Yes, we surely require free speech and the propagation of uncomfortable and disagreeable (to some) within universities Yes, there are limits to free speech: defamation, personal abuse, threats and hate-speech. (But note the difficultly of precisely defining hate-speech). A major point of universities was to be exposed to differing opinions, and that's been lost as universities are now money-pits. Opinions, alternative facts and "ways of knowing" are more of a challenge, for instance the NZ Electrical code of practice has a Maori lore-based "definition" of phase, neutral and earth. It is insane nonsense, and electrical safety is infinitely more important than ancient lore flying in the face of science and technology.
There is a great book on all this "I'm feeling uncomfortable with these views" attitude. It's the Coddling of the American Mind" by Lukianoff and Haidt.
I don’t know the answer, but a big problem with certain people is that they just have a nasty, aggressive, noisy way of even starting a conversation .. personally happy to get into discussing most ideas - but not with someone who’s just going to attempt to win their argument with aggressive noise and threats.
"we can have people who believe in creationism coming into our campuses and speaking about it as though it were scientific, as though it was rigorously defendable when in fact we know some of these questions... have been settled"
This would be an argument against Matauranga Maori being included in the hard sciences. A life force in water, gods fighting causing the wind , etc has been debunked centuries ago.
Yet, I'd wager she's an avid supporter of it's inclusion as an alternative way of knowing.
We’re at a point where specific talking points are intentionally inflammatory. People like Candace Owens, Matt Walsh and others of their ilk have turned debate into a sport and it’s never about who is right, it’s about how clips can be edited to coerce their audience.
Free speech is fine in theory, but with the astoundingly large issue of misinformation - AI or human produced bot farms, I think it’s time we develop strategies to reclaim reality.
Also, if you speak at a university - you should probably be coherent and have legitimate arguments, I have yet to hear one from the people who tend to be rejected in the last few years.
Have you been keeping up with the information regarding bot comments and their impact on global politics?
In some ways he is coherent, in other ways not - but he is definitely inflammatory.
He’s accused people in support of Māori wards of being racist, uses the term “race” frequently (which is inflammatory in general as it assumes we are different species rather than the same species with different cultural norms).
Don Brash is old man yells at clouds. I don’t specifically think he should have been banned from speaking, but the university should have dictated the terms of the engagement.
For example, yes you can speak here, but we will provide an academic to question your claims in debate form.
However, he went from being banned to having unrestricted access to a platform and we were all told any form of protest would result of expulsion from the engagement.
Is protesting contentious talking points not free speech?
It may depend on whether people agree with what he is saying, or not, that they find him either coherent or inflammatory.
He does talk about race relations a lot, so it would be hard not to use the term race.
My opinion is that race relations do need to be talked about openly in N.Z without fear of being called a racist because you have differing views.
Parliament is a very bad example of that at the moment. Along with varsities, these should be the place these debates can be had. Hence the govt direction on it.
We have the race relation debate conversation "around the water cooler" at my work a lot now days. I've yet to see it turn into a shouting match despite the opposing views. It seems everyone is happy the debate is happening though.
"For example, yes you can speak here, but we will provide an academic to question your claims in debate form." Is an interesting one. When the Free Speech Union was finally allowed to have its debate at Vic, it was an absolute hatchet job on them with who the varsity chose to regulate it and participate. No balance at all.
I would suggest in a true free speech environment you would provide academics from both sides of the argument. And only a free speech environment in the varsity would allow both sides to participate without fear of being cancelled.
And a genuine neutral moderator or we go down the path of the debacle which was the recent Oxford Union debate on Palestine.
The real guilty party is dark money financing demagogues pretending to be "free speech warriors". It especially ramped up after the infamous Citizens United ruling which opened the floodgates.
Is that an American ruling? And would it be any more morally corrupt than say, a succession of academic sociologists wangling themselves into controlling positions in universities to advance their particular worldview/ ideology?Or even provost roles?
Yes, Citizens United is a SCOTUS ruling from around 2010. And chances are academic sociologists are still waiting in vain for their big fat paycheques from George Soros & Bill Gates.
Side note: When speakers are being paid to push a specific agenda, how can informed debate make a difference? They’re not debating to learn, they’re debating to earn - and regardless of the outcome their rhetoric becomes normalised and spreads further.
