Safety is for some students but not others at the University of Sydney.

This is an extraordinary story from The Daily Telegraph in Sydney on Friday last week. It received a few hours of media attention and then disappeared.

University of Sydney boss Mark Scott says Jewish students will have to tough out being ‘uncomfortable’ in the face of anti-Israel slogans, defending the response of Australian universities to pro-Palestine encampments imported from the United States.

Explicit calls for violence and endorsements of terrorism are banned under the university’s code of conduct, under which Professor Scott promised ‘disciplinary action will be taken’ however, the USYD Vice-Chancellor confirmed chants such as ‘from the river to the sea’ and calls for an ‘intifada’ against Israel do not meet that threshold.

Professor Scott described the phrases, which Jewish organisations have described as ‘hate speech’ and anti-Semitism, as the ‘discomfort’ of maintaining free speech.

‘We do need to be able to…separate criticism of Israel and Israel’s foreign policy conduct…I don’t think that is automatically anti-Semitic,’ he said.

‘I can understand that it is uncomfortable for some of our Jewish staff and students to have the encampment here, and they would prefer it not to be there.  I’m very sympathetic to that view.  That is, how our university and (other) places committed to free speech will operate.

‘People will be upset from time to time by things that they hear, by things that they see, by the presence of people who hold strongly divergent views from them, but as a university, we need to be able to manage that diversity of views.’

That’s not the position Scott or the university took on the Voice to parliament.  The University of Sydney has one position for indigenous students, and one position for Jewish students and anyone else sickened by anti-Semitism.

In August last year, a statement from the university senate stressed its support for the ‘overall wellbeing’ of ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, students, and their communities’ during the fraught debate on the referendum.  The university’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences was even stronger. In a press release announcing the faculty ‘wholeheartedly supports the Uluru Statement from the Heart and its calls for Voice, Treaty, and Truth’ and ‘strongly supports a Yes vote’, the faculty acknowledged ‘the challenging nature of conversations about the Referendum’ and the need for a ‘respectful dialogue that prioritises the safety of First Nations Peoples’.

(Sydney University has a detailed policy on the use of pronouns.  ‘[Y]ou can tell us your pronouns by selecting a gendered option (e.g. ‘he/him’, ‘she/her’) or a gender-neutral option (e.g. ‘ey/em’, ‘zie/zim’).’)

The University’s student code of conduct couldn’t be clearer:

8.         University expectations of students

(1)        The University expects the following personal conduct from students:

(a)  treat others with respect regardless of gender, religion, race, sexuality or disability

(c) avoid engaging in bullying, harassment or discriminatory behaviour, including on social media.

Scott is being disingenuous.  He’s more intent on avoiding a confrontation than being intellectually honest. Calling for an ‘intifada’ and chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ is not ‘criticism of Israel and Israel’s foreign policy conduct’. The protesters at Sydney University aren’t demanding Benjamin Netanyahu step down as prime minister of Israel. They’re calling for the destruction of the state of Israel – with all of its consequences.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton was asked about Scott’s comments by Karl Stefanovic on Channel Nine’s Today show on Friday.  What Dutton said was excellent.  But he could have gone further – much further.

Karl Stefanovic:

Peter, University of Sydney boss Mark Scott says Jewish students will have to tough it out – being uncomfortable with the anti-Israeli slogans there.  What do you make of that quickly?

Peter Dutton:

Well, I think it’s disgraceful, Karl. I just don’t know that we would tolerate this in any other segment of our society.

If they were indigenous kids, or if they were kids from Islamic communities, or if they were Catholics, or Anglicans, or atheists, tall people, short people.  We wouldn’t tolerate the segregation and and the anti-Semitic conduct that we’re seeing at the moment. It’s targeted against people of Jewish faith.  They have no connection whatsoever with the leadership of Israel…

This is the 1930s over again, and if we don’t call it out if we don’t start to respond and bring this to an end, this continues to go on and on and on, and it is targeted at people because of their heritage or their faith, and it’s completely unacceptable.  It has no place in our country at all.

Dutton could have called for the protest camp at Sydney University to be removed and for Scott to quit or be sacked by the University of Sydney senate.  White supremacists pitching tents on university grounds and flying the confederate flag would be tolerated for all of five minutes by Scott, and the New South Wales police, and would be condemned by every politician in the country.

I’ve mentioned to you previously the essay by Niall Ferguson published in December last year, ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals’.  The response of Mark Scott to what’s happening at his university and the university’s governing council and its donors turning a blind eye to rampant anti-Semitism is what Ferguson has seen in the United States:

…I have marvelled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals.  I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicisation of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory’, and apologists for Islamist extremism.

Ferguson continues:

It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism.  Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.

A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tubingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than physics.  More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 per cent went to Americans.

[Yet]…Lawyers and doctors, all credentialed with university degrees, were substantially overrepresented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today).

