The Free Speech Union has a problem with, you guessed it,
Free Speech!
In its latest round of performing victimhood (white, male,
heteronormative, cisnormative), the Free Speech Union (FSU) tells us that it is
triggered by Te Kungenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University offering its academics
the choice of using Toitū te Tiriti (meaning “honor the Treaty”) in an
electronic email signature.
In this opinion piece, I will argue that this attack on the university
is part of a broader ideological
project of the FSU that seeks to concoct a crisis around the university,
simultaneously mobilising around the ideologically-driven organised attack of
the far-right targeting of Te Tiriti we are currently witnessing in Aotearoa
New Zealand.
This concoction of the crisis of the academy and the crisis
of democracy is central to how the FSU seeks to reorganise universities and
democracy in Aotearoa to align them with its broader far-right agenda.
This project of reworking universities is evident across
Western democracies, funded by powerful think tanks, foundations, and political
parties. Concertedly, the attack on Te Tiriti is part of a broader ideological
project attacking Indigenous rights to pave the way for extreme forms of
neoliberal extractivism.
A couple of observations before I offer my analysis. Te
Tiriti is the foundational document of Aotearoa, shaping the very architecture
that forms the political, economic, cultural, and societal backbone of Aotearoa
New Zealand. Massey University is a Te Tiriti aspiring university, seeking to
give effect to the principles and values of Te Tiriti through its teaching,
research, and service.
Free speech for me, not for thee
It seems that in the deeply ideological world FSU inhabits, free
speech in the university sector is to be celebrated and advocated for as long
as it upholds the uncharted rights of white supremacists to attack Te Tiriti, Māori
rights, and transgender rights. Free speech here is an instrument of powering
up, of securing the communicative right of the already powerful to continue
consolidating greater power.
In the past, the FSU has spoken strongly about the rights of
Hobson’s Pledge and Speak Up for Women to voice viewpoints on the university
campus that are seen as threatening Te Tiriti and threatening transgender
rights respectively.
The Union has historically defended the communicative rights
of the powerful while communicative inverting the position of power into
victimhood. This victimhood of white privilege is dressed up in academic
language, framed as “enabling a new generation of students and scholars to
dare challenge the universally accepted, consider the unthinkable, and develop
new knowledge for the benefit of all Kiwis.”
Those with entrenched power become oppressed through communicative
inversion. Those with historically derived power challenging critical thinking and
questioning the historic power of white supremacy in a settler colonial state,
is considered a position requiring courage. The irony here is that there is
nothing new about challenging Te Tiriti. In fact, this has historically been
the Crown’s position, and knowledge structures in the settler colonial state
have worked to perpetuate this.
Beyond the façade of concern for academic freedom, what the
FSU and the broader project of the global far right are really concerned about here
is that universities are being decolonised through decades of scholarly
struggle against the white supremacist zeitgeist that has historically formed
the knowledge infrastructures of Western universities, invested in the projects
of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, patriarchy, cisnormativity, and
imperialism. The academic debates and dialogues within the scholarly literature
and in public spaces speaking out against the deleterious effects of systemic
and institutional racism on health and related outcomes of Indigenous, Black, people
of colour and other diverse communities is framed as part of a woke agenda in
the far-right’s concoction of a culture war.
This latest round of attacks on Massey for offering a Te
Tiriti email signature to staff makes this underlying agenda visible.
Free speech and communicative inequality
In pushing its position, the FSU discovers the concept of
communicative equality, that “free speech can only be defended if the playing
feed (sic) is kept even.”
Here’s another layer of communicative inversion, in this
instance turning the concept of communicative inequality (and by extension,
equality) on its head. It would appear from the FSU that Massey is making the
playing field uneven by offering staff the choice of expressing support for Te
Tiriti.
The rhetorical device at work carefully inverts the powerful
position of white supremacy, far-right activists and think tanks, capitalists
funding the global attacks on Indigenous rights, and far-right political forces
targeting Te Tiriti, turning this position into victimhood, while the advocacy
for Te Tiriti and Māori rights is propped up as the position of power.