Hi Peter. I agree that some people are making a sport – and a living – out of debate and out of being inflammatory. The role of the university is to set a better example, basing argument on evidence, logic and ethical principle. Academics needn't fear people like Owens, as they have the ability and the freedom to contest what they say, when it's wrong. And, yes we do need to be concerned about disinfo spread by bots. To combat it, we need fearless and open debate. Suppression clearly doesn't work.
That’s the model we’ve always had. Simply argue against it, strongest argument wins. Except it doesn’t work like that in this age. There is a significant increase in purposeful and targeted misinformation campaigns that seek to disrupt cultural evolution and maintain the status quo.
There is significant money spent on pushing ideologies that counter the natural progression of human rights and empathy toward one another, and seek to turn those without power against themselves.
The purpose is to shift the enemy from those who benefit from uncapped wealth and power, those with no power and no wealth.
As humanity becomes more and more connected and we become exposed to more diverse cultures, the natural evolution of human behaviour would be the reduction of xenophobia, right? Because biases between ethnicities stem from lack of understanding and mystery.
Currently we see substantial pushes toward division of ethnicities by increasing the rhetoric stating these ethnicities have negative values.
If we are to claim fair and open debate to counter these misinformation campaigns, should there not be a rubric in place to sift through obvious inflammatory speakers who have a clear motive to sow disharmony and incite violence or paranoia between groups?
Shit, even just publicly display their sponsors on the banner, with how much they have been paid to speak.
I don’t want to go to university and have mega corporations send their shills to cause chaos among the student body.
They are not doing it in good faith, so why give them unrestricted access?
My point was about universities. I don't think Owens et al. will want to debate on campuses. But I'd be happy to take her on, if that was the case. Fear is the bigger enemy.
"Yes, sometimes it hurts to hear one’s cherished ideas get a good going over by opponents and sceptics. And sometimes some people’s sheer ignorance needs to be corrected. But that’s how we learn and grow. It wasn’t meant to be easy." Well said - isn't this why we have universities?
While the legislation does feel heavy-handed, unfortunately our universities now largely operate on a business (rather than an educative) model. Students are fee-paying consumers and as a consequence we have increasing seen a tendency to close down anything that comes close to an genuine, open-minded, public debate about controversial areas (eg Te Tiriti). NCEA in schools hasn't helped - a lot of our young people are not well equipped to think critically when they complete their schooling - qualified but not educated. The legislation may well be a necessary corrective to signal that our universities need to get back to the core business of speaking truth to power and challenging orthodoxies.
Indeed so, Mark. That was what universities were supposed to achieve. I have heard, though, from some of those fee-paying consumers in the past that they really don't like the 'party line' that's forced down their throats and that they have to replicate in essays. All I could say to them was that I was sorry, as they deserved better. There was nothing I could do about it, other than set a different example – until the university let me go!
Yes - The management in universities are increasingly pandering to the loudest most strident voices (who are not representative) and too many of our students are short changed in getting a robust, critical Tertiary education.
As I mentioned in an earlier thread, the commodification of tertiary education is a big factor in the rise of "cancelling" anything that might put the cash cows at risk.
Totally. At the heart of questions such as free speech is that the university sector has been starved of funds by successive governments over the last 30 years and increasingly encouraged to become financially self-sufficient. Students are seen as consumers and staff are under intense pressure to go with the flow when it comes to raising funds.
Here in Australia universities were required to adopt free speech and academic freedom statements about five years ago, and have all done so. I haven’t noticed any adverse consequences. The statements all make clear that free speech/academic freedom doesn’t include behaviour that breaches the university’s code of conduct, let alone behaviour that constitutes a crime, such as hate speech.
I should look up some of those policies. NZ has had academic freedom enshrined in law since (I think) 1989. Am I correct in thinking Aus never had that?
I don’t believe so. In the late.twenty-teens the federal government commissioned a review of academic freedom, which produced a model code. In 2021 the Highwr Wducarion Aupport Act was amended to use the term academic freedom in a couple of places, and to define academic freedom, but I don’t believe the act specifically requires universities to ensure academic freedom. However, there has certainly been pressure on universities to adopt their own statement of academic freedom, and many enterprise bargaining agreements between universities and their staff now have a section on academic freedom and its limits – as an important matter in employment relations.