Anyone who has a naïve belief in the power of higher education to instil ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.  A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.

It’s time to have a discussion about whether Australian universities should continue to be taxpayer-funded.  Most Australian universities are not what Mark Scott claims them to be.  They’re not ‘committed to free speech’ as he claims; they’re not committed to free academic enquiry, and they’re certainly not committed to intellectual diversity.  University administrators are far more committed to enforcing an intellectual orthodoxy than promoting freedom of speech.  James Cook University hired Bret Walker, reputedly one the country’s most expensive barristers, to argue in the High Court of Australia that Professor Peter Ridd should be sacked for questioning the science of climate change. Disgracefully, the High Court of Australia upheld Ridd’s dismissal. Of Australia’s 41 public universities, 26 publicly supported the Voice, and 15 didn’t have a position.  Not a single university reflected the views of 60.06% of Australians.

As it happens, Mark Scott is the Chair of The Conversation Media Group.  The Conversation is a website funded by Australian universities and philanthropic foundations that publishes articles for the general public written by university academics.

The Conversation doesn’t believe in freedom of speech or free academic enquiry.  In 2019, its editor published this statement about its editorial policies on climate change, a position that continues to this day. The Conversation has banned ‘climate change sceptics’ from the site (not that there are many ‘sceptics’ employed by Australian universities in any case), and it banned comments from ‘sceptics’. It’s a statement that runs counter to everything that universities should stand for.  It’s remarkable for its naked bias and its admission that the purpose of The Conversation is to enforce an ideology. Here’s part of it:

CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS ARE DANGEROUS – THEY DON’T DESERVE A PLACE ON OUR SITE

At The Conversation Australia we’ve recently vowed to improve our climate change coverage, and part of that means moderating comments with a similar degree of rigour.

Once upon a time, we might have viewed climate sceptics as merely frustrating. We relied on other commentators and authors to rebut sceptics and deniers, which often led to endless back and forth.  But it’s 2019, and now we know better.  Climate change deniers, and those shamelessly peddling pseudoscience and misinformation, are perpetuating ideas that will ultimately destroy the planet.  As a publisher, giving them a voice on our site contributes to a stalled public discourse.

That’s why the editorial team in Australia is implementing a zero-tolerance approach to moderating climate change deniers, and sceptics.  Not only will we be removing their comments, we’ll be locking their accounts.

We believe conversations are integral to sharing knowledge, but those who are fixated on dodgy ideas in the face of decades of peer-reviewed science are nothing but dangerous.

We know you want to have constructive positive discussions, so please don’t engage with climate change deniers.  Dob them in and help us create a safe space where they don’t derail the conversation.

You could write a whole book about those few sentences.  That’s what Australia’s universities pay for, and that’s what Mark Scott is the chair of. Australia’s universities are funded by Australian taxpayers.

The language is positively Orwellian.  You can see the reference to ‘misinformation’ and the use of ‘doublethink’ – the capacity to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously.  The Conversation isn’t quite advocating what’s written on the wall of offices of the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’.  – but it’s close.  ‘We believe conversations are integral to sharing knowledge…but climate change deniers are dangerous – they don’t deserve a place on our site.’  In 2019, the Coalition was in government and said nothing about this.

In my column in The Australian Financial Review on Friday, I wrote about some of this. Here is how I concluded:

A few days ago in City Journal from the Manhattan Institute there was an article with the headline, ‘It’s time we approached our elite universities not as critical institutions we must repair but as national security threats.’

If university vice-chancellors in this country are not careful, Australians might come to that same conclusion.

Reading and Watching

‘Everything wrong with democracy’ is the title of the latest episode of IPA Encounters that’s just been released.  You can watch it here.  My guest is Joanna Williams, the author of ‘How Woke Won – The elitist movement that threatens democracy, tolerance and reason’.  Joanna is a columnist at the brilliant ‘Spiked’ – which is free to read online here.  One of the main things we discussed was why elites fear public opinion – so there’ll never be a referendum on net zero.  (Just imagine if a referendum on net zero was a Coalition election policy.)

In ‘How Woke Won’, Joanna says something significant about how universities have become what they are.  The intellectual elite failed to defend Enlightenment values and so the left was pushing against an open door.

Some argue that woke values took off in universities due to the dominance of critical theory and postmodernism.  But this can make it seem as if these ideas won out because of their sheer intellectual strength, or because their adherents achieved success through a Gramsci-inspired ‘long march through the institutions’.

In reality, the ascendancy of woke has less to do with the intellectual authority of critical theorists and more to do with the abject failure of an intellectual elite to defend Enlightenment values such as rationality, reason, liberty, progress, and tolerance.

Even in the 1960s, radical young scholars often found themselves pushing at an open door.  An older generation of professors no longer had the confidence to maintain traditional scholarly principles, which they saw as tainted following the experience of war in general and the Holocaust in particular.