This from Jennifer Marohasy:

It is official. The High Court ruled on Wednesday that Peter Ridd was legally fired for 18 counts of serious misconduct – and he is proud of every one of them! So Dr Peter Ridd writes in today's The Australian:

"The ruling raised two major weaknesses that exist in university work agreements. The first is the power of confidentiality (secrecy) provisions to silence academics for talking about unlawful actions by their university that curtail academic freedom. I know other examples where an academic, right now, is having their academic freedom curtailed but they cannot openly mention it for fear their university can lawfully fire them.

Secrecy, together with spying on communications, is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of any authoritarian organisation, whether it be the Stasi or an Australian university. It silences dissent, isolates the victim and establishes where the power lies – with the university. The academic is crushed.

The other issue is that the High Court ruled that only topics inside an academic’s "area of academic competence” are covered by academic freedom. This may seem reasonable at first, but in my case this meant I was not allowed to say: "In my view our whole university system pretends to value free debate, but in fact it crushes it whenever the ‘wrong’ ideas are spoken. They are truly an (sic) Orwellian in nature.”

I wonder what area of expertise an academic would need to make a comment like that. Irrespective of the strict legalities of the matter, perhaps all academics should have a right to say this. I can picture Orwell smiling, especially as James Cook University found this comment by trawling through all my emails.

The new voluntary code of conduct for academic freedom, and the new legislation on academic freedom introduced by Education Minister Alan Tudge this year, although excellent in many regards, will not solve the problems revealed in this case. Both will need to be amended to have any prospect of being effective.

Before the minister might act, more fundamental problems must be answered. Is the culture of universities so rotten that it is impossible to do anything useful to reform them? Are true academic advances nowadays coming from outside the university anyway? Is university-funded research and commentary doing more harm than good?

I think it is still worth trying to reform the universities. If nothing else, the high-profile cases of misbehaving universities, around the world, have shown the public cares about these issues. It affects academics from across the political spectrum. In my case we had the Institute of Public Affairs and the National Tertiary Education Union on the same team. For that to happen, universities must be doing something spectacularly wrong. Politicians can take comfort from such alliances. It is safe to act boldly.

The dust needs to settle, and cool legal heads must turn their attention to what can be done in legislation to further protect academics. Academics must know they are well away from the cliff edge and will be protected. Satisfactory protection should be explicitly written in work agreements. We also need active policing of transgressions, and penalties against universities. The penalties must hurt. With a few notable exceptions, universities presently only pay lip-service to academic freedom.

One possibility is that university councillors, who are equivalent to the board of directors of companies, should be held personally responsible for freedom of speech transgressions. Company directors have all sorts of legal obligations that largely keep them honest. University councillors need to feel the heat.

A final question must be raised about my case. Why did JCU act so aggressively to silence me for saying there were quality assurance problems with Great Barrier Reef science institutions? This was a legal battle over a work contract, but its root cause was a debate about the reliability of science.

Maybe JCU’s extreme reaction was because I was saying something true.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:26 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 657 words, total size 4 kb.