Tertiary Symptoms of Decline Augusto Zimmermann & Gabriël Moens
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/uncategorized/tertiary-symptoms-of-decline/
Universities used to be repositories of the wisdom and intellectual traditions of Western civilisation, including rationality and scepticism. As such, these institutions of higher learning have traditionally been crucial to the growth of intellectual inquiry and scientific progress.
Unfortunately, our combined 60-year academic experience reveals most Australian universities have now abandoned these noble goals. These universities have effectively deserted their original educational mission to become “safe spaces” ruled by officious bureaucrats who, among other things, enforce Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness (DEI) policies, both in faculty recruitment and in promotion. For example, conservative academics have been subject to systematic discrimination on university campuses, and free academic enquiry is now under a very serious threat. The ongoing anti-intellectual environment of universities has caused great harm to academic freedom and the intellectual function of our universities. As they have lost respect for free intellectual debate and inquiry, their lackadaisical s attitude spreads not only to college campuses but also to society at large.
Freedom of speech is basically dying in Australia’s universities, most often in the pretence of supposedly encouraging “diversity” and a “safe environment”. As a result, students and academic staff have been found at the receiving end of administrative inquiries for merely holding ideas that are no longer fashionable or accepted by the ruling classes. This ongoing suppression of free intellectual debate comes not just from government agencies but through the tertiary education providers themselves.
Australian universities are often created by the Australian governments via an Act of Parliament. They are built on public property and funded by government grants and state-subsidised loans. They should be, at least in theory, legally compelled to meet a range of criteria in exchange for this federal funding. More specifically, such higher education providers are accountable to the Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency (TEQSA) – which then enforces upon these institutions the Higher Education Support Act 2003, and the Higher Education Standards (HES) Framework 2015. Moreover, universities are expected to apply policies and procedures which affect the resilience of staff and students under the guise of providing a “safe” environment. A good example is the National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence, which comes into effect on January 1, 2026. This Code seeks to nurture an environment and culture of safety and inclusivity for staff, students, and visitors.
In its Diversity and Equity Guidance Note, TEQSA states: ‘Measures taken to accommodate diversity should not contravene the pursuit of intellectual inquiry, and more generally, freedom of expression’.[1] Under the Higher Education Support Act 2003, Australian universities must have ‘a policy that upholds free intellectual inquiry in relation to learning, teaching and research’.[2] Further, the HES Framework requires of these universities ‘a clearly articulated higher education purpose that includes a commitment to and support for free intellectual inquiry in its academic endeavours’.[3]
Unfortunately none of these important legal requirements is properly enforced. The bureaucrats working at such universities have created hundreds of policies and other regulations that effectively hinder free speech and intellectual inquiry.[4] Instead, faculties are lowering academic standards in hiring to be more politically correct. Teaching staff are required to use ‘sensitive’ language in the classroom and any ‘insensitive’ remark may result in formal complaints followed by an internal hearing notable for its lack of due process, and then academic suspension or a requirement to attend ‘sensitivity training’. Refusing to accept such a humiliation can bring dismissal, with further academic employment unlikely. These heinous practices have the inevitable consequence of lowering the quality of education offered to students and the standards of scholarly publications.
Matthew Lesh is an IPA research fellow who has written about the IPA’s recommendations for Australian universities and the issue of self-censorship. As he notes, most universities have policies that substantially limit free speech or make them act more ‘censoriously’.[5] Out of over 165 policies and actions of Australia’s 42 universities, about 80 per cent of them ‘have a chilling effect on free speech’. Such policies, he goes on to say, ‘encourage students and academics to err on the side of caution rather than express a potentially controversial idea, and could be used to punish students for expressing their opinion’.[6]
Lesh also reports that a disturbing number of students are ‘feeling too uncomfortable to express their viewpoints,’ and that aggressive activists police language and interrupt events, and that academics dictate ‘what opinions can and cannot be expressed’.[7] This environment of fear and intimidation, according to him, ‘is seriously imperilling the discovery of truth, the core purpose of Australia’s universities; student development, 
which requires debate and challenge; and the future of Australian society, which depends on a tolerance and openness to debate’.[8]
Our book The Unlucky Country, in its Chapter 12, provides a considerable number of instances by which freedom of speech has been suppressed in today’s woke academic environment, whereby questions of research quality, academic excellence and intellectual rigour are considerably out of style. The nation’s academic elite, openly or tacitly, supports speech codes, surveillance and over-regulation of student life. In such an environment self-censorship has been spurred by the threat of penalties under insidious “free speech” policies.[9]
Arguably, a degree of discomfort is necessary for mental development. A completely safe space may not facilitate learning, as some argue that exposure to different viewpoints is essential. The emphasis on creating ‘a safe learning environment’ in universities has been noted as potentially conflicting with the goals of fostering critical thinking and reading. This preoccupation is regrettable, as it fails to recognise the importance of challenging students’ minds to foster learning and development. ‘Speech codes’ and ‘sensitivity training’ severely limit what can be said on campus, and fines are imposed on students and academic staff for causing “offence”.
