Manufacturing Neutrality: How the radical right turned a civic ideal into an instrument for capturing the university
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Manufacturing Neutrality
How the radical right turned a civic ideal into an instrument for capturing the university
In late May 2026, Grant Robertson, vice-chancellor of the University of Otago and the country's former finance minister, wrote to his university community about a piece of legislation moving through the New Zealand Parliament. The Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill, a member's bill carried by New Zealand First, would fix in statute that a woman is an adult human biological female and a man an adult human biological male, language that quietly withdraws legal recognition from trans, intersex, and non-binary people. Robertson told staff and students that he found the bill unnecessary and disturbing, and he acknowledged those who had gathered to protest it. For the students whose existence the bill proposed to legislate away, the email carried a plain reassurance, that the institution could see them and that they belonged inside it.
The Free Speech Union read the same email and discovered a scandal. Within days the organisation had announced a complaint to the chair of the university council, an Official Information Act request for the full text and its distribution list, and the intelligence that at least one student had lodged a formal grievance. Robertson, the Union charged, had betrayed the university's commitment to institutional neutrality by lending its corporate voice to one side of a contested public question. Otago rejected the complaint, observing that its own neutrality statement reserves an explicit exception for the safety and wellbeing of students, the very ground on which the vice-chancellor had written. The whole affair would pass as ordinary campus theatre were it not so clean a specimen of a method whose most recent appearance in Dunedin simply makes visible what has been operating in the open for some time.
A doctrine of recent vintage
Institutional neutrality wears the robes of timeless principle while being, in fact, a fairly young idea. Its canonical statement is the 1967 Kalven Committee report at the University of Chicago, which reasoned that a university able to sponsor the criticism of society must itself decline corporate political positions, remaining the host of critics rather than a critic in its own right. The appeal is genuine and the lineage respectable. A scholarly community gains something real from an institution that refuses to convert its collective authority into a partisan cudgel, and faculty who dissent from a popular administration have reason to want a university that does not pronounce on every question of the day.
Three concepts sit in the same conceptual neighbourhood and reward being kept apart. Academic freedom protects the individual scholar's inquiry and its expression. Institutional autonomy protects the university's capacity to govern itself, set its own academic ends, and resist direction by external powers, whether church, state, donor, or movement. Institutional neutrality, the youngest and most contestable of the three, asks the corporate body to abstain from collective stances on political controversy. Zgaga (2012) traces the slow conceptual drift by which autonomy, the load-bearing value, came to be folded into and then eclipsed by softer talk of balance and freedom. Bergan, Gallagher, and Harkavy (2020), writing for the Council of Europe, lodge all three inside a single civic architecture in which the autonomous university operates as a precondition of democratic life, the institution whose self-governance allows a society to think against itself. Barnhizer (1993) had already named the danger in the doctrine, warning that neutrality asserted as a virtue can become an alibi for institutional irresponsibility, a graceful way of declining the obligations that knowledge imposes on those who hold it.
My own intervention into the concept of academic freedom begins precisely at the seam where these ideas are made to touch. My argument, developed across the culture-centered approach I have built over two decades of community-engaged scholarship that explores university, community, public interplays, holds that institutional neutrality and institutional autonomy stand in a relation of latent antagonism once neutrality is manufactured and enforced from outside the institution. A neutrality the university adopts for itself, as a self-limiting discipline on its own corporate speech, may serve autonomy. A neutrality demanded of the university by an organised movement, policed through complaints and information requests and the threat of public shaming, functions as an instrument of capture, a lever by which external actors reach into the autonomous institution and bend its conduct toward their own ends while calling the result balance. Olssen (2022) describes a parallel incursion under neoliberal governance, the steady hollowing of autonomy by audit, metric, and market discipline; the radical right's appropriation of neutrality is the ideological face of the same erosion. Adams (2020), surveying the United States, and Ellerby (2025), reframing the freedom-and-neutrality debate, both arrive at a version of the same recognition, that a value advertised as protection can be retooled as a means of control.
