Academic Freedom Watch

The NTEU has made its submission to the Senate Inquiry into Academic Freedom. The submission recommends that:

1. Institutional autonomy and academic freedom for Australian universities and their staff should be protected in legislation as is currently the case in a number of countries including Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa.
2. The rights of students should be protected through enhanced grievance procedures and access to independent and well resourced advocacy and advice services.
3. Australian anti-terror and sedition laws must include ‘good faith’ protections for bona fide academic and scholarly research in the course of teaching, education and research or artistic or literary endeavours.

Below is an excerpt from the submission on the real threats to academic freedom in Australia today. Click on the “read the rest of this entry” link.

Real Threats to Academic Freedom
Currently there are significant threats to academic freedom at Australian universities. These threats stem from changes to the regulation and funding of universities over the last decade. The advent of increasingly contestable research funding puts pressure on academics to research in specific national priority areas, while commercialisation of research can restrict the timely dissemination of research findings to our communities. The dissemination of knowledge is an important responsibility of universities and is critical in maintaining the role of the university in the public interest. Changes to the Australian Research Council (ARC) Act introduced in 2005 granted the Minister rights to veto research projects that have already been approved by the ARC Board and its College of Experts. This means that decisions about what type of research receives funding could be politically and ideologically driven.

Perhaps the most significant threat to academic freedom that has occurred in the past few years has been the introduction of the 2005 Anti Terror laws. These laws increase the powers of police and security services at the expense of fundamental human rights. For university staff and students, the sedition provisions create the possibility that academics could be committing an offence, simply through the act of researching, writing and publishing, if they are deemed to have material which may either directly or indirectly “advocate a terrorist act”, (whether or not it has or will occur). “‘Advocate’ is defined broadly to include indirectly counselling or urging the doing of a ‘terrorist act’ as well as directly praising such acts where there is a risk that such praise might lead another to engage in such acts”.

Despite recent recommendations by the Law Reform Commission that the legislation should safeguard activities undertaken in good faith related to a bona fide academic and scholarly research in the course of teaching, education and research or artistic or literary endeavours, such ‘good faith’ protections have still not been included in the Act.

We have already seen examples of the effect of these laws – a student at Monash University was interviewed by the Federal Police on the basis that he purchased and borrowed books on suicide bombing for his course of study on suicide bombings. Censorship of books and research projects by the Attorney-General on the basis of possible conflict with the 2005 Anti-Terrorism Act has also taken place. The former occurred at the University of Melbourne with the university being advised to remove books from its library under fear of committing an offence. The latter being a cutting back of the research field of an individual researcher who had been granted an ARC peer reviewed grant on the basis that such research may contravene the 2005 Anti-Terror Bill. Finally the Export Control Bill may place further restrictions on research, conferences and publications undertaken in areas that relate to weapons of mass destruction. The problems are real and current, given that under the previous Government one of the national research priorities was the theme of “Safeguarding Australia”.

The dialogue about protecting academic freedom needs to move beyond old debates about political correctness to the real threats that incursions on academic freedom can have for our universities and for our society more broadly. The role that our universities play in the creation and dissemination of new knowledge, which is underpinned by the principle of free inquiry, is critical to fostering greater understanding and development of the world in which we all live.

These intrusions into the academic freedom and institutional autonomy of Australia’s universities and their staff demonstrate that the protections afforded by collective agreements and university policies are not sufficient. As such NTEU is advocating that academic freedom and institutional autonomy should be legislatively protected as is the case in many other countries.

McDonald and Williams argue that Australia does not provide protection for academic freedom in its Constitution or by statute, nor does it have a national bill of rights from which it might be implied. While Jim Jackson argues that some protection exists in university industrial agreements and codes of conduct made by universities with their staff, MacDonald & Williams argue that codes of conduct may not be enforceable. Thus the protection of academic freedom in Australia remains fragile.