When universities forgot how to say no

While leading universities in Australia and England, I learned that academic freedom is the phrase administrators reach for when they lack the courage to decide. It has become higher education’s version of ‘Hey, I’m just asking questions’: a rhetorical shield behind which institutions retreat when judgement is required.

The problem is not academic freedom itself. The problem is that universities have forgotten what it means and, just as importantly, what it does not.

Academic freedom has never meant that academics may profess whatever they wish. No university would appoint a flat-earth believer to teach geography. That would not be censorship. It would be the routine application of professional standards. Academic freedom exists to protect qualified scholars working within their fields of competence, not to suspend judgement altogether.

That distinction has been lost. The consequences are now visible across a range of contentious issues, from antisemitism to gender ideology to Indigenous politics, where institutional paralysis is repeatedly excused in the name of freedom.

Australian universities have struggled badly with antisemitism. Recent Senate inquiries and campus controversies have exposed a persistent inability to recognise antisemitic tropes when they appear under the banner of ‘critical scholarship’. When academics recycle century-old conspiracy theories about Jewish power and influence, they are not exercising academic freedom. They are failing to distinguish legitimate political critique from antisemitic thinking that has no place in scholarly discourse.

The same confusion appears in debates over sex and gender. When lecturers deny or minimise the material reality of sex, this is not fearless inquiry. It is intellectual incoherence. A university that cannot define what a woman is, yet runs women’s teams, scholarships and residential colleges, has lost its bearings.

The pattern was repeated during the Australian Voice referendum, which proposed to amend the constitution to give Indigenous people a special governance role. Many Australian universities did not simply host debates or encourage civic participation about the Voice; they openly campaigned for a particular outcome. Whatever one’s view of the Voice proposal, universities breached a core principle of higher education. Their job is to teach students how to think, not what to think.

At the heart of these controversies lies a simple category error. Universities have collapsed three distinct things into one: protecting the right of scholars to hold unpopular views; abandoning professional and disciplinary standards; and allowing the institution itself to behave as a political actor. In the process, judgement has been recast as censorship and institutional neutrality as moral failure.

This confusion is not new. The modern doctrine of academic freedom, articulated in the 1940 Statement by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), was written precisely to defend scholarship against politicisation. But the authors were clear: academic freedom was inseparable from professional responsibility.

Academics were cautioned not to introduce controversial material unrelated to their subject. Students are there to be educated, not recruited. The Statement also drew a sharp line between speech within a scholar’s field of expertise and speech outside it. A university appointment does not confer universal expertise. Most importantly, academic freedom was grounded in the university’s obligation to the public and the disciplined pursuit of truth.

As legal scholar Robert Post has emphasised, academic freedom protects the disciplined pursuit of expert knowledge within the academy - something quite different from the free speech celebrated in the public square. In a democracy, all views may be expressed. In a university, competence matters.

The AAUP Statement has been adopted by universities around the world, but many Australian universities are finding it difficult to apply its principles. There are three main reasons.