Contrast this communicative inversion with the materiality
of the settler colonial theft of Māori land and resources, the institutionalisation
of anti-Māori racism in Crown structures, and the ongoing structural
disenfranchisement of Māori, evident in the vastly inequal outcomes in health,
housing, employment, income, etc.
Disinformation and history denial
The Free Speech Union’s latest attack on Massey for the use
of the Toitū te Tiriti banner is based on disinformation that turns the
articulation of support for Te Tiriti into a political partisan position.
For Aotearoa, Te Tiriti is the foundational document. Massey
University gives effect to this foundational document by seeking to aspire
toward it.
The suggestion that the support for Te Tiriti is partisan is
reflective of a far-right extremist universe, one that works by denying the
rich history of Aotearoa New Zealand anchored in Te Tiriti. It must be read as
part of a broader communicative infrastructure seeking to undermine Te Tiriti.
FSU, along with its allied organisation, the Taxpayers Union
(TPU), and connected think tanks, is embedded within the ideological
infrastructure of the Right. This ideological infrastructure has played a
key role globally in attacking Indigenous rights, including attacking
Indigenous rights in Australia. Critical here is the connection of the ideological
infrastructure attacking Indigenous righs to the extractive industries that see
Indigenous rights as barriers to unfettered expansion.
Partisanship and whiteness
The FSU claims Massey is being partisan, suggesting by
implication that the university is unworthy of taxpayer funding. The trope of
partisanship is a key trope in the ongoing far-right attacks on universities,
as evident in the United States and other Western democracies.
The claim to partisanship reflects the ideological workings
of whiteness that prop up white culture as universal, while positions that are
outside of that white mainstream are framed as biased or invested. In this
instance, the communicative trope works through the framing of the expression
of honoring Te Tiriti as partisan while obfuscating the highly ideological nature
of the attack on Te Tiriti.
The far-right’s concept of an ideologically free university
In a letter written to Professor Jan Thomas, Vice-Chancellor of Massey, and copied to the Minister of Tertiary Education and Act Party leader David Seymour, the politician who introduced the Treaty Principles Bill, the FSU suggested that the university is taking a political stance:
Note here the FSU’s assumption that Massey is adopting an institutional
view in opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill, and the suggestion the
university breaches the obligation of academic freedom under the Education and
Training Act. The whiteness of the assumption works by centering a Crown act
(although it fails to specifically mention which part of the Education and
Training Act the university violates) while erasing the very legitimacy of the
Crown that derives from Te Tiriti.
Also note the framing of the Treaty Principles Bill as a
political issue, once again, foreclosing conversations about Te Tiriti and around
the Bill, and erasing the actuality of Te Tiriti as the founding
document of Aotearoa.
The campaign of the FSU attacking Massey and universities
across Aotearoa is part of a global far-right campaign targeting the autonomy
of universities. These attacks must be located within the ideological universe
of the far right, from the far-right activist Chris Rufo to right-wing think
tanks such as the Koch Network, Heritage Foundation and Atlas Network, to right-wing
political figures such as Donald Trump and the Republicans in the US launching systemic
attacks on universities.
Starting from the Trump
ban to legislations across 20+
US states targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Critical Race
Theory (CRT), and Decolonisation, the far-right seeks to dismantle
research and pedagogy asking critical questions around power and control in
social, political and economic configurations.
The danger of these attacks lies precisely in their ongoing
performance of advocacy for academic freedom, while seriously threatening
academic freedom. In the New Zealand context, these threats directly impede the
scholarship and teaching of the critical humanities and social sciences and
threaten to severely constrain the role of academics as “critics and conscience
of society.”
The communicative infrastructure of the attack of the
far-right on universities is based on the construction of an ideologically free
university, suggesting somehow that universities and the broader work of
knowledge production is somehow free of ideology. This position, funded by
powerful forces invested in sustaining and perpetuating power, works by
obfuscating its own ideological investments and is a banal strategy of the
powerful, to render invisible the workings of hegemony.
Honoring Te Tiriti is integral to upholding academic freedom
in Aotearoa New Zealand, not antithetical to it.
Te Tiriti existed long before the Treaty Principles Bill was
introduced, and I suspect, will continue to robustly anchor the political,
social, cultural and economic organising of Aotearoa well past the
conversations around the Bill.
