Don’t give me data, just give me an opinion I’ll like....

By Martyn Gosling, Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University

There was a bomb in our building. My chief asked me to, almost literally, hold the hand of our terrified telephone switchboard operator and open talks should the bomber call back. Meanwhile, he hurried to find our general manager and burst into a board meeting to be told “Aw yeah, we get bomb threats all the time…”

This was at the height of the 1981 Springbok tour. I was a reporter at The Dominion, and we were facing a lot of very physical threats because we were so pro-tour. No, wait… we were facing a lot of very physical threats because we were so anti-tour. No… hang on…

And then there was an election, and we were getting angry feedback that we were criminally pro-National and were devoting way too much space to them. No… we were getting angry feedback that we were grotesquely pro-Labour and we were giving too much space to them. So, the same chief as mentioned above measured the column-centimetres that had been devoted to each party. Over the metres and metres devoted to politics, the parties and the election, the amount devoted to Labour and National were within two or three centimetres of each other. In real terms, exactly the same.

What does this say about neutrality? That bias is in the eyes of the beholder. As we speak, there is ongoing debate about whether universities, and academics, should be neutral, or the outspoken conscience of society (whatever that really means). There are those who say to remain silent is to really give support to one side or the other. Others argue that under this or that law that universities should say nothing/speak louder and that it is individual academics who have the God-given right to speak/teach/write unfettered, or not. Meanwhile, various political figures who should know better are challenging whether university neutrality and academic freedom should even exist, and who should be defunded.

I refuse to buy into “left” or “right” politics because at their extremes they are identical – control is maintained at the point of a gun. The first targets are those with an educated voice – Pol Pot anyone? Mao? Stalin? Hitler? But what we are seeing is what we have seen since Julius Caesar was in short pants – a need by those with an interest in influence to control the conversation. And if you won’t agree unquestioningly with their position, then you must be against it and thereby you must be biased. And because you are so biased, you must be silenced. Silencing action might be a screaming letter to whatever editor you prefer threatening doom and destruction, or it might be a phone call to a now terrified woman that there’s high explosive under her seat. But it might also be a demand to uninvite a speaker, it might be where we create the environment where this or that view on Te Tiriti is not welcome, it can occur anywhere where any one of us refuses to listen because we don’t agree with the speaker even before they speak. None of this is far-fetched because we have seen it in New Zealand universities very publicly over the last couple of years.

In other words, we have to ask ourselves if we are genuinely interested in academic freedom or whether we see it as something that applies only to people we agree with. If it’s the latter, things are very easy. We don’t need any rationality, or integrity, or data, we just need an opinion that we like. All else is bias. If it’s the former… now, that’s hard. Very hard. It’s hard to listen, to debate and engage in a meaningful way, to perhaps accept an alternate view, and maybe alter our own. And it’s a freedom that is very hard to protect. We have some hard work in front of us.