More posturing by the Coalition, with sinister undertones. Universities will be prohibited "from adopting positions on issues that do not directly relate to their core role or functions.” But what is the "University"? Presumably the University Council (?) which defines and then ensures this this policy is implemented ? Can the Council control, what individual staff say? Will perceived non-adherence influence a University's funding? The mind boggles !
Hi David. I hope you had a great Christmas day. I know from experience that a lot of suppression of opinion and debate goes on in universities. Councils and VCs should not formalise that, and hence make it worse, by adopting one-sided positions on politically contentious matter. Cheers.
When I went to Victoria Uni in the early 2010s there was definitely self-policing of opinions amongst students. This was before 'woke' was a big concept, so I remember complaining that the Uni environment was too 'PC'.
That being said, I still engaged in some strong and useful debates on topics where I held unpopular views. It is a shame that things have gotten worse in the last decade, with administrator's directly censoring debate according to media reports. While it shouldn't be necessary, hopefully these new freedom of speech statements help to reverse the censorship trend.
Also, I noticed at the end that you mentioned there is no strong evidence that public polls close to an election influence voter's choice of party. However, you then mention that these polls can encourage more voters to show up on election day. Wouldn't those encouraged voters be likely to swing the outcome towards a specific party?
Thanks for the comments, Stephen. In answer to your question: yes, that could happen, but it's hard to predict in which directions people may be influenced. And is such influence a good or a bad thing for democracy? That is, Mr Peters may once have been annoyed by what he termed a 'bandwagon effect', but that effect could also go in his favour at times too. And why can't voters have the benefit of opinion polls to help guide their decisions? (It would help, though, if people better understood statistical variance!)
Yes, we surely require free speech and the propagation of uncomfortable and disagreeable (to some) within universities Yes, there are limits to free speech: defamation, personal abuse, threats and hate-speech. (But note the difficultly of precisely defining hate-speech). A major point of universities was to be exposed to differing opinions, and that's been lost as universities are now money-pits. Opinions, alternative facts and "ways of knowing" are more of a challenge, for instance the NZ Electrical code of practice has a Maori lore-based "definition" of phase, neutral and earth. It is insane nonsense, and electrical safety is infinitely more important than ancient lore flying in the face of science and technology.
There is a great book on all this "I'm feeling uncomfortable with these views" attitude. It's the Coddling of the American Mind" by Lukianoff and Haidt.
I don’t know the answer, but a big problem with certain people is that they just have a nasty, aggressive, noisy way of even starting a conversation .. personally happy to get into discussing most ideas - but not with someone who’s just going to attempt to win their argument with aggressive noise and threats.
It's not right when a person can't help but shout rather than listen. It becomes impossible to reach any understanding.
People who shout are frightened of silence, and frightened that their argument will be countered.
Actually, they are just plaine rude!
The irony from Sandra Grey at TEU.
"we can have people who believe in creationism coming into our campuses and speaking about it as though it were scientific, as though it was rigorously defendable when in fact we know some of these questions... have been settled"
This would be an argument against Matauranga Maori being included in the hard sciences. A life force in water, gods fighting causing the wind , etc has been debunked centuries ago.
Yet, I'd wager she's an avid supporter of it's inclusion as an alternative way of knowing.
Hi Mark. Thanks for your comments. You can read about TEU policies here:
https://teu.ac.nz/about/constitution-and-policies/
Cheers
Grant
We’re at a point where specific talking points are intentionally inflammatory. People like Candace Owens, Matt Walsh and others of their ilk have turned debate into a sport and it’s never about who is right, it’s about how clips can be edited to coerce their audience.
Free speech is fine in theory, but with the astoundingly large issue of misinformation - AI or human produced bot farms, I think it’s time we develop strategies to reclaim reality.
Also, if you speak at a university - you should probably be coherent and have legitimate arguments, I have yet to hear one from the people who tend to be rejected in the last few years.
Have you been keeping up with the information regarding bot comments and their impact on global politics?
Do you consider Don Brash to be coherent?
