’’.
Ayling found these results to be ‘‘dramatic and deeply concerning’’.
When it comes to the Treaty and colonialism, ‘‘if almost one-third of our academics feel constrained on an issue of such significance and prominence, I believe it is credible to think structural issues are limiting crucial speech rights.
‘‘Given the response to mā tauranga Mā ori and the interaction we’ve had with many academics over the past year, we knew there was a problem in this space.’’
There might be a degree of hyperbole there, which is not unusual. In a podcast recorded soon after the AUT cancellation, Ayling called the cancellation nothing less than ‘‘a critical juncture for the cultural direction of our nation’’.
A survey of students is next, Ayling says.
Political commentator Bryce Edwards, who runs the Democracy Project at Victoria University, developed the survey results into a much larger argument about cancel culture at New Zealand universities.
He wrote that ‘‘this elite leftwing approach is very compatible with a more censorious approach to politics and that partly explains the authoritarian impulses we are seeing today’’.
But he clarified that his own university was actually ‘‘very supportive’’ of his attempts to fulfil his critic and conscience role.
Other academics were much more sceptical of the survey. ‘‘I make nothing of the results,’’ says Jack Heinemann, who has been at the University of Canterbury since 1994 and founded Academic Freedom Aotearoa.
‘‘The replies were polarised. I see no apparent trends.’’
He says ‘‘the press release added up some results to contrast with others, but these were arbitrary, and I could not distinguish between them being indicative or only grouped in such a way as to create the impression that there was evidence for a preferred conclusion’’.
In short, he was unconvinced. As was Sandra Grey, national secretary of the Tertiary Education Union, who warns against confusing free speech and academic freedom. Talking about cancellations of Whitmore and Brash, Grey says, ‘‘The right or otherwise of a nonacademic to speak on campus is not an academic freedom issue.’’ Heinemann says, of the survey: ‘‘My initial and lingering take is that FSU is conflating freedom of speech and academic freedom, misleading any of my colleagues who may also be unclear of what the distinction is and why it matters, and then drawing them into a murky scenario where academic freedom is framed as in conflict with the rights of Aotearoa’s indigenous peoples.’’
Science or mythology?
There is a generalisation that free speech used to be a left-wing cause and is now a right-wing one. Back in the 1960s and 70s, radical leftists challenged bans of political and artistic expression. Think of the censorship battles fought by film festivals and art galleries against those promoting ‘‘community standards’’, among many other examples. Now, so the story goes, we have a progressive orthodoxy and woke leftists are in charge, meaning the political right now act like an oppressed and silenced minority.
The traditional political signals are scrambled. Think of the bizarre vision of a Labour prime minister made to look like Hitler and accused of running a communist dictatorship, as was seen during the recent Wellington occupation.
That might oversimplify the trend but it is true that the FSU began life as the Free Speech Coalition, which campaigned to allow far-right, anti-Islamic extremists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux to speak in Auckland. The group has been portrayed as vaguely right-wing ever since.
Ayling, who worked for National MPs David Bennett and Simeon Brown, is at pains to point out that the
FSU has members from across the political spectrum.
Its governing board contains both former
ACT MP Stephen Franks and left-wing journalist
Chris Trotter, and volunteers include a Marxist blogger and a church pastor.
‘‘We don’t take stances on substantive issues because we couldn’t, even if we wanted to,’’ he says. ‘‘We simply agree that individuals should be allowed to peacefully make their case.’’
Free speech is not so much left versus right, he says, but libertyorientated versus authoritarian.
Had the Free Speech Coalition formed to advocate for a pair of leftwing speakers rather than two right-wingers, ‘‘it would have been interesting, and the tone would have been slightly different, but I don’t believe it would have made a big difference in the long run’’.
The FSU now has 75,000 supporters, meaning those who have signed up for the emails, and more than 4000 of them donated nearly $500,000 over the past year. It has two full-time staff.
Ayling initially came onboard to run a campaign against proposed hate speech laws, which saw the FSU generate 15,000 of the nearly 20,000 submissions against the nowdelayed laws.
Justice Minister Kris Faafoi has said that ‘‘strong feedback’’ played a major part in the delay. Ayling adds that the FSU generated 92% of the submissions against Netsafe’s online safety code, and ‘‘succeeded in forcing them back to the drawing board’’.
But the big one, a genuine academic freedom issue, involved the so-called ‘‘Listener Seven’’.
It started in July 2021 with a letter to the magazine from seven Auckland University professors, including the distinguished psychologist Michael Corballis, arguing that mā tauranga Mā ori, or Mā ori knowledge, should not be taught in schools as part of NCEA science.
It went back and forth. The university’s vice-chancellor, Dawn Freshwater, publicly chastised the seven for the ‘‘hurt and dismay’’ they caused.
