Oh for there love of christ, what new right wing nightmare is this…
Government to change free speech rules for universities
The coalition is tweaking university regulations to curb what it says is an increasingly “risk-averse approach” to free speech.
The proposed changes will set clear expectations on how universities should approach freedom of speech issues.
Each university will then have to adopt a “freedom of speech statement” consistent with the central government’s expectations.
The changes will also prohibit tertiary institutions from adopting positions on issues that do not relate to their core functions.
…wait? WHAT!
Ok there are two issues here.
The first is yay, New Zealand Universities need to prioritise freedom of speech on Campus.
This matters!
We have seen gender critical feminists attempt to debate Trans issues on campus and they have been shut down by precious woke activists, so you can’t pretend free speech on campus isn’t an issue (thanks to our precious woke activists).
We need our universities to have powerful new ideas and be bastions of free speech because they are trusted spaces that have the mana and intellectual rigour to be environments for such debate, so great that they will have to focus on promoting free speech HOWEVER in the next breath, ACT declare that they will ban the very Institutions they are demanding Free Speech from to be able to use their own free speech…
The changes will also prohibit tertiary institutions from adopting positions on issues that do not relate to their core functions.
…and that is then second issue.
You can’t demand free speech and then garrote it in the same argument!
This isn’t about Free Speech, this is about gagging Institutions from participating in civil society, that’s the very OPPOSITE of Free Speech!
This is a Trojan Horse that pretends to be about promoting Free Speech while removing it!
It’ll be fun to see how compromised the Free Speech Union’s position on this becomes.
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The well-paid Vice Chancellors, aka marketing gurus, who see academic freedom as a direct threat to their suffocating tyranny, will now have to explain themselves, and why not ? There’s no good reason why young people should burden themselves with student loans only to be further burdened by variable teachers telling them what to say and how to think.
If the young people you write about actually have the ability to think then no amount of “variable teachers” will be able to change any other informed views that the students hold.
The point is that free speech is broader than the narrow definition proposed as universities have a wider impact on society than just their core functions.
Bonnie Theoretically, the educative process is the drawing out and development of thinking and critical facilities which often in fact, do lead to acquiring other and new knowledge and moderating or changing one’s views. Your suggestion that young people should be impervious to any change, can also be regarded as tyrannical.
Having taught at intermediate, post-primary and university level, let me tell you something. Intermediate is the easiest. The basics have already been taught by their previous teachers, the children have not yet been impacted by the complexities of adolescence and hormones, and they are a delight to work with. By university level, it used to be that they had learned to think for themselves, and to articulate about this. For teachers, it can also be exciting and stimulating, particularly when the students themselves are able to independently theorise and problem solve. We need our original thinkers, and suggestion that young people, or any people, should never change their views is societally counter-productive, regressive, and boring.
You are changing the rules from your first comment which implies that students are forced on what to say and think by variable teachers. Once I point out that thinking students can get information from other sources you then decide that I am saying that people should never change their views which was not my intention.
There is a wide difference in views that people hold often with limited evidence so while we want our engineers, chemist’s, mathematics teachers etc to hold to proven truth on other aspects of life we need to learn some tolerance.
What are “ the rules” that I have changed Bonnie ?
And why, as you seem to imply, it is it the role of the university to teach people “to learn some tolerance” ? That, I suggest, starts right in the bosom of the family, and in participation in the broader community, but in itself should also have limitations or the outcome can be chaos.
ACT’s aim is clearly to stop all institutions that receive public money from voicing opinions outside a narrowly defined “core function”. And it will not only be narrowly defined, but also a politically defined “core function” – or at least a definition designed by the Right and suffused with ideological intent.
By curtailing opinion emanating from the public sphere, the completely unrestrained opinion from the private sphere (business and business organisations, corporate media, right-wing think-tanks, social media platforms) will easily dominate the scene. As I have repeatedly and boringly said, those people and organisations who pose as the greatest champions of free speech are generally bad faith operators intent on ensuring the ongoing dominance of their own speech and the continuation of the current neoliberal economic order that serves them so well.
AB. In which case having a picture here of Jacinda Ardern, UNO vocalist for global censorship of free speech, and propagandist for government as the sole source of truth, is ridiculous.
Almost none of what you said is true … that’s the ridiculous part. There was no legal curtailing of free speech under the previous government that she led, but this government is trying very hard to do so. So if anything it’s the exact opposite of your “claims”.
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