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 it. |
Massey had received a complaint about five opinion pieces
Distinguished Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger co-authored in 2023 on the Brash
and Bassett blog. The university referred it to a panel. No finding had been
made, no determination reached, and the panel was due to report by 30
September. The union's chief executive wrote to the university the same day.
Read it closely, because every proposition in it is one I would
sign. The articles concerned university funding, decolonisation and the place
of mātauranga Māori in universities. The Education and Training Act protects
the freedom of academics to question received wisdom and to state controversial
or unpopular opinions. Massey, the union says, does not get to opt out of the
Act because it dislikes the opinion. An academic freedom policy is being turned
into an instrument for investigating a person who exercised academic freedom.
And the union is backing Peter through the process.
Four propositions. Hold them in your hand while you read what
follows.
FOURTEEN MONTHS
EARLIER
On 10 July 2025, Dane Giraud published “The Anxious Fig Leaf of
Academia” on his Substack. It is about me. He is a screenwriter and free speech
activist who describes himself in that same essay as a board member of a civil
liberties organisation. He opens by recounting that on 8 October 2023 he tagged
my employer and asked whether Massey was comfortable employing me. He
apologised at the time, and the Free Speech Union published that apology on its
own website under an argument about exposing hatred rather than pushing it
underground.
The apology lasted one paragraph.
|
EXHIBIT
B Dane Giraud, “The Anxious Fig Leaf of
Academia”, 10 July 2025 The apology withdrawn in
substance while kept in form. |
He reports, and declines to disown, the position that had I been
fired over a post it would have been the fault of my own pen. He reports that
my appointment to a public university was itself demonstrated to be
inappropriate. He then places the neo-Nazi professor nobody would tolerate
beside me, with a wafer between us.
A panel inquiry
into one Massey professor is a national emergency. Another Massey professor
losing his job over a post is the fault of his own pen.
The union that tells Massey it does not get to opt out of the Act
because it dislikes an opinion has on its council a man who published the
argument that a Massey professor's appointment was inappropriate because he
disliked the opinion. Exhibit A and Exhibit B cannot both be principle. One of
them is a position, and the other is a tactic.
THE INSTRUCTION TO
THE UNIVERSITY
The essay does not stop at criticism. Criticism I can take, and have
taken for twenty-five years. It ends with a verdict and an instruction to my
employer.
|
EXHIBIT
C The closing verdict of “The Anxious Fig
Leaf of Academia” A free speech activist
asks a university to classify a professor's work and deny him the standing of
his own chair. |
Three bullets sort my writing out of knowledge and into advocacy:
failure of disciplinary method, pejorative re-labelling, the conflation of
activism with research. Then the instruction. I cannot hide behind the
university gown, and neither should any university allow me to.
Hold Exhibit A against Exhibit C. The union objects to an academic
freedom policy being used to investigate an academic. Its council member asks a
university to go beyond investigating, to sit in judgment on the intellectual
standing of a professor's public writing and to strip it of the authority of
his chair. The union says Massey does not get to decide which opinions count.
Its council member tells Massey which opinions count, and signs his name to it.
THE STANDARD-SETTER
CANNOT MEET HIS OWN STANDARD
Those three bullets are the heart of the essay. They are offered as
the criteria by which academic speech is separated from polemic. Take them
seriously, then, and apply them to the document that contains them. An essay
that rules on scholarship ought to survive its own ruling.
Definition
The essay accuses me of definitions that morph mid-sentence. It
defines nothing. Zionism is never defined. Whiteness is never defined. Settler
colonialism, the actual subject of my peer-reviewed work, appears only as a
thesis I am said to lace things to. Academic speech, the category on which the
entire verdict rests, is given three tiers with no source, no literature and no
authority behind them. The man objecting to definitional drift wrote an essay
with no definitions in it.
Evidence and
counter-literature
His finding on my scholarship is that one academic journal piece
mentioning far-right Zionism is an opinion essay rather than an empirical
study. That is a keyword search presented as an assessment of a career. Not one
peer-reviewed article of mine is named, quoted, dated or engaged. Settler
colonial studies is a substantial field with decades of refereed literature
behind it. He engages none of it. His own second bullet asks for engagement
with counter-literature, and his essay contains a literature review of zero
items.
