DEFENDING OUR UNIVERSITIES

Over the past 50 years, NSW has become a global hub for higher education. We have more universities than ever before ranked in the top 300 worldwide. 

International education has become our largest service based export industry – and our third largest export industry overall.

The quality of research from the likes of University of Sydney, UNSW, UTS, WSU, Wollongong, Macquarie, Newcastle, ACU, UNE, Notre Dame, SCU and Charles Sturt ensures that we are at the forefront of the 21st century knowledge economy.

Yet our universities face unprecedented challenges to their financial and cultural strength.

Financially, the increasing reliance on international student fees threatens both their long term fiscal sustainability and their academic independence.

Culturally, the rise of identity politics and far-left groupthink within certain faculties has created a monoculture that has narrowed robust debate to the point of non-existence. 

Indeed, some faculties are now so dominated by this groupthink, those with divergent views are either shouted down or shut out – creating an Orwellian culture of intellectualised bigotry.

These faculties are no longer places where diversity of thought seems to be accepted. Support Israel? You are a conservative troglodyte who supports the murder of children. Have religious beliefs? You are an anti-intellectual homophobe. Have a balanced view of European history and post-colonial Australia? You are a jingoistic imperialist with racist tendencies.

Rational academic debate often now seems secondary to spouting tokenistic tirades at conservative straw men.

This is not to say that there is not great merit in the political and philosophical arguments put forth by thinkers traditionally embraced by the left. 

Indeed, the contributions of thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim – and later, Juergen Habermas, are crucial parts of the sociological, philosophical and political landscape.

Without these scholars we would never have seen the rise of critical theory, challenges to traditional positivism, post-structuralism, or teleological models of social change.

But more and more frequently, both among the student cohort and faculty staff, there is a concerted push to restrict intellectual debate.

Universities are increasingly expected to be ‘safe spaces’ - free from ideas that have the capacity to offend.Confronting material used in lectures often now must include a trigger warning before being taught. Speakers with opinions perceived to be offensive are ‘no-platformed’.

This proliferation of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and no-platforming sanitises the university experience. You should go to university to be confronted and to have your outlook challenged.

Universities should not be spaces where you go to have your pre-existing opinions validated by an echo chamber.

If, at an intellectual level, you do not have the constitution to cope with hearing views that you find confronting, or even offensive, then you should perhaps reconsider whether a university is the right environment for you to learn in.

Those who support practices such as no-platforming counter this argument by saying that we have always had limits to freedom of speech – and that it would be inappropriate to allow, for example, a holocaust denying neo-Nazi to give a lecture on a university campus.

This is true. But existing anti-discrimination legislation already makes it very hard to spew hate speech and incite violence on campus.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, the individuals being no-platformed are not extremists – but simply those who either have a different opinion, or – more concerningly – are a member of a religion or a citizen of a country that virtue signalling activists have deemed oppressive.

And no country is a greater target of this censorious desire than Israel. 

Those of the Jewish faith, or those supportive of Israel’s right to exist are increasingly being targeted by self-righteous students and staff who use the thin veil of ‘political activism’ to disguise their naked anti-Semitism.

This anti-Semitism has reached a point where individuals whose areas of expertise have nothing at all to do with politics are being boycotted from simply because they are an Israeli Jew.

Recent examples of this include academics banding together to boycott a talk about cyber security by an Israeli writer, students and staff at a different university loudly interrupting a talk by a British army officer who served in Gaza by yelling through a megaphone and waving money in front of an elderly Jewish woman’sface, and an entire university department volunteering to host conferences for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement – a boycott campaign by Palestinians against Israel.

Imagine being a Jewish student that wants to study in these faculties. How would they feel? Would their work be read fairly? Would they be the target of anti-Semitic abuse? The fact that pro-BDS activists refuse to even listen to the arguments of those who take a less thancritical view of Israel shows that anti-Israel sentiment on campus has gone beyond ‘the right to protest’ - and is now straight up prejudice.

As one brave academic responded in an email to colleagues of hers trying to boycott a talk from an Israeli citizen, “how can one oppose what one does not know? How can you argue against his views if you have not heard them?”

Truer words have never been spoken. Real academics engage ideas openly. They don’t reject them out of hand because they have made a lazy ideological judgement about the person giving them.

The research and education provided by our universities is crucial in advancing freedom, equality and prosperity. Our Vice-Chancellors and faculties do an amazing job, and our universities are among the finest in the world. Nevertheless, we must confront the challenges of financial viability and genuine freedom to discuss ideas openly if our universities are to retain their competitive advantage in the 21st Century.