The Free Speech Union's Far Right Agenda and the Attack on Universities: Leaping from Climate Surveys to Moral Panics

The trope of academic freedom in danger is a critical resource in the organized attack of the Far Right on the modern University. One of the core techniques of the Far Right in its efforts to destabilize academic institutions is cook up a frenzy around free speech, intentionally conflating free speech issues with academic freedom. As an exemplar of the communicative inversions performed by the Far Right, the panic around academic freedom is actually a critical tool then in catalyzing attacks on the academic freedom of decolonizing practices in the University. What the Far Right, and the underlying infrastructure of white supremacy is triggered by is that Universities are slowly transforming, starting to acknowledge that centuries of colonial epistemic violence have erased the knowledge infrastructures of colonized peoples.

In Aotearoa, as I have demonstrated in my analyses, the Free Speech Union uses ideologically motivated faulty surveys to create the panic around academic freedom. With a fundamentally incorrect understanding of academic freedom (the freedom of academics to teach and publish in their areas of expertise) that conflates it with free speech, the Free Speech Union constructs its propaganda around specific ideological issues (Te Tiriti, gender justice, and so on) which are at the heart of the Far Right's culture war propaganda in Aotearoa. 

In its most recent campaign pushing this moral panic, the Free Speech Union has turned to releasing leaked climate surveys to construct the argument that academic freedom is under threat in Aotearoa. Deploying the tactical tool of leaks, it builds an affective register around academic climates, suggesting these climates are threatening to academic freedom.

In August, the Free Speech Union targeted the Law School at Auckland University of Technology, placing its propaganda around a leaked climate survey (to David Farrar, yes, the same David Farrar that runs the debunked FSU survey on academic freedom) that suggested faculty dissatisfaction. Commenting on the selective excerpts from the survey published on David Farrar's blog, noted Jonathan Ayling, the Chief Executive of the FSU,

“Academics are being criticised and punished for speaking out, causing them and others to resort to self-censorship. Again, results from an internal law school survey displayed very low levels of satisfaction. This included 30% claiming they feel uncomfortable reporting inappropriate behaviour and more than one-in-three respondents experiencing bullying in the past six months."

Ayling's blog then reports on a letter sent out to the Minister of Education and the Vice Chancellor of the University. When you look closely at the items shared on Farrar's blog however, you note there is not a single reported item on the blog that substantiate the claim "academics are being criticised and punished for speaking out."  You also don't find an item that actually measures self-censorship. 

In other words, the frame around threat to academic freedom that is part of the moral panic crafted by the FSU in its press release and the letter to the Minister of Education is not substantiated empirically. There is no evidence of academics being punished for speaking out, as Ayling claims.

Farrar's blog embellishes the ideological reading of the survey with leaked emails and speculations. The leaked survey creates the opening for attacking the Dean of Law at AUT who had spoken out against the attack on the teaching of Tikanga Māori. Writes Farrar, "Now readers will recall that the Dean of Law is Khylee Quince and she attracted a lot of publicity when she called a senior KC a racist dinosaur who should go off and die in the corner." The blog wraps up by further constructing the Dean as threat to academic freedom, 

"As you can see the results for the Law Faculty are much much lower than AUT as a whole. So this would suggest the major issue is not the central administration, but the faculty management itself. I am told by sources that everyone knows what the major problem is, but people are too scared to say so." 

Note here the slippage from the report of a leaked climate survey to hearsay. Attend to the architecture of gossip in "everyone knows what the major problem is, but people are too scared to say so." 

It is worth noting that the targeting of the AUT Dean of Law, the Māori academic Khylee Quince, is part of a broader campaign targeting senior Māori academics (often women) who have spoken out publicly against the white supremacist structures that make up Universities in settler colonial Aotearoa, and their organized campaigns directed at erasing the decolonizing registers that have been built through decades of struggle. The ideologically motivated campaign around academic freedom mobilized by Farrar and FSU works on slippages to construct the narrative of academic freedom under threat. Implicit in the construction of the threat to academic freedom is the positioning of Te Tiriti as a threat to academic freedom in Aotearoa.  

Indeed, the academic climate of settler colonial Universities, embedded in whiteness and mobilized to uphold white supremacy, has worked historically to erase decolonizing registers of knowledge generation. Prevailing norms of whiteness have devalued and undermined Indigenous knowledge claims, often working aggressively to silence decolonizing scholarship. The voices of Indigenous and postcolonial academics have historically been silenced, with the academic freedom to do decolonizing scholarship severely constrained by the norms of whiteness, upheld by notions of civility and norms of communication within white academic structures. 

As Universities in Aotearoa, as with universities across settler colonial spaces globally, have started their decolonizing journeys around reconciliation and recognition of Indigenous rights, the far-right white supremacist campaign seeking to silence these efforts has worked incessantly to construct decolonization as a threat to academic freedom. The implicit and explicit targeting of Te Tiriti and the positioning of Te Tiriti in opposition to academic freedom must be read within the broader architecture of the global proliferation of white supremacist backlash against decolonization. Any conversation on academic freedom must begin with the recognition that the Far Right panic around academic freedom is a threat to the academic freedom of academics studying, teaching, researching and publicly engaging on decolonization, postcolonial theory, critical race theory etc. It must also be noted that academics teaching and researching in these areas have historically faced diverse intersecting forms of marginalization, harassment, and threats to their academic freedom.