Academic Freedom and the Contemporary University
» JOHN FITZGERALD
INTRODUCTION administrators are aware of the war-like language that university administrators in China resort It’s time we started talking about values. In the to when they condemn the kind of free and Academy of the Humanities we need to be clear open critical inquiry that we take for granted in about what our values are and whether they still the humanities and social sciences in Australia. matter in order to recognise and respond to the Nor is it clear that Australian administrators are challenges they face in the present era. aware of the constraints under which humanities It is not immediately clear, for example, and social science disciplines operate in that that academic freedom carries the weight it country or of the performance appraisal systems once carried in our universities. The inherited used to police them. Western ideal of the solitary mendicant scholar, So it falls to the Academy to identify the free to roam without interference and speak values that we consider important, and to truth to the prelate and the prince, sits uneasily discover the values that others proclaim and alongside the immense resources invested practice in their national higher education in contemporary universities charged with systems, in order to stress-test our academic driving innovation, industry, and business in institutions to ensure they are sufficiently highly competitive national and international robust and resilient to uphold the values that we markets. Still, while the roles of universities are consider important when they deal with systems more diverse and the challenges to freedom erected on values different from our own. more diffuse in the twenty-first century, the In the case of China, we need to start talking Academy’s commitment to free and open critical about values in order to draw attention to what inquiry in the arts and humanities remains no it is that distinguishes the university sector from less important today than in the mid-twelfth other national players in the Australia-China century when the Constitutio Habita was drafted relationship. For some decades now, Australia’s in Bologna. relations with China have been conducted (above) The inherited values of the Academy are through an informal compact under which Montage using thrown into sharp relief by the rise of China each side agrees to leave its values at the door. image of statue of and the growing impact of an academic model Australians value freedom, equality and the Confucius (p. 16). in which freedom plays little part. Awareness rule of law. The Government of China values PATTERN VIA FREEPIK:
08 Humanities Australia The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) respect and to set aside the others’ professed Institutes in Australian universities.4 A lot of values in order to focus on shared interests in money is at stake. expanding trade and investment.1 Academic freedom is also at stake. Our Generally speaking, the agreement to set universities’ institutional arrangements with values aside for the sake of trade and investment universities in authoritarian states such as China presents few problems. Miners, farmers, place academic freedom at risk both as an ideal investors, lawyers, architects, tourism operators and as a set of institutional practices. In the and so on go about their business trading in past these risks were negligible. In transitional goods and services for mutual profit as they do moments such as the present, when China is with many other countries that do not share the asserting its values globally and the United States same values. And so it has always been. appears to be retreating into its shell, risks to Unlike mining companies or agribusinesses, the freedoms that we take for granted are real, however, universities deal in values and one of pressing, and substantial. their core values is academic freedom. China My argument is laid out in five parts: first, does not permit free and open critical inquiry touching on the meaning and the institutional in its higher education system. In fact China’s foundations of academic freedom; second, education and research systems are arms of considering the transformations that Australian government and the Government of China is universities have undergone as institutions openly hostile to the idea of academic freedom. over the past three decades and what these Australian universities are independent bodies mean for academic freedom; third, arguing that
AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES THAT LEAVE THEIR VALUES AT THE DOOR ARGUABLY NEGLECT THEIR DUTIES AND PLACE THEIR REPUTATIONS AT RISK. that highlight academic freedom in their charters these institutional developments have reduced and their routine practices. These differences our capacity to identify and manage risks in are not trivial ones when university partners international engagements involving teaching from Australia and China come together and research with authoritarian states such as to transact agreements for mutual benefit. China; fourth, identifying the risks associated Academic freedom carries duties, including the with housing Confucius Institutes on Australian ‘duty to speak out for what one believes to be campuses; and, in conclusion, proposing a true’ and an accompanying recognition that it is number of mitigating strategies. fundamentally ‘wrong to remain silent’ in face of 2 assaults on freedom. Australian universities that THE MEANING AND INSTITUTIONAL leave their values at the door arguably neglect FOUNDATIONS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM their duties and place their reputations at risk. Australian university councils and executives Academic freedom is a variant of wider freedoms often transact business with China as if there associated with the liberal democratic order, were little to distinguish their dealings from including freedom of thought and expression, those involving agribusiness or the resources freedom of religious belief, and freedom of industry. The results have been impressive. assembly.5 The particular history of academic China accounts for more international freedom is bound up with the history of the students in Australia than any other country academy no less than with the genealogy in an industry that contributes twenty billion of freedom. From the self-governing studia dollars to national GDP each year.3 The erected on the model of corporate guilds, in People’s Republic is also partner to hundreds of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe, to the discrete research collaborations in the Science, twenty-first-century university fashioned on Technology, Engineering and Maths disciplines the commercial corporation, the practice of across Australia and is the focus of ten specialist academic freedom has been inseparable from the research centres and a dozen Confucius institutions in which it is embedded. There has
The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) Humanities Australia 09 (right) Library shelving on a curved wall.
PHOTO: CC0 1.0 UNIVERSAL, PIXABAY.
never been a time when the corporate powers exhort their colleagues to shun silence and be of the university have not lived in tension with bold ‘in speaking truth’ in recognition that a the freedom of individual scholars to teach and freedom rarely exercised was a freedom readily to discover. As a corporate entity, the university surrendered.6 is both an enabling condition for freedom of In the tension between the corporate powers expression and discovery, and an institutional of the university and the freedom of scholars restraint on the exercise of that freedom. Within to speak truth to power we find the European this tension lies the dynamic value that we call origins of the two ‘levels of insulation’ that academic freedom. Ronald Dworkin associates with academic Similarly, institutional constraints on freedom in the contemporary university: the academic freedom are as old as the university. In insulation of the university from external medieval and early modern Europe, the exercise political authority and economic power, on of corporate discipline over scholarly fellows the one hand, and the insulation of teachers was considered essential for resolving quarrels and researchers from undue interference with local authorities in defence of university by university administrators on the other. autonomy, itself a condition of freedom. In Echoing findings of US Supreme Court rulings, early universities, historian Richard Hofstadter Dworkin argues that maintaining these two records, masters were expected to take oaths of structural barriers, or layers of insulation, not loyalty to their institution and to keep university only preserves academic freedom but serves secrets. Senior masters regulated and restricted freedom more broadly: ‘academic freedom plays the teaching and scholarship of their fellows an important ethical role not just in the lives of more often than ecclesiastical authorities ever the few people it protects, but in the life of the did. And many universities ‘adopted statutes and community more generally.’ It establishes and ordinances affecting almost every conceivable supports the ‘duty to speak out for what one facet of academic life, from trivial details of dress believes to be true’ and the associated ethical to the subjects and methods of lectures and belief that it is ‘wrong to remain silent.’ The disputations.’ Still, masters would periodically imperative to speak out on matters of scholarly
10 Humanities Australia The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) expertise, and to speak out particularly where enterprise university than the American higher freedom itself is at issue, nourishes respect education system. Writing only a few years ago, for wider freedoms in a liberal-democratic Ellen Schrecker remains hopeful that traditional community.7 academic freedoms would be maintained in Writing in the 1950s on the development of American higher education ‘by virtue of two academic freedom from twelfth-century Europe practices that protect the job security and to mid-twentieth-century America, Richard institutional authority of college and university Hofstadter associated its ideas and practices with teachers: tenure and faculty governance.’9 the struggles of the independent scholar in the These last remaining pillars of ‘traditional’ face of challenges from ecclesiastical and state academic freedom were long ago demolished authority. More recent scholarship has drawn in Australia, where universities moved from attention to a different set of challenges arising tenure, in the traditional sense, to enterprise from the corporatisation of the university itself. practices of workplace employment, and where Ellen Schrecker presents a sustained critique faculty governance is no longer practiced to any of the ‘assault on academic freedom’ presented meaningful degree. by the corporatisation of the university in In Australia, however, it is by no means our time: clear that the managerial university poses graver threats to traditional freedoms than the The academy has always had to fend off system that preceded it. In 1974, the Whitlam external challenges from politicians and government’s abolition of tuition fees made others who want to eliminate unpopular universities uniformly and wholly dependent professors or censor the curriculum. on Commonwealth funding for operating and Those pressures have not abated. But now capital expenditure for over a decade. I recall the nation’s colleges and universities are senior academics of the old school highlighting also confronting demands for so-called at that time the threats to academic freedom reforms that would substitute economic likely to flow from universities’ growing considerations of productivity and cost- dependence on government. The late Professor effectiveness for the traditional values of A.R. (‘Bertie’) Davis, Professor of Oriental enlightenment and individual growth.8 Studies at the University of Sydney, would rail Vice chancellors and presidents apply market in private conversation and protest in public principles to university management, they over the loss of university autonomy arising expand administrative budgets and introduce from his university’s financial dependence on business-friendly priorities into the life of the Commonwealth funding. He had little patience university, they expand the casual workforce, and with the Whitlam government but his concern they promote competition for resources among went deeper, to the longer-term systemic threats individual scholars and competition for status to an academic freedom that he associated with among institutions. Taken together, Schrecker institutional autonomy. argues, these incremental developments have A decade later, similar concerns about transformed the mission of the university, excessive dependence on the Commonwealth reduced its autonomy, and limited