As Provost, Prof. James holds one of the university’s most senior positions. That made it all the more troubling to see how weak a grasp she has on the concept of free speech, something universities are required to uphold in the Education and Training Act.  

Prof. James’ piece is a series of reflections on Victoria’s panel discussion on free speech, which was held last year. ‘This event,’ she correctly says, ‘stirred strong feelings.’ But she then goes on to describe the event and the response to it in terms that can generously be described as misleading.  

Prof. James summarizes the response to Victoria’ free speech event as follows (to use her punctuation):  

What surfaced, from one direction, was genuine anxiety about amplifying views that might cause harm.  What this provoked from the other direction was, at best, a mischievous and provocative misinterpretation of the word “postponed” (swapping it for that most charged of words; “cancelled”).  At worst it was vitriolic petulance, best summed up in the quote, by one of the parties; “Good news, kids. It’s OK; words aren’t violence.”  

How Prof. James knows how genuine the anxiety about certain people’s views was is not clear. It is worth noticing, though, that many of the claims that student activists made about how worried people were about speech strained credulity.   

A few students, for example, were described as ‘freaking out’ over ‘right-wing voices,’ those voices apparently belonging to Free Speech Union director Jonathan Ayling and one of us (Michael), neither of whom are especially right-wing. VUWSA President Marcail Parkinson, for her part, said she was concerned that students would not have been able to ‘avoid that area’ – that is, the Kelburn campus’ central ‘Hub’ – ‘if they didn’t feel comfortable being around the debate.’   

But it seems hard to believe that anyone would be seriously discomfited by Ayling or Michael’s speech. Ayling spent three years at Vic, and Michael spent a decade there, both fairly recently. In neither case have there been reports of serious trauma being caused by their speech.   

Prof. James asserts that this ‘genuine anxiety’ provoked ‘at best, a mischievous and provocative misinterpretation of the word “postponed” (swapping it for that most charged of words; “cancelled”).’   

‘Postponed,’ of course, usually implies that the event is question has remained basically the same, but has simply been shifted to a different date. That is obviously not what happened in the case of Victoria University’s ‘free speech’ event. The original event was going to feature four speakers and be held in the Hub, a public area at the heart of Victoria’s Kelburn campus. The event that actually took place featured eight speakers and was held in a lecture theatre. It also had a changed format that ensured there was no exchange of arguments among the panellists. Most reasonable people would agree that saying that the original event was ‘cancelled’ would be perfectly fair.   

It is also not true to describe the response to the cancellation of the first event as ‘at best…mischievous and provocative.’ Sean Plunket invited VUWSA President Marcail Parkinson onto The Platform to discuss the cancellation. Jonathan Ayling was able to remind VUW leadership via the The Post that universities have an obligation to ‘allow for ideas to be thoroughly tested and for robust debate to occur.’ And Michael was able to make a number of important points about Victoria University, free speech and diversity, both in The Post and in an episode of our Free Kiwis! podcast.  

Finally, Prof. James describes a social media post by the Free Speech Union stating that ‘words aren’t violence’ as ‘vitriolic petulance.’ If the Provost of Victoria University views a simple statement of fact as ‘vitriolic petulance,’ what does that suggest about the climate for free speech there? At the very least, Prof. James’ reaction should remind us that what New Zealand academics describe as ‘harmful’ or ‘violent’ speech is often simply speech that they disagree with.

Prof. James goes on in her piece to reflect on the way ‘the internet has provided incredible ease of connection, and simultaneously created communication cul-de-sacs, that trap people in isolated cliques and sycophantic claques.’ She notes that free speech is protected in the UN Declaration of Human Rights alongside freedom of thought, and interestingly takes from this an ‘encouragement to pause before we express our opinions.’ And she reflects on how her ‘privilege is being in the white majority’ and in ‘revelling in robust argument,’ something she somewhat unexpectedly characterizes as ‘my approach to debate.’  

Prof. James ends her article with ‘a last word on words’ that deserves to be quoted in full:  

when I was walking to work a few mornings ago a pile of leaves was swirling down the curb and my mind said, “there is the wind”. The wind, though, was all around, strong and invisible and shaping the way I leaned into is as I walked.  We choose to notice some words, the lively, swirling ones; or the ones that blow stinging dust into our eyes.  We need to remember to notice all the other words; that have shaped our environment, our thoughts, and twisted some of us into beautiful, windswept oddities.  

This kind of lyricism is obviously something that recipients of Oko are free to spend some portion of their mornings on if they feel so inclined. But there are at least two things about James’ ‘thing about words’ that we found quite disturbing.  