Pejorative
re-labelling
The bullet objects to words that end debate by definition. The
essay's own vocabulary, in order: putrid, madcap theories, pathetic, reckless
and irresponsible, a puerile and completely unserious man, and the neo-Nazi
professor separated from me by a wafer. He reaches for the worst available
label in the room and then tells me that reaching for the worst available label
is what disqualifies a thinker.
Activism
conflated with research
The third bullet condemns the conflation of activism with research.
The essay is written by a self-described activist, it is published on a
personal Substack, it carries no method, no sources and no scrutiny, and it is
offered as an authoritative finding on the quality of a professor's scholarship
and on his fitness for a research appointment. Activism presented as assessment
is the exact charge, and the essay is the exact specimen.
Three bullets, three failures. A test that its own author cannot
pass is a weapon built to fit one target.
THE GOWN I NEVER WORE
The verdict rests on a factual premise, stated as though it were
established: that my indictments of Zionism issue from a Dean's Chair email
address, and that I hide behind the university gown. Both halves are false, and
either can be checked in under a minute.
Nothing he quotes came from a Massey email address. He is quoting a
Blogspot blog and an X account. No university email, no university platform and
no university letterhead appears anywhere in the material on which he passes
judgment. The Dean's Chair, the title he builds the whole accusation around, is
stated on neither of them. He invented the address and then prosecuted me for
writing from it.
Both platforms carry a disclaimer, permanently and in public. The
blog footer states that views expressed are personal. The X account states in
its bio that the tweets are in a personal capacity and do not reflect the views
of my employer. These were not added after the fact or in response to him. They
sit there for anyone to see, including a man who read the blog closely enough
to quote it twice.
Now set that beside the union's letter. It reproduces the disclaimer
at the foot of each Brash and Bassett article, in which the opinions are the
writers' and not their universities', and treats it as evidence that the
policy's obligations were met. I carry the same undertaking, standing on both
of my platforms, and it earns me nothing at all. The identical sentence is
compliance for one professor and invisible for the other.
His disclaimer also does something mine does not. It names him a
distinguished professor and head of the New Zealand Institute for Advanced
Study, placing the authority of theoretical chemistry directly beneath claims
about Māori life expectancy since 1840. Mine disclaims the institution. His
announces it.
And there is exactly one person in this story who attached my
employer to my personal writing. On 8 October 2023 he tagged Massey University
and asked whether it was comfortable employing me. I had kept my speech and my
institution apart. He put them together, and then wrote eighteen hundred words
indicting me for the connection he had made.
I disclaimed my
employer on every page. He is the one who put Massey in the frame, and then
charged me with hiding behind it.
FOUR MORE THINGS IN
THE DOCUMENT
FIRST, the
credential bar. He asks whether I am a fluent speaker and reader of Hebrew and
Arabic, and treats my not being so as grounds to dismiss everything I have
written on Zionism and settler colonialism. He reads neither language. He holds
no degree in the area and says so cheerfully, offering a first critique of a
scriptwriter without a PhD as though it settled the matter. He set a threshold
he could not approach and then ruled from beneath it.
SECOND, the
joke. Having demanded evidence, conceptual clarity and peer scrutiny, he
disposes of the authority of the academy in two lines. It was the academy that
brought us Judith Butler. I rest my case. That is the rigour on offer: a name
dropped as a punchline, standing in for an argument, in an essay whose thesis
is that argument must meet a higher bar.
THIRD, the
evidentiary demand that runs one way. He writes that we see no evidence of the
threats I received and no reason he should be held responsible. Evidence is
required of me and dispensed with for him, because in the same essay he knows
my motive with certainty: the only reason I apply white supremacy to Jews, he
writes, is that it is the worst accusation I can dream up. Mind-reading offered
as a finding, in a document demanding falsifiable theses.