the time were aired among university vice chancellors, and inclination of individual academic faculty although in this case with less concern for to participate in collegial decisions bearing on academic freedom than for the state of their appointments, curricula, research, and peer university finances. From the mid-1970s to review which underpin the everyday practices of the late-1980s universities were made to feel academic freedom and independence. their dependence on Commonwealth funding Whether or not we credit these developments through a withering process of attrition — with limiting academic freedom, many of them known as ‘steady state’ funding — that reduced would be familiar to observers of Australia’s their budgets to a parlous state by the end of higher education system. Australia arguably that decade. Commonwealth funding failed moved earlier and more uniformly toward to keep pace with operating expenses. Capital adopting the corporate methods of the stock deteriorated as older buildings were
The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) Humanities Australia 11 not maintained and new construction was other things, improved governance involved postponed for years. It is said that the University redefining the role of vice chancellor from of Sydney went without a new building for primus inter pares to CEO of the university almost two decades. enterprise, and led to reduced staff and Dependence on Commonwealth funding student representation and greater business made universities especially vulnerable to and government representation on governing managerial innovation. In the mid-1980s, the university councils.12 national economy was harnessed to the fortunes We live with the consequences of these of the world economy following tariff reductions reforms. Decision-making powers over and the floating of the dollar. Vice chancellors curricula and research have been transferred and university councils then anticipated further from participatory department and faculty shocks, including reductions in Commonwealth committees to line management. Academic funding and greater demands for accountability personnel policies have been redrafted to align to government agencies in relation to their the performance of individual academics with enrolments, the courses they offered, their staff overarching corporate missions — translating performance, and their financial accounting. corporate strategic goals into individual Peter Karmel at the Australian National academic targets covering research, education, University and David Pennington at the scholarship and engagement. On other fronts, University of Melbourne began to develop their university managers adjust their internal own internal change-agendas that anticipated reward and punishment mechanisms to lift key features of what was to be called the their university standings in global rankings, to Dawkins model. hold academics accountable for burnishing the In 1987 John Dawkins took advantage of the university’s brand in public correspondence, Commonwealth’s dominance of the system to and to encourage academic participation reduce dependence on Commonwealth funding in both formally-structured engagement and at the same time sharpen the tools of public with corporate end-users and international administration to reshape the provision of higher cooperation in research and teaching. In the education in Australia. With the introduction wake of these reforms, a team of American of the Unified National System, followed by researchers visiting Australia in the 1990s found a decade of institutional amalgamations and Australian universities were arguably ahead Quality Assurance rounds, virtually every of US universities in implementing market Australian university had come to embrace the mechanisms in support of research. Had they enterprise model of corporate governance.10 explored teaching programs, Stuart Macintyre After Dawkins, the Commonwealth remarks, they would have found that Australia’s government shifted from rowing the boat recrafting of university priorities, planning and to steering it, as the saying goes. The management around international student Commonwealth exchanged direct control for recruitment was no less advanced in its embrace a dashboard of buttons and levers through of the market.13 which to shape higher education and research. Whether the trend to corporate management In the early years these included rewards for of the enterprise university has, in itself, institutional amalgamations and for shifting compromised freedom of expression among student load from generalist degrees toward academic members of staff is for others to judge. skills development in areas identified by Here I would draw attention to one incidental government (IT, engineering, business, and so effect of corporatisation that surfaces at the on). The Commonwealth also reintroduced point where Australian universities align their fees as well as funding incentives for expanding strategies and partnerships with universities undergraduate enrolments along with incentives overseas that do not share respect for academic for linking competitive research funding with freedom or tolerate the wider liberties in national research priorities. 11 It made improved which this freedom is nested. The coincidental corporate governance a condition for university convergence of strategic planning styles and entry to the Unified National System. Among line-management methodologies in China and
12 Humanities Australia The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) has risen from under 1% to around 25% of the (far left) current age cohort, in a population one third Image of larger today than it was three decades ago. This Barbarossa with his sons Henry and achievement can be attributed in part to a model Frederick, from the of higher education that Simon Marginson has Constitutio Habita.
termed ‘The Confucian Model’, a term referring PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA to national university systems extending from WIKIPEDIA COMMONS. the People’s Republic of China to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, countries that have all been influenced by Confucian educational traditions. Each of these national systems converges with the others in an education system designed around four key elements:
• A strong central state shaping the structures, funding, and priorities of national higher education systems
• A trend to universal participation, driven by popular commitment embedded in cultural values
• The adoption of ‘one chance’ national competitive examination systems, the West masks the incommensurability and highlighting and reinforcing hierarchy, ultimately non-convertibility of the values of the discipline, meritocracy liberal university and the militant Leninist values • Accelerated public investment in underpinning the Chinese university system. education, research, and the attainment of When corporate managers do deals without ‘world-class’ status for universities.14 regard to values they place values at risk. As a rule, systems that hold higher education THE CASE OF CHINA and research accountable to the principles, goals, and needs of the national state are prone to My concern is not just with China. In universities state interference in their executive autonomy that manage off-shore programs or campuses in and academic discovery and innovation. 15 southeast Asia, for example, how many academic Nevertheless the degree of state interference staff feel free to come forward and acknowledge varies significantly from one nation to another. that colleagues are obliged to sign agreements to The Confucian hierarchical model of education refrain from publishing research outcomes that found in Singapore, Japan, and South Korea might offend the host government? How many makes provision for academic freedom line-managers pressure academic researchers commensurable with the greater or lesser who have not signed on to these agreements degrees of freedom tolerated in each country, to refrain from publishing material that might including freedom of expression and of the place their partner university agreements at risk? press, and freedom of religion and assembly. We could ask further questions, or ask similar China eschews such civic freedoms and shows questions of other countries. Here I propose to commensurably little respect for the principles ask questions about Australian universities and derived from those freedoms, including academic their relations with China. freedom. In the case of China, the convergence Domestically, higher education is one of of Confucian and Leninist models of strategic China’s many success stories. Over the past three management presents challenges for free and decades the national tertiary participation rate open critical inquiry of the highest order.
The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) Humanities Australia 13 The strategies through which the Chinese guidelines on academic staff performance Communist Party and Chinese Government appraisal issued in August 2016 include the guides and controls teaching, research and following criterion for performance appraisal publication in higher education are embedded (clause 10): not in the principles of civic life, East or West, 10. Strengthen assessment of discipline but in strategies for waging war. The old wartime in the classroom. By taking adherence United Front Department works to win the to the basic line of the Party as a basic loyalty of non-party elements including ethnic requirement for teaching, and adhering Chinese overseas and students studying abroad.16 to a correct educational orientation and China’s students overseas are exhorted, for strict discipline in University classroom example, to serve their country by helping to teaching, strengthen supervision of build scientific and technological capacity for teachers’ educational activities in the heightened military preparedness, not least to classroom and actual teaching practices. prepare to take by force islands and sea-lanes in The illegal spread of harmful ideas and the South China Seas currently held or contested expressions in the classroom will be dealt by other countries in the region.17 with severely according to regulation China’s battle strategy for higher education and law.19 is set out in formal state documents. The ruling State Council’s guidelines for higher education, The ‘harmful ideas and expressions’ to be issued in 2015, present the higher education banished from university classrooms were set sector as a ‘battlefield’ between China and its out in another Party communiqué issued in April enemies in the liberal West: 2013, and forwarded to university presidents and party secretaries as a prescribed list of ‘Seven Higher education is a forward battlefield Prohibitions’ governing university teaching and in ideological work, and shoulders the research. The seven topical areas banned from important tasks of studying, researching university classrooms, research seminars and and propagating Marxism, fostering publications all fall within the domain of the and carrying forward the Socialist core humanities and social sciences. They include value system, and providing talent constitutional democracy, civil society, economic guarantees and intelligent support for the liberalisation, freedom of the press, historical realization of the Chinese Dream of the critiques of the Communist Party, challenges great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. to socialism with Chinese characteristics, and Doing higher education propaganda and discussion of ‘universal values’ (local code ideology work well and strengthening for human rights and freedoms, including the construction of the higher education academic freedom).20 Not only are these topics ideological battlefields are strategic banned from the classroom and the seminar, projects… and have an extremely the Party communiqué banning them was important and profound significance designated a secret state document, partly out for consolidating the guiding position of habit, partly to avoid embarrassing overseas of Marxism in the ideological area and universities partnering with Chinese ones consolidating a common ideological basis that are compelled to comply with the ‘Seven for the united struggle of the entire Party, Prohibitions.’ A seventy-year-old journalist, Gao the entire country and all the people.18 Yu, was found guilty of leaking state secrets for At the institutional level, individual academics allegedly sharing the communiqué with a foreign are accountable to university and national journalist. She was sentenced to seven years in strategies through their university’s performance gaol, subsequently commuted to five years under appraisal system, as in Australia, although in house arrest in deference to her age. this case under explicit direction from the Finally, in December 2016 Xi Jinping Ministry of Education to measure compliance placed his presidential seal of approval on the with Communist Party ideology and policy in tightening of political controls over higher joining battle with ‘harmful ideas.’ The Ministry’s education in a widely-publicised speech
14 Humanities Australia The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) about placing ‘ideological work’ and ‘political pioneered locally by education theorists of work’ at the heart of university education the pre-Communist era, such as Cai Yuanpei and management. Among other things, he and Tao Xingzhi, and in others was embedded proclaimed that all science was based on deeply in their originating DNA as American Marx’s scientific socialism, and that the duty of missionary colleges. university managers and academics is to believe In most of China’s 2,400 universities, and inculcate the ‘scientific theory of Marxism’: however, serious scholars revert to practices once favoured by medieval European philosophers Proper management of higher education when faced with the ecclesiastical authority of requires perseverance in thoroughly the Roman Catholic Church. Some get on with implementing Party education policies their studies quietly, ignoring restrictions as guided by Marxism. It means persevering best they can without publishing or teaching without fail in making students appreciate anything that would directly challenge the throughout their lives, by grasping Marxist authorities. Others defer to the right of higher theoretical education, that the intellectual authorities to correct their errors and oversights foundation of science is the scientific when they publish their research findings. Some theory of Marxism…. All teachers and seek refuge in one of a number of less restrictive students must become firm believers in urban jurisdictions where a particular university the core values of socialism.
THE SEVEN TOPICAL AREAS BANNED FROM UNIVERSITY CLASSROOMS, RESEARCH SEMINARS AND PUBLICATIONS ALL FALL WITHIN THE DOMAIN OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES.
At the classroom level, no classes or disciplines president or local Party Secretary is known to were to be spared these explicit political provide protection from over-weening central interventions: authority — assuming, that is, they are permitted to transfer their personal ‘dossiers’ from one We must fully utilise the important jurisdiction to another, which is often forbidden. channel of the classroom by improving In a country where state and ideological and strengthening classes on the theory authority are one and the same, at every level of of thought work and political work… and government, interstitial spaces allowing scholarly integrate classes on thought work and refuge are relatively few compared with those in political work with other classes.21 medieval and early modern Europe. 23 Further, President Xi raised what he called the ‘basic question’ of who it was that could AUSTRALIA’S CHINA CHALLENGE be entrusted to bear the ‘sacred mission of engineering human souls’ as academic teachers, An iconic moment in recognising the and implied that academics were not only to independent scholar’s right to move between be monitored for compliance but selected for towns, cities and states in search of refuge appointment on the basis of prior demonstrated is the Constitutio Habita declaration of compliance with Party directives. Bologna University in the mid-twelfth century. Directives such as these, designed to The declaration is remembered today chiefly ‘strengthen management of the ideological because European university presidents cited battlefield’,22 are applied vigorously in all of the Constitutio Habita as precedent when they China’s higher education institutions apart met to sign a continental charter of academic from a handful of prestigious universities such principles, Magna Charta Universitatum, in as Peking and Tsinghua universities along with Bologna in 1988.24 The 1988 Charta was a Wuhan, Nankai, Nanjing, Sun Yatsen, Fudan forward-looking document laying out the and a number of other elite institutions. These ‘principles of academic freedom and institutional relatively exclusive universities preserve an autonomy as a guideline for good governance ethic of critical inquiry that was in some cases and self-understanding of universities in the
The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) Humanities Australia 15 future.’25 In the following year the Charta helped of Nazism, Leninism, and Stalinism were a to guide and to govern mergers and transitions real and malevolent accompaniment of their among East European and West European personal and family lives.26 universities following the collapse of the And yet Australia is also part of China’s Berlin Wall. story. Since 1989 Australia has hosted a In higher education, Australia is part of this comparable number of intellectual refugees European story. Many will recall that Australian from Maoism and Leninism in China. universities were caught up in the struggle for Their reflections rarely make their way into freedom in Eastern Europe in the post-war public debate through mainstream journals period through their hosting of a number of and magazines. Their names are little known. prominent intellectual refuges from Nazism, Had they remained in China, they would Leninism and Stalinism. Richard Krygier, today be university professors, deans and Eugene Kamenka, Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, presidents. In Australia they remain part-time
