Cancellation

There is a lot of commentary about academics being cancelled for expressing their views, especially in the US where hundreds have been fired. But Australia is lucky to be a decade behind the US in many things. My experience is that academic cancellation is not something that currently is of major concern.

Case 1.

In February 2022, the University of Melbourne announced their honorary doctorates. I personally know (Sir) Peter Donnelly (left of photo) as I had the office next to him in Imperial College in 1987. What an over-achieving bastard! I also slightly know Allen Fels since he knew my Dad back in the day. I received the notification on LinkedIn about these honorary degrees and, upon scrolling the comments, found that most of them were aggressively denouncing the lack of gender balance in the award photo. They did not know the quality of the recipients but they were “pale stale males”. Rather than noting their achievements, the mob was just looking at their sex. This led to major University donors actually withdrawing funding as reported by the Guardian.

Well, it turned out that three female and one non-white awardee could not attend the photo shoot. The University pointed this out on LinkedIn soon after the controversy. At this point, I suggested to those commenters who had made incendiary comments that perhaps they should delete them or apologise. Unfortunately, UoM have deleted the LinkedIn thread, or at least I can no longer find it, so you cannot see exactly what I said.

One of the commenters, a low ranking general staff member of the University, took exception to me confronting the loud-mouthed activists and so decided to complain to the Vice Chancellor that I had been “trolling female commenters”, that this was inconsistent with the University’s values, and asked for an investigation into me. This complaint was then sent to our Dean, Ian Harper. I was sent a Please Explain email (which was not appreciated since I had Covid at the time) and asked to attend a meeting with Ian and the then Head of Department equivalent.

The upshot of the meeting was that my comments on LinkedIn were not deemed to be “trolling”.  The HoD even did a brief statistical analysis to see if my hostile comments were directed at female commenters more than males, and found little evidence based on raw counts. Taking into account the content of the comments, I think my focus was pretty clear. Anyway, the University found no reason to elevate the matter. So free speech won and the malevolent complainant lost.

Case 2.

In early 2023, I posted on FB about Australian Universities’ exposure to the Chinese market. The post is a combination of my personal experience of Chinese culture in HK with more general concerns about diversifying risk in the education sector.

Soon after there was a change.org petition suggesting I was a racist. I even became famous enough to be denounced by the main newspaper in Hong Kong which potentially made life hard for some of my friends there. The change.org petition had several score signatories and the University complaint had around 50 signatures, possibly including students that I had even taught.

My school was very insistent that I made no further statements on the matter. PR, sigh! But despite this I did give the SCMP a quote because I would not let them have the last or only word. A formal investigation from the University found that I had done nothing wrong. So free speech won and the malevolent complainant(s) lost.

Case 3.

In September 2023, the very partisan Vice Chancellor of University of Melbourne, Duncan Maskell,  sent the following email to all faculty in the University. This was forwarded to all Professors in my school by our Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning via the All Faculty email group. It read: