Only a few days after the University of Auckland’s so-called academic freedom policy was rejected by the university’s Senate, Victoria University of Wellington’s own academic freedom policy has come to light.
Victoria’s policy is likely a response to the government’s stated intention to make such policies a condition for government funding.
But would Victoria’s policy really protect academic freedom? Or is this just one more sign that the universities can’t be trusted to put their own house in order?
The policy has some positive aspects. Victoria pledges to ‘remain neutral on public matters,’ thus belatedly joining the many leading US institutions that have committed to institutional neutrality this past year. Victoria’s policy also explicitly says it will protect academics’ ability ‘to criticise this university,’ something that will be welcomed by the many academics who fear retribution from senior administrators for speaking their minds.
The policy also ‘affirms the right to freedom of expression’ of staff members, students, and ‘visitors’ to the university – a welcome sign that Victoria wants to help end a recent rash of ‘deplatformings’ at universities across the English-speaking world.
Here, though, there are a few caveats. Any talks or events held at Victoria should be ‘read in conjunction with the Campus Life Policy’ and bear in mind any ‘health and safety’ issues, whether the event is ‘consistent with the purposes and values of the University,’ whether it ‘furthers understanding,’ and whether ‘there would be an unreasonable risk of disseminating misinformation or disinformation.’
If Victoria’s position is that visitors should be free to say what they want as long as some people don’t think it’s an intentional or unintentional falsehood (‘misinformation or disinformation’), then the university obviously doesn’t understand the first thing about free speech. The caveats don’t just undermine the previous proclamation of academic freedom, they completely overturn it.
This is something of a pattern.
Take, for example, the whole series of caveats to do with ‘health, safety,’ and ‘wellbeing.’ Along with its obligations to free speech, we are told, Victoria also ‘has a duty of care to its staff and students, and responsibilities for health, safety and wellbeing.’ And these duties, would you believe it, 'place limitations on academic freedom and freedom of expression.’
‘Health and safety obligations’ have a curious tendency to shut down certain types of speech. The notion that students need to be kept ‘safe’ from ideas has played a role in several recent violations of academic freedom in this country.
These include the deplatforming of Don Brash at Massey University in 2019 and Daphna Whitmore at AUT in 2022. It was also one of the reasons that Vice-Chancellor Nic Smith was forced to re-schedule (and re-programme) his panel on free speech at Victoria last year.
The ‘health and safety’ caveats are not the only ones. Decisions about academic freedom, the policy declares, ‘should be made in the light of the relevant legal frameworks, this policy and other University policy documents, including but not limited, to the Staff Conduct Policy, the University values, and the principles of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi Statute.’ (Punctuation is as in the policy document.)
What exactly the Treaty of Waitangi has to do with academic freedom isn’t spelled out, though the Treaty of Waitangi Statute that Victoria adopted in 2019 lists several key principles, including kāwanatanga, rite tahi, and whakaoranga. Sadly, it’s a different list to the one included as another series of caveats in the academic freedom policy. This one includes kaitiakitanga, manaakitanga, and akoranga, but not the three principles above.
It’s good to see that Victoria is eager to help revitalise te reo Māori. But it might have been better to limit its employees and students’ fundamental speech rights with a briefer, less jumbled, and more readily-comprehensible list of principles.
A final example of how this policy takes away with one hand what it claims to give with another comes when Victoria’s academics are encouraged ‘to act as public intellectuals and participate in public debate on topics that fall within their discipline and professional experience.’
But why shouldn’t academics comment on topics that fall outside their discipline and professional experience? Doesn’t everyone do that from time to time? And shouldn’t academics – whose speech rights are protected in the Education and Training Act – be more free to speak than the average citizen, not less?
Victoria University’s academic freedom policy is just another sign that our universities are now dominated by people who either don’t understand free speech or are too cowardly to defend it. The government needs to move swiftly to take the matter out of the universities’ hands and introduce legislation that will help ensure that these public institutions are doing what we pay them to do.
To read the article on The Post website, click here.