Hugo Wolfsohn, Henry Mayer, among others, tutors, lecturers and senior lecturers, usually lectured and published widely in Australia. in languages departments, with little prospect (above) They built and led centres and departments of of promotion unless they make themselves Statue of Confucius research and teaching in the humanities and useful by deploying their networks to open PHOTO: CC0 1.0 UNIVERSAL, PIXABAY. social sciences, and founded and contributed lucrative channels to the Chinese higher to journals, magazines, professional associations education market. and learned academies at a time of intellectual As China patriots, Chinese-Australian ferment arguably unparalleled in Australia. intellectuals wish China well. And yet they Martin Krygier reminded us a few years ago value the freedoms Australia has to offer more that, while for many Australians the Cold than career opportunities available in China. War was a ‘free-floating fantasy’ leavened by Threats to their friends, families and students parochial political concerns, for his father within China, and repeated injunctions to wage and other intellectual refugees the spectres ideological warfare against them for choosing
16 Humanities Australia The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) to live in the liberal West, form a malevolent the Australian and Chinese higher education accompaniment to their everyday lives. Many systems. Australian universities value academic look on in wonder as their university deans freedom, China’s do not. To host a Confucius and vice chancellors enter into deals with Institute is to exchange academic freedom for Chinese universities that imply the moral Communist Party authoritarianism, as if in a equivalence of the Chinese and Australian currency exchange, at equal value of one to one. higher education systems. After swapping values, Australian universities The entry of Confucius Institutes onto pursue collaborative research and education Australian campuses, twelve at last count, opportunities with Chinese institutions on a offers a pointed illustration of the challenges scale that far outstrips anything a Confucius the corporate university presents for academic Institute could possibly match. Their freedom in international engagements.27 innocuousness is then a measure of their Confucius Institutes appear on the whole success: the less conspicuous the Confucius harmless and inconspicuous agencies in the Institute, the greater its achievement as an Australian universities that host them. For this arbiter of values exchange. reason they are thought to be inconsequential. It would be shortsighted to overlook their HOW DID IT COME TO THIS? symbolic significance. Confucius Institutes breach fundamental principles of academic In most cases, Confucius Institutes were autonomy and freedom relating to curricula introduced onto Australian campuses as an and appointments. As a rule, host universities executive initiative with little involvement have no say in the selection of Chinese on the part of humanities academics familiar staff, who are subject to the guidelines and with the risks involved. Dr Jocelyn Chey, a restrictions on academics set out in the former colleague of Professor Bertie Davis documents noted above and are monitored at the University of Sydney, told ABC radio’s by the Communist Party Secretary of the Background Briefing program that a proposal overarching management office in Beijing, the going before the University’s Senate happened Hanban. Their curricula and teaching materials to fall into her hands while she was visiting are censored at the margins to pass the test the university in 2007. The proposal suggested of approved ‘battlefront’ scholarship. Their that university management was considering directors are expected to play a gate-keeping folding its Chinese programs into a new role to prevent the circulation of materials in Confucius Institute. Up to that point there had Australia that Chinese government authorities been little consultation with academic staff may deem offensive, including those touching who had the capacity to advise of the risks to on China’s territorial sovereignty, or the Seven academic freedom implied by this arrangement. Prohibitions, which are the bread and butter of In Dr Chey’s words, the proposal going to a liberal arts education. Any discussion of the Council challenged ‘the right of academics not limits on academic freedom that apply within just to teach but to research and to publish in China is off limits as well. areas where they are not under the guidance On the Australian side, accepting an or direction of anybody.’28 Even the watered- invitation to set up a Confucius Institute down version of a Confucius Institute that may be thought a gesture of good will on the was admitted onto campus after Dr Chey’s part of university executives wishing to do informal intervention would not have been business with China. To Chinese authorities, admitted under the shared management model Australian universities’ disregard for the of academic and executive responsibility for principles of academic freedom and autonomy university governance that applied when Bertie when allowing the establishment of these Davis ran the Oriental Studies Department at the Institutes marks a significant breach in the University of Sydney. battlefront with Western liberal values. On I do not propose returning to the age of the both sides, Confucius Institutes symbolise powerful patriarchal professoriat — nor to the the equivalence of the principles governing era of Oriental Studies — but I would suggest