Unfortunately, the nation’s academic elite openly support speech codes and over-regulation of student life. As a result, most of our universities have become oppressive spaces ruled by officious bureaucrats enforcing their own leftist dictates upon everybody else, academics included. We believe that it is just not possible to understand the deplorable state of Australia’s tertiary education without a proper understanding of the growth of the university bureaucracy. Indeed, ongoing calls for censorship on campus often come from university administrators. Students, on the other hand, tend to be the group that most consistently supported freedom of speech. But in recent years, students have increasingly requested the cancelling of academic speakers and removal of “triggering” materials from courses.
Universities require open debate, and limiting academic speech is an issue. Students should acquire the skills necessary to address a variety of challenges in the world. If they become accustomed to a “safe learning environment”, they may become fragile, anxious, and resentful at university. And yet, in The Cancelling of the American Mind (2023), Greg Lukianoff (an U.S. attorney and First Amendment expert) and Rikki Schlott (a political commentator and columnist at the New York Post) explain that, on university campuses, freedom of speech has been subverted, and younger generations are taught that free speech itself is a problem.[10] There is a push by students and university administrators to disinvite conservative-leaning speakers whose ideas they consider “offensive”. Most universities rarely penalise students who disrupt classes or silence lecturers, even when it breaches conduct codes. Further, students now demand protection from course material that might make them feel “unsafe”. In this context, Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explain:
It becomes difficult to develop a sense of trust between professors and students in such an environment. Students [may] … report a professor for something said or shown even before the lecture has ended. Many professors now say that they are “teaching on tenterhooks” or walking on eggshells”, which means that fewer of them are willing to try anything provocative in the classroom – or cover important but difficult course material.[11]
To solve this problem, universities should re-emphasise the central purpose of all true education: promoting critical thinking and intellectual exploration. This means to teach students that, to be creative thinkers, they must risk being “wrong.” It is therefore necessary to teach critical thinking skills to help guide students through engagement with diverse and provocative viewpoints. Lukianoff and Schlott comment,
Putting the emphasis back on critical thinking will ultimately teach the next generation to argue in a healthy and productive manner – and help them resist falling into the trap of using the unhelpful rhetorical techniques that help propel polarization and Cancel Culture. Most important of all, fostering intellectual curiosity at a young age sets the stage for a lifetime of learning.[12]
A society that weakens the ability to develop critical thinking denies students what they need to cultivate proper social interactions. The coarsening of social interaction results in the creation of a society prone to conflict and violence, and one whereby the first instinct is to resort to instruments of coercion to solve perceived problems. In Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody‘ (2020), Helen Puckrose and James Lindsay comment:
University culture leaks out into the broader culture almost by osmosis. Many people gravitate to the university’s events, productions, and outreach programs, and are thereby influenced by its culture … As a society, we turn to universities to help identify with statements, ideas, and values we can trust. Universities then transmit both information and intellectual culture to students. In this way, these institutions produce the educational and cultural elite, who will later go into the professions, head industries, establish charities, produce media, and shape public policy. Done right, universities are invaluable. Done wrong, they are as means of harmful cultural indoctrination without equal.[13]
The current university culture is therefore incompatible with the true function of a university. John Henry Cardinal Newman identified this function in his classic book The Idea of a University. He stated that ‘it is, I believe, as a matter of history, the business of a university to make this intellectual culture its direct scope, or to employ itself in the education of the intellect.’[14] Newman’s notion of a university, including his defence of a liberal education, was rejuvenated almost a century later by Professor Karl Jaspers but, unlike Newman, Jaspers also strongly emphasised that the idea of a university implied communication among its members ,which he described as ‘the readiness to relate oneself to things with the aim of getting at a picture of the whole in terms of one’s special discipline’. Thus, while Jaspers’ view were a reaffirmation of Newman’s idea, he added that active stimulation of original inquiry through uncensored communication with others was an important function of a university.[15]
The present academic environment is comprised of passive students devoid of proper critical thinking who, as a result, absorb only the mere ideological biases of teachers committed to leftist agendas advanced by the ruling elites. The result is a generation of students learning in distorted ways by means of ideological indoctrination, which increases the possibility of intellectual narrow-mindedness and, possibly, more individuals suffering from anxiety and depression.
Above all, we should treat sceptically the universities’ claim that they remain the great bastions of academic freedom and excellence. The fact is that Australia’s universities are no longer sustaining these important values, which are so important for a free and developed society. On the contrary, today’s universities are directly responsible for the noticeable absence of critical thinking skills among the population in general.
This article is based on our interview for Academia Libera Mentis about the state of academia in Australia, and what needs to be done to address the problem. Academia Libera Mentis is a new college based in a castle outside of Theux, Belgium, aiming to nurture critical, constructive, and creative students, who wish to do cutting-edge research in an area of interest.
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