The Party in the Lecture Hall
ACT has imported the American far right's war on the professor, and its weapon of choice is the language of comfort and safety
The notes travelled fast. They began in a first-year law lecture at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland, where Professor Treasa Dunworth was doing what law professors across the democratic world do every day, walking her students through a piece of legislation, in this case the Treaty Principles Bill, and offering her expert interpretation of its purpose and its politics. Within hours, those notes had crossed from the pedagogical space of the classroom to the Facebook page of a member of Parliament, Dr Parmjeet Parmar, ACT's tertiary education spokesperson, and from there to the official page of a governing party. Parmar named the professor, accused her of misinforming and brainwashing her students, and asked her followers a question dressed as concern: "Would you feel comfortable speaking up?"
How classroom notes come to travel that road is the story. Notes do not carry themselves to a politician's Facebook page. A road has to exist, an infrastructure that solicits them, receives them, packages them, and broadcasts them, and a political party has to build it. We have seen this road before. We have seen it in the United States, where it has a name, a funding stream, and a body count of ruined careers. What happened this week in Aotearoa New Zealand is a photocopy of the American far right's campaign against the university, reproduced line for line, and it should alarm anyone who cares about the Education and Training Act, about academic freedom, and about the capacity of this country's universities to serve as the critic and conscience of society.
Consider the machinery. In 2016, the US organisation Turning Point USA launched its Professor Watchlist, a public database of academics accused of advancing "leftist propaganda in the classroom." The operation solicited classroom material, extracted fragments of speech from their pedagogical context, and published names and photographs.
Campus Reform, funded by the Leadership Institute, built a permanent tipline running from the lecture theatre to the outrage cycle. Canary Mission compiled anonymous dossiers on academics and students who spoke for Palestinian rights, dossiers that followed them into job interviews and border crossings. The American Association of University Professors has documented what follows publication: coordinated harassment, death threats, disciplinary complaints, and a chilling silence that settles over the classroom long after the news cycle moves on. The professor learns to swallow the sentence before finishing it. That is the point. The apparatus does not need to fire anyone. It needs everyone to know a party is listening.
Figure 4: The website of the "Canary Mission" with the button "report an individual"
Every element of that apparatus is present in Parmar's post. The standing invitation for classroom content to be sent to a political party. The extraction of a lecturer's words from their context in a course of study. The publication of the professor's name to a mass political audience. The framing of expert interpretation as indoctrination. Even the theatre of confirmation, "the University has confirmed they are real," which converts an employer's routine acknowledgment into a prosecutor's exhibit. This is the Professor Watchlist with a Facebook interface and a Kiwi accent, and the agency in it belongs entirely to the party that assembled it.
The local ecosystem was already in place. The Free Speech Union, modelled on its British namesake, has spent years constructing the narrative that New Zealand universities are hostile to conservative students, running surveys and campaigns that prepare the ground for exactly this kind of targeting. ACT has supplied the legislative arm, from its academic freedom amendments to Parmar's own sustained campaign against the University of Auckland's Waipapa Taumata Rau course on Te Tiriti and indigenous knowledge, which she attacked as a burden on students, and her bill targeting what she calls race-based university policies, meaning scholarships and pathways for Māori students. The pattern is coherent. First, redefine equity provisions as discrimination. Then, redefine Te Tiriti education as imposition. Now, redefine a professor's legal analysis as brainwashing. Each redefinition shrinks the space in which the university can do its work.
In the culture-centered approach to communication, my collaborators and I use the term communicative inversion to describe how the powerful turn meaning upside down, deploying the language of the marginalised to entrench the very structures that marginalise. Parmar's post is a textbook performance of it. Academic freedom, a protection built over a century to shield scholars from precisely this kind of political interference, is inverted into "the academic freedom of the student," which then becomes a licence for a governing party to police what a professor may say about that governing party's own legislation. Sit with that circularity for a moment. A member of Parliament, whose coalition writes the laws that fund and regulate universities, is publicly shaming a named academic for critically analysing her party's bill, and she is doing it in the name of protecting the classroom from political influence.
The deepest inversion, and the one that gives the whole operation its moral disguise, is the inversion of safety and comfort. "Would you feel comfortable speaking up?" The vocabulary of comfort and safety in education was forged in struggle, by Māori and Pasifika students who organised against racism in their institutions, by disabled students who fought for access, by first-generation students who named the quiet violence of classrooms built without them in mind. That vocabulary carries a materialist meaning: safety as the condition under which those bearing the weight of structural violence can learn, speak, and be heard. Parmar's post lifts the vocabulary and empties it of every one of those meanings. In her telling, the person rendered unsafe by a law lecture is the hypothetical student who agrees with the party in government. Comfort is measured from the position of power, and its absence is renamed oppression.