Not only did the Royal Society Te Apā rangi not back the errant professors, it planned to drag Corballis, who has since died, Garth Cooper and Robert Nola before a disciplinary committee. Cooper and Nola eventually resigned.
When he resigned, Nola wrote that ‘‘the main issue underlying this dispute has to do with freedom of speech in the area of science. It has been long recognised that science best advances when it is open to the critical discussion of any of its doctrines, whether alleged to be indigenous or not.’’
By last month, 70 of the Royal Society’s 400 fellows had called a no-confidence motion in the society, which finally backed down.
Auckland University will hold a symposium on mā tauranga Mā ori and science.
In a long letter published in the New Zealand Medical Journal this month, titled ‘‘In defence of mā tauranga Mā ori: a response to the ‘seven academics’’’, Waikaremoana Waitoki, a clinical psychologist and senior research fellow at the University of Waikato, saw ‘‘white saviour’’ thinking in the way some academics and their supporters portrayed the situation.
‘‘This is where Mā ori are told which elements of our indigenous knowledge are important and to whom,’’ Waitoki wrote, adding that ‘‘the writers
(as is their inherent privilege) relegate
Mā ori knowledge to archival value, ceremony, management and policy’’.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the argument about science and indigenous knowledge, many agree it was poorly handled by both the university and the Royal Society. And it was something of a godsend to the FSU.
They helped turn it into an international drama. Scientists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker went into bat for the renegade professors. ‘‘No indigenous myths from anywhere in the world, no matter how poetic or hauntingly beautiful, belong in science classes,’’ Dawkins wrote, in a stern letter to the Royal Society.
Spectator magazine associate editor Toby Young was just as critical and even printed the email address of the Royal Society’s chief executive in case readers wanted to complain. Young is also founder and director of the UK’s Free Speech Union, which New Zealand’s FSU is associated with.
It was a revealing stoush, almost an intellectual equivalent to arguments about co-governance, asking how different knowledge systems can collaborate or co-exist.
It also gave FSU a boost in confidence.
‘‘The Royal Society backed down because of pressure on them from prominent international critics like Dawkins and Jerry Coyne who only engaged the issue because we publicised the fact that the professors were being investigated,’’ Ayling says.
‘‘We are getting major runs on the board, and we’ve only been going less than one year. The more battles we fight, the more our supporters also realise that free speech is the foundational right on which all our democratic liberties are founded. It is from free speech that our other rights emerge.’’
Not the woke but the managers
But there is another way of looking at academic freedom. This view says that academics are not constrained by the fear of offending against progressive values, but by the very real pressures at a time when universities are stretched and understaffed.
The battle is not with woke-ism, they say, but with managerialism and neoliberalism. When Sandra Grey thinks of constrained academic freedom she has two recent examples, which are ‘‘tertiary institutions reprimanding academics for research that management doesn’t agree with, and using confidentiality statements to constrain the ability of academics to speak out when they see their fields harmed by restructuring. ‘‘Managerialism, the overall strain on resources, and the constant threat of restructuring also has a chilling effect on academics, who feel fearful of repercussions for pursuing research that is unpopular with their managers.’’ Jack Heinemann agrees. The academic freedom issues he hears about are from within the community itself rather than university versus academic or society versus academic. But the latter conflicts are the most visible and contentious. ‘‘Most of the former are either dispatched appropriately through academic processes or left to fester, leading to issues of staff disengagement or bitterness. The cumulative toll is huge and comes from a failure of proper management and proper training of managers and staff. But each individual case is small scale and most go unnoticed by most.’’ As other academics have said, it’s hard to speak freely if you think you might be made redundant or your department will cease to exist. Ayling doesn’t disagree that academic freedom can be threatened by managerialism and neoliberalism, but says ‘‘we have been approached to work on opposition from the censorious ‘woke’. According to our members, it is the greater threat.
‘‘Were academics to approach us and outline the fact that academic freedom and speech are being limited by the other factors, we would happily work with them to address that.’’
There is yet another dimension to this. In the same week that Whitmore was cancelled, and Du Fresne got to speak, seven male academics from Massey University posted an article on The Conversation website arguing that while ‘‘a great deal has been written about threats to academic freedom’’, including from ‘‘intrusive or riskaverse university managers, the pressures to commercialise universities’ operations and governments bent on surveilling and stifling internal dissent’’, misogyny should not be overlooked. Misogynistic attacks on female academics and students are a subset of wider misogyny, including in politics.
The example was given of academics Rebekah Tromble in the Netherlands and Patricia Rossini in the US, who were bombarded with rape and death threats when they researched civility and tolerance online.
‘‘With academic freedom comes the moral responsibility to challenge misogyny and not stay silent,’’ the Massey seven argued.
‘‘As male academics we have an obligation not just to call out these sorts of behaviour but also to identify some of the corrosive consequences of the misogyny directed against women academics, wherever they may work.’’
In this case, freedom to be heard could also come with an equivalent duty to speak up for others.