Neutrality Has Become the Far Right's Weapon Against the University

The Free Speech Union's pursuit of Grant Robertson shows how a doctrine sold as protection is used to punish a university for caring for its most vulnerable students.

By Mohan J. Dutta

In late May, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Otago wrote to his community. New Zealand First's Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill, which would write into law that a woman is "an adult human biological female" and a man "an adult human biological male," had just passed its first reading. Grant Robertson told students and staff that he found the bill "unnecessary and disturbing" at a personal level. He acknowledged those who had protested the cuts in this year's Budget. For a trans student at Otago reading those words on a screen, the message was plain. The person at the top of my university sees me. I am not on the wrong side of anything here.

Within days, the Free Speech Union had converted that act of care into a charge sheet. The organisation announced it would write to the Chair of the University Council, file an Official Information Act request for the full email, its recipient list, and any advice given before it was sent, and it noted that at least one student had already lodged a formal complaint. Robertson, they said, had breached institutional neutrality. He had let the university speak through him, leaving those who disagreed stranded on the far side of an official line.

Sit with the architecture of that claim, because the architecture is the point. A bill moves through Parliament that would strip legal recognition from trans, intersex, and non-binary New Zealanders. A Vice-Chancellor extends reassurance to the students that bill puts at risk. And it is the reassurance, the duty of care, that gets named as the violation. The bill itself, the act of legislating people out of recognition, passes without a word about neutrality. The harm is invisible. The response to the harm is the scandal.

This is what I have been calling, across five years of writing on the subject, communicative inversion. A material relation is turned on its head in its representation. Those who hold structural power perform the language of the wounded. The university doing the ordinary work of looking after its most exposed students is recast as the aggressor, and the lobby group disciplining that university is recast as the defender of the open society. The trick works because it borrows the moral weight of a real value, freedom, and bends it back against the people freedom was meant to protect.

The cruelty here has a sharper edge still. Robertson is the Vice-Chancellor who built Otago's institutional neutrality statement in the first place. His own working group drafted it. The statement carves out explicit exceptions where the university may speak: the safety and wellbeing of staff and students, equity, and obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The Free Speech Union welcomed that statement when it was adopted. Now they read it as if those exceptions had been deleted, and they use the document to discipline the man who wrote it. The university has rejected the claim outright, and on the plain text of its own policy, the rejection is sound. Caring for the safety of trans students is precisely what the statement protects.

The deeper sleight of hand lives in a deliberate conflation of two different things. The Tertiary Education Union has been careful about this distinction, and it matters. Academic freedom is a hard-won structural protection. It guards the scholar who follows evidence to conclusions the powerful find inconvenient, the researcher who names structural violence, the teacher who refuses to flatten a contested history. It is grounded in expertise, in peer scrutiny, in the slow accountability of a disciplinary community. The libertarian free-for-all the Free Speech Union markets is a different animal altogether, a claim that any voice deserves any platform at any volume, with the loudest and best-resourced voices winning by default. Naepi et al. (2025) have traced how readily the second swallows the first in turbulent times. Collapse academic freedom into raw free speech, and you can call any duty of care a censorship.

I want to be clear about what the Free Speech Union is, because politeness about its provenance has cost us dearly. Newsroom's investigation into who benefits from its rise charts an astroturf operation, well funded, ideologically networked, that has been mainstreamed by a credulous press and by politicians who should know better. I have watched its method up close. It moves from a climate survey to a moral panic without pausing for evidence. 

Five years ago I began raising the alarm about the far-right agenda riding underneath the language of free speech, and I have since documented the coordinated campaigns that target individual scholars who speak from and for the margins. The pattern held for me. It holds now for Robertson. It will hold for whoever is next.

So look at who this freedom is for, and who it is against. Read the Free Speech Union's own campaign to stop universities undermining our basic freedoms and notice where its energy lands. It lands on gender-diverse students offered safety. It lands on Māori knowledge in the curriculum, on Palestinian solidarity, on the scholarship of decolonisation, on the institutions that try to make room for subaltern voice. The structure of the campaign tells you its function. A doctrine of neutrality that fires only in one direction is not neutral. It is a discipline dressed as a principle, and the people it disciplines are always those with the least power to answer back.

This is the inversion at its purest. A crisis of academic freedom is manufactured, loudly and repeatedly, in order to do the very thing it claims to prevent. The manufactured crisis becomes the cover for the real assault. I chaired an international task force on academic freedom for the largest disciplinary association of communication scholars, educators, and practitioners that spent two years mapping how this works across institutions, and the lesson is consistent. The threat to the university rarely knocks at the door announcing itself as censorship. It instead presents itself wrapped in the flag of free expression, asking only that the university stop protecting the people it is duty-bound to protect.

The Free Speech Union understands the value of the words it has captured. It knows that freedom sounds like the side of the angels. Our work as academics here in Aotearoa, as it is internationally, is to refuse to the communicative inversion underlying the capture, to hold the line on what academic freedom actually is, and to name the duty of care for what it is, the ordinary decency of a university that will not abandon its own.

When the powerful start speaking in the language of the wounded, watch the hands, not the mouth.