policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
And yes, they often complain that there are
certain things they have to be quite careful
about teaching, and mostly it has to do
with genetic influences on behaviour, sex
differences and – another big one – IQ and
intelligence differences.
In race or gender?
The fight for free speech: Pt 3
Unspoken cultural norms
and their effect on foreign
academics and students.
Geoffrey Miller interviewed by Conor Burke
G
eoffrey Miller is worried about
academic freedoms. The
self‑identified “aspie” and “nerd”
argued in part two of our series that free
speech policies can have a detrimental
effect on academics and students who are
‘neurodivergent’ or on the autism spectrum.
In the same vein, he believes that
academics and students from different
cultures encounter similar struggles.
Miller says we need to consider the
cultural exchange of ideas and whether it
is acceptable to project our cultural norms
on visiting academics and students.
This is the crux of his essay, The Cultural
Diversity Case for Free Speech, which
contends that conditions in universities make
it hard for foreigners to follow free speech
codes and understand what is and isn’t
appropriate to say.
An American, Miller comes at this with
first-hand experience. Having spent time in
the UK, Germany and here in Australia, he
saw a vast “culture gap” and spent a lot of
time struggling with new sets of culturally
specific taboos.
“Every new culture brought new
embarrassments, fraught conversations,
awkward silences and social costs. The
natives could never clearly articulate what
views were permissible versus offensive …
One was simply expected to know, despite
being a stranger in a strange land.”
His case for cultural sensitivity is pertinent
for Australia. So reliant are we on the revenue
from foreign students, Miller warns that if we
create hostile work environments for foreign
academics, we will fail to persuade the “best
and brightest”.
His argument is informed by his experience
in America, but with the climate surrounding
free speech here reaching hazardous levels, it
is easily applicable to Australia.
CR: Do you have any examples of when you
got into trouble as an academic in Australia?
GM: The big sensitivity point in Australia that
you don’t find in America or Britain is issues
about Indigenous Australians – you have
to be very cautious about saying things in
that regard. For example, I would get into
discussions about the evolutionary history
of when Australia was colonised by the
Indigenous people. Was it 40,000 years
ago? Was it 60,000 years ago? A lot of the
lefty Australian academics would get very
uncomfortable about just the factual details
of human evolution and colonising the world
and all of that.
It highlighted the time depth of how long
Indigenous people have been genetically
distinct from other ethnic groups. So even if
you never said, “Well, that might have been
time enough for certain traits to evolve
somewhat differently,” they kind of phrased
out those implications automatically and
thought, “Why are you raising this? Where
are you going with this?” I wasn’t going
anywhere, I was just interested.
Do any of your former Australian colleagues
feel like their free speech here is being
trampled on? Are there things they feel they
can’t teach?
I only know a few Australian academics,
mostly in evolutionary psychology or biology.
Just even the fact that, let’s say, within white
America, IQ predicts outcomes a lot more
strongly than class background. That’s kind of
considered, even if you don’t talk about sex
or race, or any of that.
Is there a balance we can strike, where we do
have to consider the viewpoints of foreign
academics and students, but we can say, well,
this is how we do things here?
I think it would be great if universities
had new student or new faculty training,
particularly for foreign students, that said,
“Look, honestly, here are the taboos in
Australia. Here are the sensitive points. Here’s
why they’re taboos. Here’s how to handle it.”
That would be great.
But I think it’s unconscionable if you invite
a lot of foreign students to come here, and
Australia is a nation of immigrants, and
there’s a lot of people coming here from
China, and India, for example, who don’t
understand Australian culture, and Australia’s
kind of radically honest about the fact that,
for better or worse, there are taboos. Then
it’s setting those students up for failure and
misery, and they might feel quite inhibited
about saying anything that they think is even
slightly controversial. So, it’ll have a massive
chilling effect on them.
Is there a chance that this chilling effect is
perceived as opposed to real?
Yes, and I think the power of the chilling
effect is it only takes a few public examples
of people being punished for saying certain
things to inhibit the speech of hundreds of
thousands of other people.
We’ve all witnessed a person being burned
at the stake, and the point is not to punish
them for saying something bad, it’s to create
a public spectacle that chills everyone
else’s speech.
The uncertainty does a lot of the work. If
people don’t quite know where the boundary
is, they will err on the side of caution and
self-censor really strongly on certain topics. ■
Geoffrey Miller is a tenured associate
professor of psychology at the University
of New Mexico.
15