Sometime in the first half of 2019, Ji Ruan, a senior lecturer in computer science at Auckland University of Technology, organised an event to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

He no doubt assumed that, in a free country like New Zealand, this would be no problem. And that, if any problems arose, he would have the full support of managers at his institution.

As it turned out, events proved him wrong on both counts. Not only did AUT cancel the event, but it did so at the behest of senior managers, including then Vice-Chancellor Derek McCormack. McCormack stepped in after an official at the Chinese consulate raised concerns about the event.

Ji’s experience was by no means unique. As I showed in my report, Unpopular Opinions: Academic Freedom in New Zealand, released last year, managers at our universities are frequently implicated in violations of academic freedom at our institutions.

Sometimes they even drive the violations themselves, as Massey University VC Jan Thomas did when she went out of her way to cancel a talk by Don Brash in August 2019.

In view of all this, you might have thought that the government would be making extra sure that university managers can’t get around its new academic freedom legislation. If you did think this, though, you’d be wrong.

That the government is introducing legislation on this topic at all (as part of their amendments to the Education and Training Act) is greatly to its credit.

But the new legislation won’t be worth the paper it’s written on if it’s not enforceable in crucial areas. In its current form, it’s not.

One key area where the legislation isn’t enforceable is the new complaints process that universities would have to establish.

In its current form, the legislation would require universities to set up ‘a complaints procedure relating to academic freedom and freedom of expression.’ It would also require universities to include details of any complaints in their annual reports.

That’s it.

So let’s imagine you’re a student at a New Zealand university. Let’s say you help organise a conference on gender-critical feminism, and it’s cancelled after a campaign by a few radical student activists.

Under the government’s new academic freedom legislation, you could now make a complaint to university managers.

How confident could you be that they would do the right thing and uphold their legal obligations to academic freedom?

We can get some idea of how likely that is by looking at what happened in November 2019, when a student at Massey University helped organise a conference called ‘Feminism 2020’ in collaboration with Speak Up for Women, a feminist organisation.

As with AUT’s cancellation of the Tiananmen Square event, Massey University managers didn’t just fail to uphold the speech rights of a member of their community on this occasion. They were actively involved in undermining them, with the event being cancelled after a group of student activists met with acting VC Giselle Byrnes.

It’s hard to say exactly what chance a complaint by the student who helped organise the event would have had with those same managers, but it probably wouldn’t have been too much higher than a snowball’s chance in Hell.

In the New Zealand Initiative submission to the select committee that scrutinised the legislation, we suggested setting up an independent review committee that people who were not satisfied with the internal complaints process could appeal to. We also suggested allowing complainants to apply to the High Court for judicial review of the decision.

Overkill? We didn’t think so, and still don’t.

The members of the select committee were under no obligation to adopt our recommendations, and from the commentary on the legislation they released last week, it looks like they haven’t.

Fair enough. But if an internal process is the only recourse for students and academics whose academic freedom has been violated, they will be forced to submit complaints to the very same set of people who violated their rights in the first place.

That makes very little sense, and leaves university managers to police themselves, a privilege they have abused in the past and will, in all probability, abuse again.

The new legislation has a lot of good ideas in it. Universities will be required to adopt freedom of expression statements. They will have to commit to not cancelling talks by visiting speakers on account of their ‘ideas or opinions.’

But bringing in legislation that lacks any real enforcement mechanisms won’t do much good.

Unfortunately, that is what the government has apparently decided to do.

To read the full article on The Post website, click here.