Kia ora, colleagues! It’s me, your Vice-Chancellor. I’m here to report back on my submission on the academic freedom legislation currently doing the rounds in Parliament. 

This bill has apparently been introduced in the innocent belief that we have some kind of problem with academic freedom in this country. (If anyone disagrees, I am happy to set up a chat with HR.) But as I told the select committee, I’m not seeing any evidence of that, even though the evidence was recently conveniently assembled in a report for The New Zealand Initiative by an excellent young classicist. 

I’m not seeing evidence of US diplomat Bonnie Jenkins being deplatformed at Victoria University of Wellington last March. I’m not seeing evidence of a talk by gender-critical feminist Daphna Whitmore being cancelled at AUT in 2022. And I’ve already forgotten about a commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre being cancelled at AUT back in 2019 after the Vice-Chancellor met with an official from the Chinese Embassy. 

In fact, funnily enough I’m not seeing any of the many free speech flare-ups that have taken place at New Zealand universities in the past few years. As for the surveys showing that sizeable minorities of academics and students in this country feel they aren’t free to talk about vital public issues on campus, I do have a concern that some of these have very low response rates. Even if it was really just one of those surveys, and even if a University of Auckland survey with a 67% response rate found that only 15% of academics in the law school felt they could respectfully voice their views without fear of negative consequences.  

Finally, in response to concerns about health and safety obligations being weaponised to shut down debates, I’d say that is very dangerous talk. And I just can’t imagine it ever happening at a New Zealand university, except maybe for that one time when Massey University put out a statement saying it was cancelling the ‘Feminism 2020’ conference because of ‘health and safety obligations.’ 

All in all, I can assure you that I assured the select committee that there was nothing to see here. Our public universities can be trusted to uphold academic freedom and institutional neutrality on their own. I think our record over the past few years makes clear just how seriously we take academic freedom.