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A Bill for Cat, and for every scholar who gathers


 

A Bill for Cat, and for every scholar who gathers

Opinion. Mohan J. Dutta

In the winter of 2020, with the campuses closed, a conference that should have filled a lecture theatre in Auckland went online and filled something larger. More than three hundred people from ten countries logged in over three weeks to talk about fat studies, a field that asks what happens to human beings when a society decides their bodies are a disease. The woman who convened it, Dr Cat Pausé, had built that field in this country almost single-handedly over fourteen years. She convened its first conference here in 2012, its second in 2016, and now its third. She co-edited the Routledge international handbook that will define the discipline for a generation. She did all of this from a provincial campus at the bottom of the world, and she made that campus a place the world looked to.

Cat also understood that law is where scholarship becomes protection. Colleagues remember her working to have fatness recognised as a ground of discrimination in New Zealand law, and supporting activists trying to do the same in Germany. She ran a weekly radio show, Friend of Marilyn, on community radio in Palmerston North, because she thought the research belonged to the people it was about.

And she was, in her last years, an advocate for academic freedom itself. At the Tertiary Education Union's academic freedom conference she convened and moderated a panel called "Walk like an academic? The limits of academic freedom for those who are not white cis men", asking who in this country is permitted to speak with academic authority and what an academic is assumed to look and sound like. The discussion was published the following year in the union's journal, Te Ira Tangata, with Tara McAllister, JJ Eldridge and Jemaima Tiatia-Seath. Cat saw the threat coming, named it, and asked for reform. Her point, put more sharply than any statute has yet managed, was that the protection is unevenly distributed. Academic freedom works well enough for the scholar the public already recognises as one. It thins out for the Māori scientist, the Pasifika academic, the queer physicist, the fat woman writing about fat bodies. And she insisted that universities owe their staff a duty of care, that a freedom granted without protection is not a freedom at all. She said it about others as much as about herself.

Then it happened to her. A commercial YouTube performer had registered for her 2020 conference under a false name and presented a fabricated paper. He recorded the proceedings. Two years later he released the footage to an audience of more than a million. Cat died in her sleep in March 2022, at forty-two, of causes her family described as medical, in the week that followed. Her friends went offline for days because they could not bear to read what was being written about her. A scholarship now carries her name. I think the law should carry it too, because the reform she asked for is still not written.

Aotearoa New Zealand already has one of the clearest statements of academic freedom in the common law world. Section 267 of the Education and Training Act 2020 guarantees academic staff and students the freedom to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions. Last November, Parliament went further and added freedom of expression provisions requiring every university council to adopt a statement on freedom of expression and to report on it from their 2026 annual reports onward. Whatever one thinks of the detail, the direction is a settled national commitment. The university is a place where difficult questions get asked, and the state has an interest in keeping it that way.

What the Act does not yet do is protect the room in which those questions are asked, or the scholar once someone comes for her. Academic freedom in the statute is a freedom held by an individual against her institution and against the state. It says nothing about the conference, the seminar, the community research hui, the reading group. Those are the places where scholarship actually happens. They are where a young field finds its voice and where a graduate student presents for the first time to people who will become her collaborators for life. The Act also says nothing about the private actor who enters that room by deception in order to wreck it. A freedom to speak without a protected place to speak in is a promise half kept. The Cat Pausé Bill would keep the other half.

The Bill would do three things, and each completes a commitment the Act has already made.

First, it would define the protected academic gathering, whether it meets in person or online, and give convenors a statutory right to set conditions of participation that actually bind those who accept them.

Second, it would make it a wrong to enter such a gathering by deception. Where the intruder is in New Zealand, that is an offence, on the same principle as any other obtaining by deception. Where the intruder is offshore, which is the usual case, the scholar and the convenor get a civil pathway instead. They could seek an urgent injunction to have the material taken down. They could recover statutory damages. And the court could order any platform that does business here to remove the material, geoblock it, or turn off the money it earns. The point is simple: a hoax should stop being profitable.

Third, it would turn Cat's duty of care from an argument into an obligation. Universities would owe their scholars real protection when they are targeted for their work. Legal representation at the institution's cost. Digital security support. A senior contact with the authority to act. A public statement of support within forty-eight hours, unless the scholar asks otherwise. An independent Academic Freedom Commissioner would help scholars use these pathways and report to Parliament each year, with particular attention to the scholars whose protection currently thins out first.

None of this narrows what anyone may say. A journalist who attends a public conference under her own name and reports what she hears is untouched. A critic who reads a paper and thinks it nonsense is free to say so as loudly as he likes. The Bill draws a line around one thing only, which is the lie that gets you in the door.

The Bill also strengthens last year's amendment by giving it a partner. Those provisions created a pathway for people who believe their expression has been wrongly restricted. A mature system needs a pathway for the scholar whose gathering has been wrongly sabotaged as well. Put the two side by side and you have a framework that protects the speaker and the room, the critic and the convenor, the person who wants to challenge a field and the person who has spent her life building one. That is what a balanced commitment to free inquiry looks like. It is hard to see how anyone who supported the amendment on principle could oppose this.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi belongs in this argument too. The Crown's obligation of active protection extends to the knowledge that Māori scholars carry and to the gatherings convened under tikanga to develop it. A statute that protects the academic gathering gives that obligation a concrete form. The same protection reaches the Pacific studies seminar, the disability studies workshop, the gender studies conference. These are exactly the scholars Cat had in mind when she asked who gets to walk like an academic. They are what makes a university worth having, and they are also the most exposed.

I came to this country from Singapore in 2017 because I wanted to work under a scholarship anchored in Te Tiriti, in a place that took the public university seriously. Cat had been here nine years by then. She had taken a question the world found embarrassing and made it rigorous, international, and humane, and she had used the standing that gave her to argue for everyone whose standing was thinner than her own.

A Bill in her name would tell every convenor of every unfashionable conference that the room they have built is a room this country protects. It would give the Education and Training Act the one thing it still lacks, which is a door the scholar can walk through when someone comes for her, and a state that will stand behind her when she does. It would be the reform she asked for, written down at last.

Cat's next conference was to be called Rights, Personhood, Disposability. The Bill is how we answer the title.

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