Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of Senator Marshall, I present the report of the Senate Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, Allegations of academic bias in universities and schools, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The genesis of this inquiry was the concern expressed by many students at both secondary and tertiary level about the perceptions of academic bias on campus, the reasons for this and avenues of redress and appeal. Government senators have stated, as though it is evidence of a grand conspiracy, that Young Liberals, Liberal Students and other campus Liberals argued for the establishment of such an inquiry. They did. Senate inquiries are often instigated by concerns expressed by members of the community, and this inquiry was no exception.

Although he did not agree with this particular reference, I nevertheless wish to thank Senator Marshall for his chairmanship of the inquiry. He is certainly one of the better and more even-handed committee chairs in this place.

In moving the motion to establish this inquiry, I thought it was important to ensure that students at school or university are not discriminated against or fed a particular ideological or political view. I was and am keenly aware of the power imbalance between students and institutions and the relative weakness of students. Our schools and universities need to be places where a plurality of views is not only tolerated but encouraged. Education needs to be about free inquiry and thought. Courses need to be taught in context and in a fair, accurate and balanced way. All Australian university students should have the right to study and inquire in an open and free academic environment.

This inquiry provided the opportunity for matters that impinge on this freedom to be highlighted, and the committee uncovered a number of matters of particular concern—firstly, the hostility of the university sector to examination. Several academic witnesses as well as Universities Australia gave evidence to the effect that the very existence of the Senate inquiry was itself a threat to academic freedom and would impinge on that freedom and that academics would exercise self-censorship in the face of a Senate inquiry. I for one do not believe that Australia’s academics are anything other than robust and I do not believe that they would be cowed by a Senate inquiry. It is indeed a bizarre proposition, I think, that universities should be entitled to free inquiry but not the parliament itself. Given taxpayers spend some $6.7 billion per annum on the university sector, I think it is not unreasonable or inappropriate that the parliament ask a few questions of the university sector from time to time.

Another area of concern was the denial by many academics that bias exists. Clearly it does and probably has since the establishment of the university at Fez in Morocco in the year 859. The questions which should be asked are: is the bias that exists systemic or is it isolated, and what avenues of appeal exist? I for one believe that instances of bias of a deliberate and specific nature by academics are uncommon, but in such cases I am of the view that the avenues of appeal need to be better publicised and more transparent.

True bias, I think, exists in the nature of the curriculum in many faculties. It ensures a monoculture—what James Cook University academic Merv Bendle calls an ‘intellectual monoculture’. Dr Bendle told the inquiry—and Miranda Devine notes this today in a piece in the Sydney Morning Heraldof his view that:

In another age this could be a fascist far Right intellectual monoculture and it would do just as much damage to our society as a left-wing or far Left intellectual monoculture. It is not so much the politics of the thing; it is the fact that it is an intellectual monoculture, that it is one voice being heard over and over again unrelentingly.

We do not want to have at campuses around Australia an environment where students feel the need to be strategic and to tailor their work to the prevailing curriculum taste. We need to move from a situation where academic freedom is seen as just that—freedom for the academic faculty. We need to shift to a broader concept that involves the academic freedom of students as well.

The opposition make a number of recommendations in this report which seek to underpin and reinforce the academic freedom of faculty and students, to provide avenues for redress for those rare specific cases of individual academic bias, and also to encourage institutions to ensure a variety in curriculum which I think is lacking at the moment.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This inquiry has been unusual in a number of respects. It has not really been an inquiry into academic freedom in the sense that this term is generally understood. It has really been an inquiry into allegations of biased teaching in social science and humanities courses as they are taught in universities and schools. It was never clear to the government party senators what the purpose of the inquiry was, or what possible use it would be. A Senate committee is unsuited to the task of chasing after evidence of subversive teaching, not least because we could never agree on what it is. This inquiry has been a waste of our time, in my view, though it has not been without interest.

The inquiry is based on the premise that there is a strongly leftist agenda which is influencing the course content and the teaching of it, and this presents a problem of unspecified magnitude and importance. The committee received fewer than 30 submissions making this point. We do not know what the other 300,000 undergraduate students thought about the issue. Even if it were true that the majority of academics have a broadly left liberal political stance, the question is whether this matters. Clearly, graduates of Australian universities over the past 50 years or more have been more or less evenly distributed across both sides of the houses of the Parliament of Australia. If there is a leftist conspiracy in universities it has not been conspicuously successful in achieving any political ends.

The difficulty the committee had was in dealing with the evidence of bias. Submissions and testimony gave us anecdotes which did not provide much context for the complaints. Even if we had received much more information, it would have been difficult to reach any conclusions other than that there probably were cases where academics were exceeding the proprieties of lecturing and tutoring. There is probably a very small amount of bad teaching going on. What surprised the committee was that students with complaints about bias did not appear to use the fairly elaborate complaint mechanisms which universities have instituted. Apparently, they were happy to come to us, rather than complain directly to their deans and department heads, or through the very formal processes that all universities have in place for addressing complaints of this nature. The quality assurance measures which have been instituted across the higher education sector are intended to deal with problems of poor teaching. If there is a problem—and the evidence was so scant as to be insignificant—then the solution lies there. It is not the role of the Senate to go blundering in to sort out the internal affairs of universities. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted.

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to make a very brief contribution to this debate, given the pressure of other business before the Senate today. I think that the evidence that there is a problem in Australia with academic bias is very clear as a result of this inquiry. I do not pretend that the problem is widespread, in the sense that it affects a large number of students in a large number of institutions, but I think that the evidence is compelling and irrefutable that there is an issue with bias in the case of some students. I have little doubt that in some cases that political bias will affect students with left-wing perspectives faced with a lecturer or tutor with a right-wing bias, but there was no evidence of that put before the committee. I have no doubt that it must exist. But the evidence of the other kind of bias was put before the committee and in sufficiently compelling detail to suggest that it needs to be examined as an issue confronting Australian universities.

I put to the Senate that what they should take from this inquiry is not a sense of denial of there being any issue or problem—which is, with respect, what we can take from Senator Marshall’s comments today—but rather an acceptance that, if there is an issue, even if it affects a small number of students, it is incumbent on universities, as places which are properly regarded as bastions of intellectual freedom and the capacity to express and articulate thoughts in a way which we may not have the freedom to do in other parts of our society, to facilitate devices to prevent any student having his or her grades affected or his or her capacity to express views in an academic context compromised by virtue of the existence of bias in universities.

The coalition senators’ additional comments in their dissenting report are, I think, well worth considering—that is, not that the government rush to legislate to deal with this issue, but that the universities themselves, who have said repeatedly that they have robust mechanisms for dealing with problems of competence and quality in teaching, actually address this issue specifically and allow it to be properly expressed in the form of a charter that sets out the freedom not only of academics but of students in those institutions. If we accept that there is an issue there—and there certainly has been an issue raised in the Australian context of the freedom of academics to express their views—you cannot not deal with the issue of the freedom of students at the same time. You have got to deal with both of them. If we accept that there is an issue about the way in which these problems are addressed in our universities—and even those opposite would concede that on occasions that has occurred—we should deal with it in the way suggested in the dissenting comments of coalition senators. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.