FOURTH, and this
one is worth checking in the page source. Two of the links Giraud uses to
evidence his claims about my posts are published with a tracking parameter
reading utm_source=chatgpt.com. The sourcing in an essay demanding archival
sources, demographic breakdowns and falsifiable theses carries the referral tag
of a chatbot. I leave readers to form their own view of what that indicates
about how the case against my scholarship was assembled.
THE CLAIM HIS OWN
UNION REFUTES
The essay's central legal proposition is that under New Zealand and
international practice a professor's blog posts and tweets carry no academic
standing. It is asserted flatly, with nothing behind it.
Fourteen months later his own union wrote to Massey quoting Massey's
Academic Freedom Policy, which defines the protected activity as running from
peer-reviewed published papers through to social media posts and other public
platforms. The union's letter rests its entire defence of Schwerdtfeger on that
clause, because Schwerdtfeger's five articles are blog posts on somebody else's
political website.
His tier three is
the union's protected speech. The whole architecture of his verdict is refuted
by the letter his own organisation sent to my employer.
FROM A POLITICAL
MOVEMENT TO A PEOPLE
One move in the essay deserves to be named precisely, because it is
the move that does the real work.
His second criterion for extremism research is neutrality and
trust-building, and he explains that you cannot build trust with Jewish or
Hindu communities if your expert sees them as the problem. Watch what happens
in that sentence. My criticism is of Zionism and of Hindutva, two political
projects, each with its own state power, its own parties, its own documented
programme. By the end of his clause they have become Jewish and Hindu
communities, two religious populations, and my critique of political movements
has become hostility to peoples.
That substitution is the definitional collapse he accuses me of,
performed in his own prose, and it is the engine of the entire piece. Jewish
people and the Israeli state's ideology are different things. Hindu people and
the Hindutva project are different things. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish
people across the world say the first of those distinctions out loud every
week, and a great many Hindus say the second. The essay needs the distinction
erased, because critique of an ideology is lawful, ordinary, peer-reviewed
academic work, and hatred of a people is a sackable offence. Erasing the line
is how the first is converted into the second.
NOW RUN HIS TEST ON
THE MAN HIS UNION DEFENDS
Standards are only standards if they apply to the people who write
them down. So take Giraud's three bullets and run them over the five articles
the Free Speech Union went to the wall for.
Disciplinary
method
Peter Schwerdtfeger is a theoretical chemist and physicist, head of
the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study. The articles concern Māori life
expectancy since 1840, decolonisation, research funding and the purpose of
universities. Where are the archival sources, the demographic breakdowns, the
falsifiable theses? If fluency in Hebrew and Arabic is the price of commenting
on Palestine, what is the equivalent qualification for a chemist writing on
Māori mortality?
Evidence
The articles carry no citations at all. The union's letter to Massey
explains that citations were left out to suit the blog format and could be
supplied on request. That courtesy was never extended to me. The absence of
footnotes in my writing is proof of method failure in Exhibit C. The absence of
footnotes in his is a formatting convention.
Pejorative
re-labelling
“Universities or Indoctrination Centres?” is one of the five titles.
“Decolonisation and Indigenisation are Dividing our Country” is another. If
naming Zionism a structure of white supremacy is a phrase that ends debate by
definition, what is calling a university an indoctrination centre, in a
headline, without a single citation beneath it?
Engagement with
counter-literature
There is a deep refereed literature on mātauranga Māori, on
colonisation and life expectancy, on the politics of research funding. The
articles engage none of it. They are not obliged to. The Free Speech Union says
so, correctly, in paragraph eight of its letter.
Every bullet in Exhibit C, applied honestly, disqualifies the
professor Exhibit A defends.
And the gown, one last time. The disclaimer beneath each Brash and
Bassett article names Schwerdtfeger a distinguished professor and head of an
institute whose research concerns fundamental aspects of science, and the union
reproduces it as evidence of compliance. He put the title in the frame on
purpose, to lend the authority of theoretical chemistry to claims about Māori
mortality. I disclaimed my employer in writing on every page I publish, and was
charged with hiding behind a chair I have never once invoked.