The first is that this is an article sent to all academic staff by a very senior administrator (i.e. boss) at one of our leading universities. It is on the freedom of speech, the keystone principle of both liberalism and democracy, and a topic on which there is (understandably) an enormous literature in fields such as political theory, the philosophy of law, and intellectual history. Obviously, a full panoply of footnotes and scholarly references wouldn’t have been appropriate in an op-ed in a staff newsletter. But some indication that James wasn’t thinking about this most important of topics for the first time might have been reassuring.  

This is especially the case in view of the fact that we have been having a debate about free speech and academic freedom across the English-speaking world for at least a decade now (though admittedly this debate has tended to be more lively outside the academy than inside it, for obvious reasons).   

We have tried to contribute to this debate ourselves, most substantively in the report we released with the New Zealand Initiative last year. In it, we presented a number of surveys of academics and students, a selection of anonymous testimonies from academics, and a catalogue of incidents involving academic freedom that have taken place on our campuses over the past decade.   

Prof. James doesn’t have to cite our work. But the fact that she seems to feel no need to even mention any of the now overwhelming evidence that we have a problem with free speech at New Zealand universities is interesting, to say the least. ‘Can the modern University be the place where robust, relevant debate can happen?’ she asks, before immediately answering her own question, astonishingly blithely, ‘We already are!’   

It is of course true that a lot of ‘robust, relevant’ debate does take place at our universities. But it is also true (as several different surveys have now shown) that substantial numbers of academics and students feel uncomfortable discussing a few crucial topics, including the Treaty of Waitangi and the nature of sex and gender.   

Prof. James’ column appeared at just the right time, as the government was preparing its revisions to the Education and Training Act, revisions that will include enhanced protections for academic freedom. Draft legislation has now been released.   

What Prof. James’ column shows, yet again, is that New Zealand universities cannot be trusted to uphold their statutory or ethical obligations to academic freedom and the freedom of speech. Senior administrators either do not understand free speech, actively dislike it, or are not willing to openly defend it, and the same can be said for a good proportion of New Zealand’s academics. As Prof. James’ piece reminds us, they are often not even willing to educate themselves on the issue or to engage with the now plentiful evidence that academic freedom in under threat in an honest way.  

So make no mistake: senior administrators at our universities have neither the wit nor the wherewithal to restore genuine academic freedom themselves. It is vital not only the academic freedom legislation that is currently before the house passes, but also that it has teeth, and doesn’t naively trust our largely anti-free speech university managers to police themselves.

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This is our reply to Nic Smith:

In a column that appeared in The Post on 23 February, Victoria University of Wellington Vice-Chancellor Nic Smith criticizes the coalition’s commitment to have universities adopt a free speech policy.  

Smith notes that ACT Party leader David Seymour ‘has previously criticised universities for declining to host certain speakers and argued the institutions should lose funding if they don’t “protect free speech.”’ The vice-chancellor then states that ‘one inference of all this is that anyone who wants to speak on campus should be able to do so.’  

But it wouldn’t actually be valid to infer from Seymour’s criticisms of recent deplatformings at New Zealand universities that he thinks that ‘anyone who wants to speak on campus should be able to do so.’  

You can, of course, think that Vice-Chancellor Jan Thomas was wrong to prevent Don Brash from speaking to a student politics club in August 2018 (for example) and at the same time recognize that random people can’t simply turn up at a university without an invitation and expect to get a hearing.

Smith has set up a classic straw man. Unfortunately for him, it’s a straw man that he addresses the rest of his column to. ‘While it may seem antithetical to some,’ he declares, ‘I do not agree that universities platforming all-comers will help.’ But it’s not clear who exactly has been proposing this.

The vice-chancellor goes on, though, warning that ‘an all-comers approach will actually reduce our capacity to expose relevant truths and understand the world in new ways,’ and that ‘everybody having a platform will diminish our capacity for people to talk respectfully together about difficult topics and discuss conflicting ideas.’

It might well be the case that allowing absolutely anyone to speak on campus would make debating ideas on campus more difficult – even if the vice-chancellor doesn’t advance any actual arguments for that proposition.  

But again, we haven’t heard anyone insisting on an ‘all-comers approach’ to academic freedom in this country over the past few years.

What we are aware of is anger over episodes such as the de-platforming of Brash, the cancellation of the Feminism 2020 event (also at Massey), and the deplatforming of gender-critical feminist Daphna Whitmore at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in 2022.  

Smith doesn’t mention any of these cases though. Perhaps that’s because they make clear that the problem we have isn’t with ‘all-comers’ making debate on campus impossible. It’s with people with widely held views being prevented from debating certain issues.  

It is true, of course, that certain types of speech aren’t usually covered even by the strongest free speech laws. In US First Amendment law, for example, drowning out a speaker with heckling is usually considered a violation of the speaker’s rights.

