ON CAMPUS
campusreview.com.au
The fight for free speech: Pt 4
A tale of two controversial
academics.
By Conor Burke
T
he apparent battle for free speech
being played out across our
university campuses is difficult to
navigate, with many competing viewpoints
and intangible ideas at play.
The ‘chilling effect’ and other actions
allegedly perpetrated by universities to
stifle open debate are hard to prove and
can often be explained by reference to
guidelines and policies: all of which makes
it hard to pin down a definitive answer to
the question of where we currently stand.
We have heard politicians and academics
opine on the subject, but what about the
people in the thick of it, the so-called
controversial players being silenced?
THE CLIMATE CHANGE SCEPTIC
“My view is that academic freedom is
effectively dead.”
22
That is essentially how my conversation
with Peter Ridd starts.
An ex-James Cook University professor
and, to some, a climate change denier,
who can blame him for having this view if
we are to believe everything that has been
written about his battle with JCU. For Ridd,
the long and short of this struggle is what
he sees as an egregious dismissal over his
climate scepticism.
To many news outlets, as well as the
Institute of Public Affairs, Ridd’s scepticism
about the damage to the Great Barrier Reef
has led to the end of a successful academic
career. The story began in 2016 when
Ridd spoke to a journalist regarding some
pictures of the reef.
“A journalist from the Courier Mail rang
me up to ask me something about the
reef. I can’t actually even remember what it
was; it wasn’t particularly interesting. Quite
coincidentally, I’d actually been looking
at a couple of photographs, very famous
photographs supposedly showing damage
to the reef,” he said.
“I gave the journalist some questions
that he might ask Professor Terry Hughes
[director of the ARC Centre of Excellence
for Coral Reef Studies] and whoever else
was actually using these photographs,
to tease out what quality assurance
mechanisms [are being used].”
“The journalist actually sent all my
questions and the whole thing to Terry
Hughes and then he – I presume it was
him, I don’t even know – sent it to the
university and didn’t like the tone of some
of my questions.”
This is the first instance of what JCU
describe as Ridd’s uncollegial conduct.
“I said, ‘If you ask him this question, I think
he will wiggle and squirm’ … but they didn’t
like me using the term ‘wiggle and squirm’.
“I also said, ‘He’ll wiggle and squirm
because he may think that I think that his
statements about it are misleading.’ They
also didn’t like the word ‘misleading’.”
The next incident involved broadcaster
Alan Jones and his Sky News show. Ridd
had the peer review system in his sights
that day.
“I’m making the argument that if you’re
just using peer reviewers as your quality
assurance mechanisms … then you cannot
regard that work as reliable, and if an
institution is only using peer review as a