The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) Humanities Australia 17 that Australian universities need to recover WHAT IS TO BE DONE? the capacity to measure and manage risks in dealing with their counterparts in authoritarian Academic freedom is nested in wider forms of states. The convergence of strategic planning freedom but is fundamentally embedded in and corporate management styles on both institutions. Put to the test, the contemporary sides, I would suggest, blinds Australian Australian university does not appear well university executives to the incommensurability equipped to manage the risks that can arise of the values underpinning the two higher when it aligns its research, teaching and education systems. corporate missions with universities in other Some decades ago when Beijing was obsessed national systems that hold academic freedom in with national development and domestic affairs low regard. this may not have mattered. Even today, State Changes to higher education triggered by the Council injunctions and Education Ministry Dawkins reforms enhanced the autonomy of guidelines are intended for domestic application, institutions but placed enhanced autonomy in not application abroad. But the distinction the hands of an executive leadership inclined to between home and away is blurring as China place issues of revenue, status and performance follows its policy of ‘going abroad’, in effect ahead of traditional academic values. exporting its world view and values well beyond In particular, there appears to be little its borders, including to Australia.29 independent academic input into executive
THE DOMESTIC REPRESSION OF ACADEMIC EXPRESSION WHICH IS AN EVERY DAY EVENT IN CHINA IS NOW EXPORTED ALONG WITH CONFUCIUS INSTITUTES
Education is part of China’s going abroad decisions relating to China. When invited, strategy. On the pull side, the appeal of China’s independent academic input is often ignored ‘Confucian’ education model is growing among if it fails to match the higher corporate vision. countries in the region.30 On the push side, Faced with opportunities for aligning universities Chinese education specialists now call for with institutional partners and systems that do Australian universities that accept Chinese not value freedom, the current corporate model students to give greater weighting to the values is systematically inclined to go for alignment of the education system that produced them. 31 and set aside values once considered a liberal And China’s Ministry of Education has begun university’s greatest assets. to export the style of interventionist academic Some say that we should go along with it policing it routinely practices at home. In July all because China is changing, or in the words 2014 the Director of the Ministry’s Hanban of Bob Carr, formerly Australia’s Minister agency which manages Confucius Institutes for Foreign Affairs and now Director of the overseas, Madame Xu Lin, ordered that a page Australia-China Relations Institute at the be ripped out of the conference program of University of Technology, Sydney, China is the 20th Annual Conference of the European ‘becoming more like us’.33 This claim rests on slim Association of Chinese Studies, an independent evidence. China’s education system is geared to academic fellowship then convening in Portugal. ensuring precisely that China does not become Her staff removed the pages without consulting ‘more like us’ in the sense of embracing universal the academic conference organisers who put the values, human rights, constitutional government, program together. The domestic repression of civil society or freedom of religion, speech academic expression which is an everyday event and assembly. It certainly has no intention of in China is now exported along with Confucius embracing academic freedom. Not only are ideals Institutes.32 and institutions such as these banned in China; discussion of them is specifically outlawed on
18 Humanities Australia The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) China’s campuses and in institutes governed by China on Australian campuses. It is not China that is changing but Australia. The ABC has censored its own news programs for fear of offending Beijing. Chinese Communist Party propaganda bureau publications are delivered to the homes of subscribers to Fairfax newspapers each month. Sky News co-produces news and current affairs programs with CCTV in China where the outcomes of cooperation are censored before broadcasting. Australia’s Chinese-language media — print, radio, online and social media — are largely owned or dominated by arms of the Chinese Communist Party and government. Beijing monitors and restricts the freedom of Chinese Australians to practice religion by threatening to harm family members in China if they join this or that religious congregation. Our university executives invite onto our campuses institutions and China for drawing attention to what Chinese political representatives who profess to be at war authorities themselves were saying in Chinese.35 with our values, including academic freedom. Professor John In fact we do China a courtesy by reading and Fitzgerald One thing to be done is to call out this kind translating what Party and government agencies of behaviour in our universities. During her PHOTO: are saying in their own language and to their GLEN BRAITHWAITE visit to Australia in October this year, Anson own people. We extend a further courtesy when Chan, head of the Hong Kong public service we accept what they say as true statements of from 1993 to 2001, spelled out a lesson for intent. It is Australia’s political leaders, media Australia. ‘I don’t think Australians understand owners, business managers and university the sort of country they’re dealing with … By executives who do China a disservice by ignoring the time China’s infiltration of Australia is what Beijing is saying every day through its readily apparent, it will be too late.’ Despite government and media proclamations in favour Hong Kong reverting to Chinese sovereignty of their own ill-founded presuppositions. in 1997, she reminds us, the Communist Party More important, we do our Chinese colleagues remains an underground organisation in that in Australia and in China a disservice by not city. In the early years of Chinese sovereignty, accepting the obligation to speak up about it. Communist agents moved quietly into the city Second, we can deploy the tools and drivers to remould Hong Kong’s media, universities, that corporate universities themselves employ non-profit and government agencies in Beijing’s to enhance their status and promote their likeness. Within two decades they were openly services. One readily available set of tools intimidating journalists, kidnapping publishers, is competitive global rankings. The entry of and intervening in the appointment of senior Chinese universities into the top echelons university administrators. To Anson Chan, of published league tables, Oxford Professor Australia appears to sit now where Hong Kong Rana Mitter astutely observes, suggests that sat two decades ago. ‘Australia is a very open academic freedom no longer matters for society so it wouldn’t occur to most people, the university standing.36 It could equally be read designs of the one-party state. And it wouldn’t as an indictment of ranking systems that make have occurred to the people of Hong Kong until no provision in their measurement indicators we experienced it first hand.’34 for free and open critical inquiry in the Calling out abuses can itself invite abuse. On humanities and social sciences. This omission ABC national radio, Professor Bob Carr accused could be remedied by encouraging ranking humanities scholars of being vehemently anti-
The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) Humanities Australia 19 agencies to introduce a minimal commitment Fifth, the external funding and appointment to academic freedom as a threshold for entry processes applying to Confucius Institutes give onto competitive league tables, and to devise a their host universities in Australia a direct stake workable measure of the exercise of academic in the management of China’s higher education freedom in each national system and university system. Every university hosting a Confucius that crosses the threshold. Global rankings could Institute should routinely ask its China- then drive reforms favouring freedom through appointed staff to report publicly on the terms the competitive market mechanisms that and conditions of their employment, including currently stifle them. the terms of their annual performance appraisals. A third course of action is to encourage Australian universities hosting Institutes should more Australian universities to sign on to also monitor the formal terms and conditions the 1988 Magna Charta Universitatum and under which State Council guidelines, Education encourage prospective Chinese partners to Ministry directives and institutional performance become signatories on the understanding appraisal mechanisms apply to visiting teachers that they will seek to abide by the principles and professors. governing the Charta, and submit to routine In bringing values more clearly into view, monitoring and reporting on matters relating moving them from the doorway and putting to academic freedom. To date four universities them on the table as it were, the aim should in China have signed — Peking, Nankai, Tongji, not be to impose them on others but to impose and Wuhan — and eight Australian universities them on ourselves — to remind ourselves of have done so. Australian universities could opt who we are and what we believe and where we to give preference to research and teaching draw the line. International engagements vital partnerships with universities that are prepared for the future development of higher education to sign the Charta. in Australia should not be allowed to place A fourth action concerns the influence at risk the values that mark the university as of external donors on shaping university an institution. appointments and research. Given the value In the Academy we need to talk about values. differences separating our national higher We have a duty to speak out about contemporary education systems, Australian universities risks to academic freedom in the knowledge dealing with China face unprecedented that the liberties we enjoy in the academy play pressures to meet the expectations of external an important role in the life of the community donors and partners wishing to shape their at large. And it is our duty to speak out in the research and teaching activities. Risks to knowledge that freedoms rarely exercised are academic freedom are magnified when freedoms readily surrendered. ¶ university executives place the prospect of *** promising opportunities, big money and long-term strategic partnerships with Chinese This article is an edited version of the annual entities ahead of academic values. One remedy Academy Lecture delivered in Melbourne on would be to invite an overarching body, such 15 November 2016 as part of the 47th Annual as Universities Australia, to develop and Symposium of the Australian Academy of the promote a best-practice guide for accepting Humanities, ‘Asia Australia: Transnational and managing donor funds. This would ensure Connections’. that the sources and origins of donations are clearly documented, that donors present minimal risk to the standing of the university, and that firewalls are erected separating donor engagement from the selection of academic staff and research and teaching projects.
20 Humanities Australia The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) 5. Ellen Schrecker, The Lost Soul of Higher PROFESSOR JOHN FITZGERALD Education (New York: The New Press, 2010); faha is President of the Daniel Little, ‘Academic freedom from Australian Academy of the Hofstadter to Dworkin’, Understanding Humanities. He is the Truby and Society Blogspot 20 July 2011
The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017) Humanities Australia 21 abroad-a-new-focus-of-ccps-united-front- 25. Observatory Magna Charta Universitatum work/> [accessed 31 October 2016].
22 Humanities Australia The Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017)