This week’s democracy and human rights festival at the University of Queensland will include a discussion about how Australia can address the “rise of the far right.”
It sounds frightening, doesn’t it? Fascists, white nationalists, and even Nazis come to mind when I consider the far right. All of them are authoritarians. real dangers to democracies.
Nonetheless, the incident describes this political tendency as having a “toxic gravitational pull” and connects Pauline Hanson’s One Nation to larger global currents of right-wing populism.
Trade unionism may even function as a sort of “vaccine” against such views, according to one presenter.
Universities have a right—indeed, a duty—to support these kinds of conversations. An academia is failing in one of its primary responsibilities if it is unable to examine the rise of populism or the connection between grievance politics and democratic legitimacy.
It is important to examine One Nation’s persistent influence in Australian politics. Academic freedom shouldn’t be restricted just because political leaders don’t like criticism.
Universities shouldn’t start acting as censoring engines.
However, the question is not whether or not right-wing populism should be investigated—of course it should. The scholarly gaze’s obvious imbalance is the problem. Even while I think the term “far-right” goes too far, this is more than just who colleges invite to events or what they call One Nation. It has to do with intellectual discrimination.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is described as “far right” at a democracy and human rights festival that will take place at the University of Queensland this week.
Promotional materials for the Australian Festival of Democracy and Human Rights are shown.
The so-called “far right” will be enthusiastically scrutinized by these groupthink intellectual gatherings, but the ideological left, which controls a large portion of campus life, is rarely given the same kind of critical attention.
Legitimate academic research becomes institutional bias as a result of this choice. Everyone has political beliefs, therefore that’s not the issue. It’s the deeply ingrained practice of praising one type of purported radicalism as a sign of moral seriousness while pathologizing another as a threat to democracy.
Universities would criticize the far-left movements that are prevalent on campuses around the nation if they were serious about combating extremism.
Rather, they ignore the left-wing equivalent of political extremism while singling out One Nation, at least in this instance.
Progressive ideologies have their own intolerance of dissent, orthodoxies, and illiberal inclinations. They are also able to replace debate with moral denunciation. However, left-wing extremism is rarely identified as such in academia.
It is more frequently described as “social justice,” “activism,” or “solidarity.” The boundaries of acceptable discourse are shaped by this linguistic double standard: one side of politics is morally validated while the other is clinically diagnosed (by the untrained, I may add).
For example, universities do not want to characterize the Greens as far left. It’s more likely that many academics don’t even consider themselves to be. However, One Nation is as far to the right as the Greens are to the left. You can learn a lot about political bias on some college campuses from this inconsistency. Labels establish the bounds of allowable discussion before the argument even starts; they are not neutral descriptions.
This disparity presents a more serious threat to education than just the immediate political frame. “These groupthink ideological get-togethers will scrutinize the so-called ‘far right’ with enthusiasm, but rarely apply the same critical energy to the ideological left that dominates much of university life, including the far left,” writes Peter van Onselen. When students are shielded from criticisms of progressive orthodoxies, the university fails in its most fundamental goal: fostering independent thinkers.
The clash of divergent viewpoints is necessary for a real education. Universities run the risk of encouraging intellectual fragility by protecting the campus left from the same scrutiny that is accorded to the right.
Students graduate with the vocabulary of condemnation rather than the habits of persuasion. Alternatively, they complain about it and turn against the tribe.
Additionally, it undermines the university’s ability to comprehend society. A scholarly community’s blind spots become institutionalized when too many of its members hold similar beliefs. The purpose of academic conversation is to test ideas, yet it runs the risk of turning into a mutual affirmation exercise. This contributes to the explanation of why certain academics frequently misjudge the general public’s sentiment.
Universities are not monoliths, to be sure. Some are not as good as others. There is still serious scholarship in the field, including work that questions prevailing beliefs. However, it is difficult to dispute the larger institutional trend. While the campus left is normalized, the right is always scrutinized.
Ironically, the very populism that the school purports to be analyzing is fueled by this disparity. people lose faith in knowledge when they witness colleges labeling right-wing populism as pure evil while treating progressive orthodoxies as common sense. These people are already wary of elite institutions.
According to van Onselen, “the right is scrutinized relentlessly, while the campus left is normalized,” which supports the populist idea that institutions are biased against them.
The typical institutional defense is that academic freedom is exercised while universities maintain their formal neutrality. That is partially accurate, but intellectual balance and institutional neutrality are not the same thing. It is possible for an institution to maintain cultural predictability while maintaining formal neutrality. While rewarding just specific forms of dissent, it can allow debate.
Is it possible for universities like the University of Queensland to host a seminar on the perils of progressive illiberalism or how activist politics can undermine democratic legitimacy?
Perhaps my invites have been misplaced in the mail on a regular basis.
Bias itself is not the biggest threat to higher education. Bias is so ingrained that it no longer even recognizes itself as bias.
Scholarship ceases examining ideas and begins preaching them once that threshold is reached. Universities thus start to function more as institutions of ideological reinforcement than as centers of inquiry. That is a betrayal of what higher education is meant to be all about, not just an imbalance.