So have the likes of Brash and gender-critical feminists been drowning out speakers at our universities with heckling?  If so, Smith might have some evidence for his fears about on-campus debate being limited by invited speakers.  

In fact, of course, it is the likes of Brash who tend to be heckled. When the former National Party leader was eventually allowed to speak at the University of Auckland in September 2018, NewsHub reported that the event ‘was marred by ugly scenes…with protesters immediately heckling him over a megaphone as he attempted to take part in the debate.’

When British gender-critical women’s activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull tried to speak in Auckland last year, she was surrounded by a crowd that jeered and shoved her, had tomato juice poured on her head, and eventually had to escape from the area with a police escort. That event wasn’t on a university campus, but it’s hard to imagine things would have gone differently if it had been.

And when seven Auckland academics sent a letter to The Listener magazine in 2021 politely expressing doubts about inserting mātauranga Māori in the science curriculum, two faced an investigation by the Royal Society, one was forced to resign from his administrative position, and another was temporarily removed from teaching.

It should come as no surprise that when Heterodox New Zealand (a group of dissident academics) and the Free Speech Union have conducted surveys of undergraduates and academics over the past couple of years, they found that substantial numbers of responding academics didn’t feel comfortable discussing hot-button topics like the Treaty of Waitangi and gender.  

Why doesn’t Smith address any of this? It probably isn’t because Smith (who made his academic reputation making computer models of the heart) simply doesn’t understand the issues. Could it be that the vice-chancellor, like a lot of people at universities these days, feels intimidated?

You might think that the vice-chancellor, who was paid $368,750 by the taxpayer-funded institution last year, should simply bite the bullet and risk offending a small number of bolshie students and staff. The Education Act does, after all, require universities to uphold academic freedom, and Smith is effectively Vic’s CEO. That even Smith doesn’t dare address the real problem speaks volumes about the situation that our universities now find themselves in.

It also speaks to the need for the kind of legislation that the coalition aims to introduce – and, in fact, for more robust measures as well.

 Just as in medieval universities, plenty of good work gets done, and most university workers aren’t particularly zealous. But there are limits on what you can and can’t discuss, and over time this has significantly distorted the university’s core purpose.

If this government stops at simply asking universities to commit to a free speech policy and leaves them to police themselves, managers like Smith will simply carry on posing as defenders of free speech while caving in to zealots at every turn. With few left on campus who are willing to oppose the zealots, why wouldn’t the managers act in this way?

What we need, in addition, is an academic freedom bill of the sort that has been successfully introduced in the UK. This enables staff and students whose rights have been breached to seek legal redress. It also sets up a ‘free speech czar’ (currently Dr. Arif Ahmed) who can make sure that universities are doing the job that they are paid to do – providing a genuinely open space for learning and investigation.

Cover photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

The post The problem with the vice-chancellor’s ‘free speech’ column appeared first on Open Inquiry.

The term etymology refers to the linguistic origin of a word. An etymological fallacy is committed when the meaning of a modern word is taken to be the same as that of an old word from which it derives. 

Like many words in the English language, education has Latin roots. It comes from educere, which means, ‘to draw out’. Believers in certain progressive theories of education love this. They use it to commit the etiological fallacy. Often.  

“Education”, they say, “means to ‘draw out’, not to ‘put in’. So a teacher’s job must be to facilitate children teaching themselves. A teacher should be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage”. 

By committing an etymological fallacy of my own, I can prove them wrong. 

The etymology of teacher is the old English word, tæcan, which means to give instruction, train, assign or direct. Obviously then, a teacher’s job must be to do these things, not to ‘facilitate’.  

(Incidentally, the origin of facilitate, is another Latin word, facilis, which means ‘easy to do’. That might help to explain why progressive teachers like this approach so much.) 

A minor problem with the notion that children can teach themselves, is that they can’t. Not, at least, things that took the human race many thousands of years to work out – things like literacy, arithmetic and science. 

Progressive educators would like to avoid this problem by refocussing education on things that children can acquire without being directly taught. In the New Zealand Curriculum, these things are called ‘key competencies’.  

The key competencies include ‘managing self’, ‘relating to others’ and ‘participating and contributing’. Placing these things at the heart of the curriculum leaves teachers free to ‘facilitate’ and releases them from having to teach the hard stuff. 

I propose abolishing education and replacing it with edification. If we did, progressive educators committing etymological fallacies would cease to be a threat to children’s learning. 

The etymology of edify, also from Latin, is aedificare, which means to build or establish. Edification, then, is much more consonant with an etymological interpretation of teacher than education is. A teacher instructs, trains, assigns and directs, in order to build up and establish knowledge. 

If we’re going to commit etymological fallacies, let us at least choose ones that don’t entail wasting human potential. 

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