If universities mean what they say about student thriving, it is our moral duty to build the infrastructures that enable student learning.
Amidst the global attack of the far right on universities, mainstreamed through policy capture by the far right, and here in Aotearoa through the infrastructures of the Free Speech Union and mainstream political parties such as ACT and New Zealand First, it is critical that Universities organise to safeguard learning spaces.
And it is particularly critical that university administrators are held to account to do their jobs in enabling student learning.
What the students said
In June, Massive, the magazine of Massey's students, polled the campuses ahead of the election. The rest of this blog post is going to build on what was reported, albeit noting that it is an unofficial election poll, and without the information on the polling method.
More than seventy percent gave their party vote to the Greens.
Not one respondent named National, ACT, or New Zealand First. Asked about the coalition, they offered not a single kind word.
Read their reasons and a clear politics emerges.
One first-year backed the Greens for pointing toward a country with a future and opportunity for everyone regardless of social status, race, gender, or sexuality. A masters student named the moment as the rise of a patriarchal, capitalist, conservative fascism that has fallen hardest on the least protected. A fourth-year condemned legislation rammed through under urgency and cruelty waved off at an alarming rate.
These students are not confused about what they want.
They want to be taught how the world works and how it might be made just. They can name what stands in the way.
What is being done to their classrooms
Now look at what is happening inside the lecture halls those students fill.
In July an ACT member of Parliament , the education spokesperson of the Party, took a first-year law lecture at the University of Auckland, a lecture on the Treaty Principles Bill, and posted it to her Facebook page, later to be amplified by her Party's Facebook page.
She named the teacher. She held the teaching up as evidence of bias.
This technique is imported wholesale from the American far right, from the professor watchlists and the campus informer networks that have spent a decade turning lectures into scandals and teachers into targets.
The Te Tiriti connection is not incidental
The lecture that drew the attack was about Te Tiriti.
That is the pattern, not the exception.
The same government the students reject has spent this term coming for the Treaty head on, through a Principles Bill built to hollow out the relationship, through a regulatory agenda designed to write Māori out of the machinery of the state.
Te Tiriti and Māori futures are at the heart of safeguarding our futures.
The state has named the same thing as its target.
"Isn't this just protecting students?"
Here is the defence ACT and its allies in the Free Speech Union will offer. They will say they are standing up for the academic freedom of the student. They will say they are guarding young people against indoctrination. They will ask, as the campaign always asks, whether a student would feel comfortable speaking up in that room.
It is a clever inversion, and it is false.
The freedom to teach and the freedom to learn are the same freedom.
When a politician screenshots a lecture and feeds it to a party's followers, no student is protected. A message is sent to every teacher in the country: trim the syllabus, soften the argument, drop the Treaty this year, or your name could be next.
That is not the defence of learning. It is its supervision, and perhaps worse, authoritarian repression. After all, for most dictators, it is the freedom to learn critical concepts that must go first.
And the comfort being invoked is a weapon.
A university is one of the few places left where students are meant to be made uncomfortable by ideas, by evidence, by histories they were never taught. Turn discomfort into a grievance a politician can act on, and you have handed the far right a veto over the curriculum.
Who actually pays
Academic freedom is usually described as a staff privilege, a perk of tenure. That framing is convenient and wrong.
The person who loses when a lecturer teaches under threat is the student in the third row who came to university precisely to think about hard things.
Every chilled colleague, every quietly abandoned topic, every teacher who decides Te Tiriti is too dangerous to touch this semester, delivers those students a smaller world.
The students in the Massive poll are not spectators to this fight. They are the stake.
What does it mean to put students first?
So put the honest question to academic institutions, particularly to the managerial class.
Are universities being designed to deliver to our students, or only to manage the risk of teaching them? Are our managers offering the safeguards that we need as faculty to teach freely in the classroom?
The answer cannot be silence. University managers should say, publicly and by name, that they will defend academic staff targeted by politicians for lawful teaching. They should refuse to let a complaint pipeline that runs from the Free Speech Union to ACT set the terms of any syllabus.
They should affirm that teaching Te Tiriti, gender, climate change, whiteness, critical race theory critically and rigorously, is core to the work of a university in Aotearoa and not a liability to be litigated. And they should build the concrete protections, legal, procedural, collective, that let a lecturer teach the Treaty Principles Bill on Monday without wondering whose Facebook page she will appear on by Friday. They should be brave and bold to issue statements when their academics are targeted. This is what serving students means.
The students have already answered the question the university keeps asking itself. They told us, in a magazine poll run by their magazine, what they want us to be for.
In the mid-term poll they run, our students voted for a braver country. They are brave in expressing what they want, in spite of the culture of repression directed at them.
The least we owe them is a braver university, and leaders with the spine to defend it.