THE REST OF THE
LEDGER
ON SPEAKING OUTSIDE YOUR FIELD. The union's letter tells Massey there is no stipulation in the
legislation or the policy confining academic freedom to an academic's area of
teaching and research. I am a communication scholar who has published
peer-reviewed work on coloniality, voice and decolonisation for over two
decades, across more than fifty community sites in seventeen countries. The
chemist is granted unlimited range. I am told to qualify for entry to my own
discipline.
ON STANDARDS BEYOND THE LAW. The letter attacks the clauses of Massey's policy requiring
awareness of speech that silences and stigmatises people by ethnicity, and the
clause forbidding the undermining of Te Tiriti obligations, as vague duties
sitting past what the law requires, and suggests they be amended away. Giraud
then applies a test with no statutory basis whatsoever, in the form of
trust-building with communities, to argue for my exclusion from state research.
Delete the clause when it shelters Māori; invoke the identical logic to keep a
brown academic away from a research centre.
ON ANONYMITY. The
letter undertakes to keep the complainant's identity confidential while the
complaint is publicised. Protection for the person who complained, from the
organisation whose council member tagged my employer in public, named me, and
wrote eighteen hundred words about me under my own name.
ON APPOINTMENTS.
Exhibit C is not the end of the essay. It closes by demanding that I never,
ever be allowed anywhere near a centre for research on violent extremism, and
by assuring readers that keeping people like me out of state research is not
cancel culture. An employment consequence, sought in public, by a council
member of the organisation now telling Massey that a panel process is
intolerable.
THE COLOUR OF THE
LINE
Look again at what the union chose to put in its own post. The
speech it defends is about decolonisation and the place of mātauranga Māori in
universities. The academic whose targeting it has tolerated for fourteen months
is one whose work defends decolonisation, and Māori and Palestinian voice.
The clause the union quotes protects the freedom to state
controversial or unpopular opinions. It comes with no schedule of approved
controversies. Anti-decolonisation speech by a chemist is covered. Decolonial
speech by a communication professor writing inside his own field is covered by
the identical words. One of those professors received a letter from the chief
executive and a public campaign of support. The other had his employer tagged
by a man on the council.
The line between
protected and unprotected in this union's practice does not run where the
statute runs. It runs along the colour line, and along the border of Israel.
THE TEST
I take the four propositions in Exhibit A at face value and treat
them as principle. A university does not get to open an inquiry because it
dislikes an opinion. A blog post carries the protection of the Act. Writing
outside your discipline is no disqualification. An academic freedom policy must
never be turned against the academic exercising academic freedom.
I endorse all four without qualification. Now apply them.
Then the tagging of Massey by a council member was wrong, the
apology the union published on its own site was right, and rebuilding that case
fourteen months later betrayed the principle the union now invokes. Then my
essays carry the protection the union claims for Schwerdtfeger's. Then no
language test, no dataset and no methodological note may be demanded of me that
is not demanded of a chemist writing on Māori mortality. Then the demand that I
be barred from an extremism research centre is precisely the employment
consequence a free speech union exists to prevent. Then trust-building with
communities is the extra-legal civility standard the union wants deleted from
Massey's policy, and it goes too.
If the Free Speech Union accepts those consequences, it acted on
principle in September 2026, and I will say so publicly, without qualification,
and defend Peter Schwerdtfeger's right to publish every word of those five
articles.
If it does not, the letter to Massey is a brief filed for a client.
The crisis of academic freedom is a product, manufactured for one set of
speakers and withheld from another. And the proof of it sits in Exhibit B, in
the words of a man on the union's own council, about a professor losing his job
over a post.
The fault of his
own pen. Depends whose pen.
The Free Speech Union's
letter to Massey, dated 22 September 2026, is published at fsu.nz, and its
public statement was issued the same day. Dane Giraud's essay was published on
10 July 2025 at danegiraud.substack.com. The characterisation of my October 2023
writing in that essay is his. I do not accept it, and nothing in the argument
above depends on resolving it.