A specific formation
The far right at issue in my work is a definite political formation rather than a loose insult, and the evidence for its operation in Aotearoa has accumulated in public view (Vats & Dutta, 2020). Peker (2024) supplies the cleanest theoretical statement of its manoeuvre, describing how the radical right has set about reclaiming value neutrality in higher education, presenting itself as the aggrieved party restoring an impartiality that a captured academy has supposedly abandoned. The vehicle for this work in New Zealand is the Free Speech Union, whose ascent Newsroom has documented and traced to a transnational ecology of donors and affiliated organisations that recurs across the English-speaking world. In my essays, I have charted the Union's characteristic escalation, the way it can move from a campus climate survey to a full moral panic without pausing for the evidentiary work that the language of free inquiry would seem to require.
The pattern has a recognisable shape, and its targets are the load-bearing institutions of democratic life, the press and the university above all. These are the institutions that produce shared knowledge, adjudicate competing claims, and grant or withhold legitimacy, and a movement that aspires to reorder the political common sense must discipline them first. The means is an assault on autonomy conducted under the banner of neutrality. The press is harried for bias toward the very communities it reports into existence; the university is harried for partiality whenever it extends recognition to the marginalised. Dutta has been on the receiving end of the campus version of this campaign, and has warned for years that the coordinated targeting of individual scholars is the retail expression of a wholesale project. His earlier mapping of the far-right agenda riding inside the rhetoric of free speech anticipated, in its essentials, the case now playing out around Robertson.
The transnational template
The method does not stop at the water's edge, and the New Zealand episode reads as a provincial performance of a script written at continental scale. In the United States, Keck (2025) analyses the way attacks on academic freedom have become entangled with a broader democratic backsliding in the Trump era, while Post (2025), among the most authoritative voices in American academic freedom scholarship, describes the period as an open assault on the freedom of the academy itself. Salajan and Jules (2025) widen the frame, reading the global fallout of United States authoritarianism as a threat that travels, reshaping the conditions of scholarship far beyond American borders. The mechanism is identical on both shores of the Pacific. A manufactured crisis of bias or partiality licenses an external actor, a federal department in one case and a self-appointed union in the other, to discipline the institution back toward a position the actor designates as neutral, which is to say toward the actor's own ideological preference. The American campaign arrives with the leverage of appropriations and accreditation; the Antipodean version arrives with the leverage of publicity and procedural harassment. The grammar is shared even where the vocabulary differs.
The duty of care as provocation
The character of the method declares itself most fully in what it chooses to attack. A university's responsibility to its students reaches well past the seminar room into their safety, their wellbeing, and their mental health, an obligation that intensifies precisely as a cohort of students is made the subject of hostile legislation. The Tertiary Education Union has been careful to distinguish academic freedom from a generalised licence to speak, and the distinction matters here, because the function the Free Speech Union flags as the offence is not a scholar's argument at all but an institution's care. The Union's national campaign against universities makes the priority explicit, directing its energy at the provisions through which universities shelter gender-diverse students, honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and make room for the knowledge and presence of those at the margins. Malahlela and Sadiki (2025) gather the scholarship on structural inequality in higher education around exactly this point, that the work of social justice inside the university is the work most likely to be reframed by its opponents as a breach of the institution's proper restraint. Care for the vulnerable becomes, in the inverted grammar of the campaign, the evidence of capture.