In some ways he is coherent, in other ways not - but he is definitely inflammatory.
He’s accused people in support of Māori wards of being racist, uses the term “race” frequently (which is inflammatory in general as it assumes we are different species rather than the same species with different cultural norms).
Don Brash is old man yells at clouds. I don’t specifically think he should have been banned from speaking, but the university should have dictated the terms of the engagement.
For example, yes you can speak here, but we will provide an academic to question your claims in debate form.
However, he went from being banned to having unrestricted access to a platform and we were all told any form of protest would result of expulsion from the engagement.
Is protesting contentious talking points not free speech?
It may depend on whether people agree with what he is saying, or not, that they find him either coherent or inflammatory.
He does talk about race relations a lot, so it would be hard not to use the term race.
My opinion is that race relations do need to be talked about openly in N.Z without fear of being called a racist because you have differing views.
Parliament is a very bad example of that at the moment. Along with varsities, these should be the place these debates can be had. Hence the govt direction on it.
We have the race relation debate conversation "around the water cooler" at my work a lot now days. I've yet to see it turn into a shouting match despite the opposing views. It seems everyone is happy the debate is happening though.
"For example, yes you can speak here, but we will provide an academic to question your claims in debate form." Is an interesting one. When the Free Speech Union was finally allowed to have its debate at Vic, it was an absolute hatchet job on them with who the varsity chose to regulate it and participate. No balance at all.
I would suggest in a true free speech environment you would provide academics from both sides of the argument. And only a free speech environment in the varsity would allow both sides to participate without fear of being cancelled.
And a genuine neutral moderator or we go down the path of the debacle which was the recent Oxford Union debate on Palestine.
The real guilty party is dark money financing demagogues pretending to be "free speech warriors". It especially ramped up after the infamous Citizens United ruling which opened the floodgates.
Is that an American ruling? And would it be any more morally corrupt than say, a succession of academic sociologists wangling themselves into controlling positions in universities to advance their particular worldview/ ideology?Or even provost roles?
Yes, Citizens United is a SCOTUS ruling from around 2010. And chances are academic sociologists are still waiting in vain for their big fat paycheques from George Soros & Bill Gates.
Side note: When speakers are being paid to push a specific agenda, how can informed debate make a difference? They’re not debating to learn, they’re debating to earn - and regardless of the outcome their rhetoric becomes normalised and spreads further.
Hi Peter. I agree that some people are making a sport – and a living – out of debate and out of being inflammatory. The role of the university is to set a better example, basing argument on evidence, logic and ethical principle. Academics needn't fear people like Owens, as they have the ability and the freedom to contest what they say, when it's wrong. And, yes we do need to be concerned about disinfo spread by bots. To combat it, we need fearless and open debate. Suppression clearly doesn't work.
That’s the model we’ve always had. Simply argue against it, strongest argument wins. Except it doesn’t work like that in this age. There is a significant increase in purposeful and targeted misinformation campaigns that seek to disrupt cultural evolution and maintain the status quo.
There is significant money spent on pushing ideologies that counter the natural progression of human rights and empathy toward one another, and seek to turn those without power against themselves.
The purpose is to shift the enemy from those who benefit from uncapped wealth and power, those with no power and no wealth.
As humanity becomes more and more connected and we become exposed to more diverse cultures, the natural evolution of human behaviour would be the reduction of xenophobia, right? Because biases between ethnicities stem from lack of understanding and mystery.
Currently we see substantial pushes toward division of ethnicities by increasing the rhetoric stating these ethnicities have negative values.
If we are to claim fair and open debate to counter these misinformation campaigns, should there not be a rubric in place to sift through obvious inflammatory speakers who have a clear motive to sow disharmony and incite violence or paranoia between groups?
Shit, even just publicly display their sponsors on the banner, with how much they have been paid to speak.
I don’t want to go to university and have mega corporations send their shills to cause chaos among the student body.
They are not doing it in good faith, so why give them unrestricted access?
My point was about universities. I don't think Owens et al. will want to debate on campuses. But I'd be happy to take her on, if that was the case. Fear is the bigger enemy.
