Academic freedom a work in progress

CURTIN University vice chancellor Harlene Hayne acknowledged the freedom she had as an academic allowed her to be involved in efforts to overturn a wrongful conviction in New Zealand.

In October 2022, the Supreme Court of New Zealand quashed Peter Ellis’ convictions over child sexual abuse charges, finding there were issues with evidence provided by the children in the 1993 trial.

Professor Hayne, a child psychologist, had researched the standard of interviews conducted with the children involved in the Ellis case in December 2007.

She gave evidence as an expert in children’s memory during the court appeal, at the end of which Mr Ellis’ conviction was overturned.

“I work with children and obviously defending an alleged paedophile was not something that I walked into easily,” Professor Hayne said.

“The point … where I mentioned academic freedom was just really to remind people that we do have this gift of academic freedom, that actually we should feel obliged to challenge conventional wisdom.

“For me, I had the skills and the knowledge to actually assess whether or not the claims that were being made about the quality of the children’s interviews in particular were correct or not.

“I did spend about 20 years of my academic career, among other things, working on that particular case, applying what I’ve learned from my publicly funded research and through interactions with my students to that case in particular.”

In 2021, the federal parliament passed the Higher Education Support Amendment (Freedom of Speech) Act including a condition for higher education providers to have a policy upholding freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Under the Act, academic freedom is defined as the freedom of academic staff and students to engage in intellectual inquiry, and to express their opinions and beliefs, among other freedoms.

The Institute of Public Affairs recently published its Free Speech on Campus Audit 2023, its fourth systematic analysis of more than 279 policies at Australia’s 42 universities.

In its audit, the IPA categorised all five Western Australian universities in the “red”, being the worst ranking for freedom of speech against its metrics.

However, the IPA’s hostility ratings categorised all but four of the 42 universities in the red ranking, with the remainder rated as amber, which the institute deemed as having policies that could potentially restrict free speech.

Making freedom of speech a priority in Australian university campuses ramped up in 2018-19, when the federal government commissioned Robert French, a former High Court chief justice and The University of Western Australia chancellor, to conduct a review.

His French Model Code sets out principles universities can adopt to strengthen their protections for academic freedom, with all universities adopting the French Model Code in their policies by late 2021.

“The real issue of interest was internal codes of conduct and policies within universities with very broad concepts of misconduct and the like, which could impact on what I call expression of freedoms,” Mr French told Business News.

“That is the freedoms that people have to express themselves either in the ordinary exercise of freedom of speech, or in the slightly different and related concept of academic freedom, which places academics who are working at a university in a somewhat different relationship to the university than an employee is to an employer.”

Professor Hayne said students had become more politically aware, potentially the most aware since the 1960s, and needed the freedom to express themselves in respectful debate.

“The one disappointing thing is that I don’t feel that enough academics actually pushed the boundaries of their academic freedom,” she said.

“You could look at it as a privilege but for me, I see it as an obligation that academics are in a very unique position to actually exercise academic freedom, and not enough people actually do that.

“Particularly in the early days working the Ellis case, it was a potentially intellectually dangerous place for me to be.

“My life would have been easier had I not chosen to support that case.

“As I learned more about it, I just couldn’t sit by idly given that I had knowledge and expertise that I thought might be able to bring some clarity to the situation.

“Since the Vietnam War, academics haven’t necessarily embraced their academic freedom in the way that the universities were known to do during that very tumultuous era and history.”