The communicative inversion
The culture-centered approach offers the sharpest available name for the operation. My peer reviewed work names this phenomenon communicative inversion, the rhetorical procedure by which a material relation of power is represented as its mirror image, so that those who hold structural advantage come to occupy the position of the wounded and those who exercise a duty of protection are recast as aggressors (Dutta & Pal, 2020). Read through the approach's signature analytic of structure, culture, and agency, the FSU campaign resolves into a contest over the voice infrastructures of the society, the channels and platforms through which legitimacy is distributed and withheld. Institutional neutrality, in this reading, is a particular kind of voice infrastructure, one engineered to register the speech of the powerful as the neutral baseline while coding the speech of the subaltern as activism, advocacy, bias, a departure from an impartiality that was always loaded in advance. The crowning inversion is the one I have named most insistently, the manufacture of a crisis of academic freedom as the cover under which academic freedom is dismantled. The account of academic freedom in turbulent times offered by Naepi et al. (2025) and the National Communication Association's task force on academic freedom and tenure both register the same paradox from within the institutions under pressure, that the threat rarely announces itself as censorship and almost always arrives wrapped in the flag of free expression.
What the campaign wants is not the cessation of the vice-chancellor's email and nothing more. The prize is the university itself, reordered around an ideological structure that the movement supplies and then describes as the absence of any structure at all. A neutrality imposed from outside operates as the entry point for that reordering, the procedural wedge by which an autonomous institution is taught to mistrust its own duty of care and to seek permission, from its critics, before extending recognition to anyone the critics would prefer to leave unrecognised. The culture-centered approach reads this as a question of communication sovereignty, of who holds the authority to define the terms on which a community may speak of itself and be heard, and it situates the New Zealand case within the longer settler-colonial history that has always made the recognition of the marginalised a contested act. A university that may not tell its most vulnerable students that it sees them has already surrendered the autonomy that allows it to shelter anyone at all, and the movement that engineered the surrender will return, on schedule, to collect the rest.
References
Adams, W. D. (2020). Academic freedom, institutional autonomy and democracy: A view from the United States. In Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and the Future of Democracy (Council of Europe Higher Education Series No. 24, pp. 141–153). Council of Europe.
Barnhizer, D. (1993). Freedom to do what? Institutional neutrality, academic freedom, and academic responsibility. Journal of Legal Education, 43, 346.
Bergan, S., Gallagher, T., & Harkavy, I. (2020). Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and the Future of Democracy (Council of Europe Higher Education Series No. 24). Council of Europe.
Dutta, M. J., & Pal, M. (2020). Theorizing from the global south: Dismantling, resisting, and transforming communication theory. Communication Theory, 30(4), 349-369.Ellerby, P. (2025). Freedom and neutrality: Reframing the debate. Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy, 10(2), 3.
Kalven Committee. (1967). Report on the University's Role in Political and Social Action. University of Chicago.
Keck, T. M. (2025). Free speech, academic freedom, and democratic backsliding in the Trump-era United States. International Political Science Review. Advance online publication.
Malahlela, M. K., & Sadiki, M. C. (Eds.). (2025). Breaking Structural Inequality and Enhancing Social Justice in Higher Education. IGI Global.
Naepi, S., Jack, K., Waymouth, M., Naepi, C., & Vandewiele, C. (2025). The right to speak: exploring academic freedom in turbulent times. Higher Education, 1-20.Olssen, M. (2022). Academic freedom, institutional autonomy and democracy: The incursions of neoliberalism. In Handbook on Academic Freedom (pp. 126–146). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Peker, E. (2024). The radical right and the university: Reclaiming value neutrality in higher education. On Education: Journal for Research and Debate.
Post, R. (2025). Assaulting Academic Freedom in the Age of Trump (SSRN Working Paper No. 5286936).
Salajan, F. D., & Jules, T. D. (2025). Academic freedom under siege: The global fallout of US authoritarianism and its threats to comparative and international education. Comparative Education Review, 69(3), 379–399.
Vats, A., & Dutta, M. J. (2020). Locating freedom of speech in an era of global white nationalism. First Amendment Studies, 54(2), 156-180.Zgaga, P. (2012). Reconsidering university autonomy and governance: From academic freedom to institutional autonomy. In University Governance and Reform: Policy, Fads, and Experience in International Perspective (pp. 11–22). Palgrave Macmillan.