"Yes, sometimes it hurts to hear one’s cherished ideas get a good going over by opponents and sceptics. And sometimes some people’s sheer ignorance needs to be corrected. But that’s how we learn and grow. It wasn’t meant to be easy." Well said - isn't this why we have universities?
While the legislation does feel heavy-handed, unfortunately our universities now largely operate on a business (rather than an educative) model. Students are fee-paying consumers and as a consequence we have increasing seen a tendency to close down anything that comes close to an genuine, open-minded, public debate about controversial areas (eg Te Tiriti). NCEA in schools hasn't helped - a lot of our young people are not well equipped to think critically when they complete their schooling - qualified but not educated. The legislation may well be a necessary corrective to signal that our universities need to get back to the core business of speaking truth to power and challenging orthodoxies.
Indeed so, Mark. That was what universities were supposed to achieve. I have heard, though, from some of those fee-paying consumers in the past that they really don't like the 'party line' that's forced down their throats and that they have to replicate in essays. All I could say to them was that I was sorry, as they deserved better. There was nothing I could do about it, other than set a different example – until the university let me go!
Yes - The management in universities are increasingly pandering to the loudest most strident voices (who are not representative) and too many of our students are short changed in getting a robust, critical Tertiary education.
As I mentioned in an earlier thread, the commodification of tertiary education is a big factor in the rise of "cancelling" anything that might put the cash cows at risk.
Totally. At the heart of questions such as free speech is that the university sector has been starved of funds by successive governments over the last 30 years and increasingly encouraged to become financially self-sufficient. Students are seen as consumers and staff are under intense pressure to go with the flow when it comes to raising funds.
Here in Australia universities were required to adopt free speech and academic freedom statements about five years ago, and have all done so. I haven’t noticed any adverse consequences. The statements all make clear that free speech/academic freedom doesn’t include behaviour that breaches the university’s code of conduct, let alone behaviour that constitutes a crime, such as hate speech.
I should look up some of those policies. NZ has had academic freedom enshrined in law since (I think) 1989. Am I correct in thinking Aus never had that?
I don’t believe so. In the late.twenty-teens the federal government commissioned a review of academic freedom, which produced a model code. In 2021 the Highwr Wducarion Aupport Act was amended to use the term academic freedom in a couple of places, and to define academic freedom, but I don’t believe the act specifically requires universities to ensure academic freedom. However, there has certainly been pressure on universities to adopt their own statement of academic freedom, and many enterprise bargaining agreements between universities and their staff now have a section on academic freedom and its limits – as an important matter in employment relations.
More posturing by the Coalition, with sinister undertones. Universities will be prohibited "from adopting positions on issues that do not directly relate to their core role or functions.” But what is the "University"? Presumably the University Council (?) which defines and then ensures this this policy is implemented ? Can the Council control, what individual staff say? Will perceived non-adherence influence a University's funding? The mind boggles !
Hi David. I hope you had a great Christmas day. I know from experience that a lot of suppression of opinion and debate goes on in universities. Councils and VCs should not formalise that, and hence make it worse, by adopting one-sided positions on politically contentious matter. Cheers.
Forced speech as Simmonds & Seymour are proposing is typically no better than old-fashioned censorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compelled_speech
When I went to Victoria Uni in the early 2010s there was definitely self-policing of opinions amongst students. This was before 'woke' was a big concept, so I remember complaining that the Uni environment was too 'PC'.
That being said, I still engaged in some strong and useful debates on topics where I held unpopular views. It is a shame that things have gotten worse in the last decade, with administrator's directly censoring debate according to media reports. While it shouldn't be necessary, hopefully these new freedom of speech statements help to reverse the censorship trend.
Also, I noticed at the end that you mentioned there is no strong evidence that public polls close to an election influence voter's choice of party. However, you then mention that these polls can encourage more voters to show up on election day. Wouldn't those encouraged voters be likely to swing the outcome towards a specific party?
Thanks for the comments, Stephen. In answer to your question: yes, that could happen, but it's hard to predict in which directions people may be influenced. And is such influence a good or a bad thing for democracy? That is, Mr Peters may once have been annoyed by what he termed a 'bandwagon effect', but that effect could also go in his favour at times too. And why can't voters have the benefit of opinion polls to help guide their decisions? (It would help, though, if people better understood statistical variance!)