ON CAMPUS
found a way out of that because I just made
sure I was on leave when I was over there.”
For Anderson, it is not a matter of what
he says, it’s the ire that his comments
and actions provoke from the media that
concerns the universities.
“It’s really just the publicity,” he says,
and he recalls a furore a few years back
that provoked the intervention of then
education minister Christopher Pyne.
“He made the argument about the
university having to focus on maximising its
revenue and so on. And linking it specifically
to the fact that any sort of scandal is going
to affect your revenue and universities had
to work together to try and not damage
their reputation and their capacity to raise
private revenue … In other words, using
the commercialisation of education as an
argument for the universities not to get
involved in controversy basically.”
This is the larger issue at play for
Anderson: Australian universities’ proclivity
to court funding above all else. The issue
of tenure and full-time versus causal
employment also comes to the fore and is
a large part of the reason he feels free to
be himself.
“I’ve got tenure and I’m permanent, so I
don’t have to worry about that,” he says.
“Precarious employment at the university
certainly put a constraint on [free speech].
There are also people who want to get
brownie points and research funds and get
promoted and so on.
“Those who are going to create money
and prestige in an entrepreneurial way,
they’re the sort of people, typically these
days, that get promoted to professor level.
I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. I’ve seen a
lot of examples of it.”
Financial pressure is regularly passed on
from institution to academic, Anderson
claims, and this, he believes, stifles
free speech. Like Peter Ridd’s claims of
sloppily peer-reviewed work, Anderson
believes that perverse incentives to publish
encourage people to “proliferate a lot
of fairly poorly considered, tame sort of
publications”.
One way to combat this would be
to consider free and open access to
scholarly work, although even this
would not “tame” the huge beast that is
academic journals.
So, is it too late to turn things around at
Australian universities?
“It’s not too late,” Anderson says.
“You can do some little initiatives to keep
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campusreview.com.au
a debate going. But I think at the root of
it, the nature of this corporate university
in Australia is a dead weight on a lot of
freedom of speech. Because it’s pushing,
particularly young people, to publish in areas
that they might not otherwise want to be in.
“You can do things like creating
alternative journals to encourage people to
write in areas which are not commercially
attractive, for example.”
In the end it is quite simple for Anderson.
Even pre-tenure, he felt free to express
himself, to be himself.
“I didn’t want to write things that
someone else wanted, basically. I wanted
to write the things that I want to write
about,” he says.
“What’s the point of academia unless …
[they want to] be there, because they do
want to investigate things of interest to
them and express things.
“Maybe it prevented me getting
promoted. It did, actually, but it didn’t
matter. It wasn’t really what I wanted.”
LEGAL ADVICE
In this series, we’ve now heard from union
representatives, academics and students,
but what is the bottom line for universities
from a legal standpoint? Should they be
worried about the ramifications of what
their staff say?
“I think it is quite right that they are
concerned, but the difficulty is, how do
you find a balance between having formal
policies in place that try and restrict the
liability of the university, and try and
minimise the occurrences of it happening?”
This is the view of Geoff Holland, a
practising barrister and lecturer from the
UTS Faculty of Law. He contends that
defamation suits are an institution’s main
worry – students defaming teachers
and vice versa. However, universities are
only potentially liable when they act as a
publisher of materials.
“The liability of the university
would generally be limited to those
circumstances where they were the
publisher,” he says.
“The problem now is amplified by the
fact that, typically, lectures are at least
audio recorded, if not video recorded.
That, then, again brings up the question of
the university’s liability … But once it gets
into a recording that’s distributed by the
university, or through any of its channels,
they then become a publisher.”
This can then affect not only what
academics decide to teach “but also where
they allow classroom discussions to go”,
and Holland remembers a time where an
unhappy student took transcripts of what
was being said in his class and passed these
on to a politician.
In a case such as this, one must be very
careful, as Holland believes that the only
defence would be that what was said was
“a fair comment, or an honest opinion, but
they’re both extremely difficult defences to
establish in defamation law”.
And here again we face the dreaded
‘chilling effect’. According to Holland,
defamation law is notoriously harsh in
Australia, especially when it comes to free
speech. And defamation is an “extremely
complex and expensive action”, so as an
academic or when advising his clients, he
often encounters times when people will
shy away from a topic in order to stay safe.
Aside from defamation, Holland points
to potential liability if an ‘adverse reference’
is given as, again, ‘fair comment’ and must
be proven.
But what really worries Holland is
the recent introduction of stricter
anti-terror laws.
“I think that, if you look at the anti-terror
laws that have been introduced over the
last 16 years, [you can see] the chilling
effect that they’ve had on academics’ ability
to research … and it also has a chilling
effect on what academics are prepared
to teach and talk about. So, defamation
certainly is a problem, but I don’t think it’s
what most academics see as being the
biggest threat to their freedom of speech,
or academic freedom.”
Whether or not there is a free speech
problem in Australia is hard to say, and
open to interpretation. However, one thing
is certain, the issue is not going anywhere
and has a lot of academics worried.
It would stand to reason that in order
to retain academic integrity we must
endeavour to enable academics to feel
free to pursue topics and subjects that may
make some people feel uneasy.
In the end, most would agree that the
pursuit of academic truth makes for a
healthy society.
As John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty:
“All silencing of discussion is an assumption
of infallibility. We can never be sure that the
opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a
false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it
would be an evil still.” ■