The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

    ESSAY   ·   ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN AOTEAROA The Fault of His Own Pen What the Free Speech Union calls academic freedom depends entirely on who is holding the pen Mohan J. Dutta    ·    6 October 2026    ·    culture-centered.blogspot.com   On 22 September 2026 the Free Speech Union declared a crisis of academic freedom at Massey University. Fourteen months earlier, a man on its council published an essay instructing a university that my work should be stripped of academic standing and that I should be kept away from state-funded research. Both documents are public. Set them side by side and the union's principle dissolves in front of you. THE PRINCIPLE, STATED IN PUBLIC On 22 September 2026 the Free Speech Union published this. EXHIBIT A Free Speech Union (@NZFreeSpeech), 22 September 2026 The union states its principle in public, and quotes the statute that carries i...

  The Watchlist Comes to Takanini A candidate for Parliament, four posts about me, and the crowd that arrives afterwards. Mohan J. Dutta — Palmerston North On 12 September 2025 a man who wants a seat in the New Zealand Parliament took a clip of me talking into a camera, put his own caption on it, and sent it to a hundred and fifty thousand people. The caption read: Leftist academic, Mohan Dutta, is Professor of Communication at Massey University. Here he runs with Far Left narratives that are both nonsensical and extreme: Read the punctuation. The sentence ends on a colon. It hands off. Everything after it is me, cropped and captioned and stripped of what came before, and the reader is invited to supply the verdict the writer has carefully declined to spell out. 12 September 2025. 720 likes, 126 reposts, 285 replies, 65 quote posts, 151,000+ views. Also pushed out as a Facebook reel. Charlie Kirk had been shot two days earlier. I said what I had been sayin...

  The Door Swings One Way The candidate for Takanini Elliot Ikilei is standing for New Zealand First in Takanini, one of the most ethnically mixed electorates in the country. In June he told Newsroom that his party offers voters a chance to curtail the influence of academics and return to the fundamentals of Western civilisation. He placed New Zealand First in a line with Reform in the United Kingdom, One Nation in Australia and Donald Trump in the United States, and said nobody can call them racist because the party has authentic, organic diversity. The photograph above the story shows him handing Shane Jones a Hobson's Pledge petition to make English an official language. He is the second Hobson's Pledge spokesperson on the party's 2026 list. Eight years ago, in July 2018, Ikilei was the deputy leader of a minor party speaking at an Auckland rally for Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux after the council pulled their venue. That same month, in the Taxpayers' Union of...