Follow the inversion through and its architecture becomes visible. Safety now means the safety of a governing party's legislation from critical examination. Comfort now means never hearing power described accurately. And to produce this comfort for the powerful, the operation manufactures precise, deliberate unsafety for everyone else: a named woman professor delivered to a partisan audience primed for outrage, academics across the country recalculating what they can say about the government that funds them, and Māori students who must sit in lecture theatres knowing that a bill about their constitutional existence may no longer be described as what the Waitangi Tribunal found it to be. This is the same manoeuvre the American right perfected when Florida's Stop WOKE Act legislated against instruction that might cause "discomfort" about race, a law a US federal appeals court struck down as an unconstitutional assault on academic speech. The discomfort of the powerful was written into statute as harm. The harm to everyone else was written out. A classroom in which a professor cannot say that the Treaty Principles Bill sought to contain Māori rights is comfortable for exactly one constituency, and it is the constituency that drafted the bill.
The party asks whether a first-year student would feel comfortable speaking up. Look at the actual architecture of power in this story. On one side stands a professor, alone, named, her words stripped of context and served to tens of thousands of followers. On the other stands a party in government, with ministers in cabinet, a media apparatus at its disposal, and a demonstrated appetite for legislating over the institutions it is attacking. The vulnerability in this picture does not belong to ACT.
And the substance of the charge collapses on contact with the record. Māori students at the University of Auckland have watched this government dismantle Te Aka Whai Ora, strip Te Tiriti references from the statute book, and advance a bill that the Waitangi Tribunal, in its urgent inquiry, found would constitute the worst and most comprehensive breach of Te Tiriti in modern times. When Parliament voted, the Treaty Principles Bill was defeated 112 votes to 11, opposed by every party except ACT itself. Professor Dunworth's assessment that the bill was a political project aimed at constraining Māori rights sits comfortably within the mainstream of legal scholarship in this country, echoed by the Tribunal, by the overwhelming majority of the tens of thousands of public submissions, and by Parliament's own vote. Calling that assessment misinformation is itself the misinformation. A law professor who declined to teach her students the constitutional politics of the most heavily rejected bill in recent parliamentary history would be failing them.
Here is what the Education and Training Act 2020 actually says. Section 267 defines academic freedom as the freedom of academic staff and students, within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions. The same section charges universities with accepting a role as critic and conscience of society. Professor Dunworth's lecture is a precise enactment of that statutory duty. Parmar's post, by contrast, is a member of the legislature using the machinery of a governing party to punish protected academic speech about that party. If the phrase political interference in academic freedom means anything at all, it means this. The Act does not protect professors only when politicians agree with them. It exists for the moments when politicians do not.
The culture-centered approach teaches us to read these attacks structurally. The classroom is one of the few remaining infrastructures where the claims of those at the margins, Māori claims to tino rangatiratanga, migrant claims to dignity, working-class claims to a livable life, can be voiced, examined, and connected to evidence. That is why the far right targets it, in Florida and in Auckland alike. The playbook is structural, which is why the response must be structural too, directed at the party and the ecosystem rather than at any individual who passes through its pipeline. The campaign wants us arguing about one lecture, one professor, one set of notes. The question that matters is who built the road the notes travelled on, and what they intend to run down it next.
There is a bitter irony in the messenger, and I say this as an Indian migrant who arrived in academia through the same broad currents that carried Dr Parmar to Auckland. The settler project has always known how to recruit brown faces to whiten its work. A migrant woman of colour fronting the campaign against Te Tiriti education, against Māori student pathways, and now against a professor who defended the Treaty in her classroom performs a diversity that services the very hierarchy it appears to disrupt. Those of us who came here as guests of Te Tiriti owe tangata whenua something better than becoming the newest enforcers of their containment.
The University of Auckland now faces a test, and so does every vice-chancellor watching. The institutional reflex, confirming the fragments, distancing itself from its own professor, quietly counselling caution, is how universities in the United States taught the watchlists that the tactic works. The alternative is to say plainly that Professor Dunworth was doing her job, that her job is protected by law, and that a political party building a pipeline from the lecture theatre to its Facebook page is the threat the Act was written against. Solidarity, loud and institutional and immediate, is the only communication these campaigns understand.
ACT's Facebook page declared that when a professor talks like this, students get the message to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. Hold that sentence up to the light and it reads as a confession with the names reversed. A governing party has just shown every academic in this country what happens when a professor talks like this. The heads it wants down are not the students'.