But the virus that is TDS turns policy disagreement into a sort of apocalyptic fear-mongering and Manichean virtue-signalling about some looming dictatorship and soon-to-arrive extinguishing of more than a few constitutional conventions. So whatever Roger’s ongoing views on the awfulness of Trump I reckoned that I had had my say a while back and was going to leave it at that. (Cards on the table: I think Trump’s first 100 days have been on balance terrific, the best of any President I can remember. And I agree with at least 90% of what the Orange Man Bad has done and is doing.)
All that said, in Roger’s most recent Quadrant attack on Team Trump he turns to the issue of Donald Trump and American universities. Roger’s basic line is that, yes, the universities have become too politicised. Hence Trump’s diagnosis is correct. However, says Roger, Trump’s remedy is wrong. It is dangerously too aggressive. It threatens too much governmental control of universities. It risks attacking academic freedom. It may cross a dangerous line. It’s too controlling. Constitutional concerns have been raised. No, make that “profound constitutional [concerns]”. Roger pleads for governmental neutrality. We can fix the universities by “insisting on neutrality, enforcing civil rights laws fairly and using market and cultural pressure to restore true academic freedom”. That’s the basic line he takes.
Now before I say why I think that Roger Partridge is living in cloud cuckoo land on this one let me preface what is to come by laying my cards on the table. I am a political conservative who has spent most of his professional life working in orthodox Left (as in politically Left-wing) institutions. For more than the last 30 years I have worked teaching in university law schools around the common law world – four years in pre-handover Hong Kong, 11 in New Zealand at the University of Otago, 20 at the University of Queensland, with teaching sabbaticals at Cornell University and the University of San Diego law schools in the US, Osgoode Hall and the Dalhousie law schools in Canada, and King’s College law school in Britain. Whatever else one might think about my views, I know law schools and universities. It would barely be an exaggeration to claim that every single year of the last three decades anglosphere universities have become more woke. More Left wing. Less open to the free exchange of ideas. There is more self-censorship, amongst students and academics. All sorts of progressive Left-wing causes from native peoples’ land acknowledgements and supposed greater legitimacy to the lands through ever more rainbow and other progressive flags taking pride of place (no pun intended) on buildings, moving on to university computers opening up to the latest transgender rights pleas of the day and pro-Palestinian encampments being tolerated for weeks on end, all the way over to overt and covert support for Left wing political causes (and sometimes political parties). For a concrete Australian example, in last year’s constitutional Voice referendum – the one that 60% of voters rejected – you could count on one hand, a machine operator’s hand at that, the number of legal academics out of thousands who came out openly for ‘No’. For the sake of intellectual diversity in the Australian tertiary sector, the four of us thought it prudent not to travel on the same plane together. Whatever readers’ memories might be of their time at university 40 or 30 or 20 years, heck a decade ago, the politicisation on campus is far, far worse today. Take the unbelievable skew or political one-sidedness of academics across anglosphere universities, which has been documented myriad times in the US where donations to political parties are public information. The skew is at least 15:1, Democrat to Republican. One University of Notre Dame (US) law school academic looked at five years of political donations by all US law professors ending in 2023 and came up with a 36:1 ratio. And I’d say it’s every bit as bad in Canada, Britain and Australia. As for Roger’s native New Zealand, it is just as bad there too. So as I said, across the Anglosphere world, it is barely an exaggeration to say that academic conservatives (and more so, open and public conservatives like me) are an endangered species on campus.
It is worth making the current dire state of our universities abundantly clear for two reasons. One is that while Roger certainly acknowledges the problem – including admitting that a 2022 Harvard University survey found only 1% of faculty identified as conservative – he followed that up by noting that organisations like the Heterodox Academy and FIRE (‘Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’) have long recognised this problem and been working to fix it – “to defend free speech, due process and institutional neutrality within universities”. The implication Roger leaves with the reader is that these two organisations have been something other than totally and completely useless in trying to fix the problem. Because the truth is they have done nothing to fix the problem. Nada. Nothing. Zero. They haven’t even managed to slow down the trend-rate towards the ever-greater collapse of viewpoint diversity on campus. Or to ameliorate antisemitic violence and harassment on campus. Or to achieve a campus where academics and students feel no need to self-censor. Or to go any distance towards hiring based on merit.
The other reason is that Roger’s remedy for this woeful state of affairs, let us recall, is to “insist” on neutrality. I read that and I felt as though I were reading a P.G. Wodehouse novel where the most damning thing Bertie would threaten to do would be to write a stern letter to the Times. Roger, if you think “insisting” on any of these reforms will have the slightest effect on the caste or cabal that now runs our universities then I’m afraid that I think you are living in cloud cuckoo land. And as for market pressures on Harvard from donors, sure that eventually helped get rid of the former President who was a documented plagiarist and who let the pro-Palestinian encampments operate on campus for months. But even with all sorts of press coverage it still took some time. And don’t forget that she was given a massively highly paid sinecure on departure, one no conservative would ever receive. Moreover, it’s not remotely credible to believe the replacement Harvard President wants to end DEI-based hiring or student selection. And remember, Harvard has a US $50 billion endowment. It would take a century of donor pressure to reshape the university, assume away the fact that many rich people – a majority I’d say – are Left-wing progressives who feel no need at all for university change. (Recall that Kamala Harris had seven or eight billionaire donors for every one that supported Trump.) As for building new universities which meet the sort of neutral ideals Roger and I both want, well, the University of Austin, Texas is one. I’m all for it and admire its founders. It’s just now up-and-running a small cohort of programmes. It has attracted enough funding to survive. But there are what? 330 or more US universities? I’m not sure this island dot in a sea of established universities will be the fix we need.
And anyway, you’ll be “insisting” to whom Roger? The only institution with the power to take on the incredibly wealthy university sector is the federal government. Right? And when Roger goes on to advocate “enforcing civil rights laws fairly” as his supporting remedy I wondered what he thought Donald Trump was in fact doing. Part of the problem, I think, is the way Roger is characterising what the Trump administration is doing.
Here’s how Roger put it in his Quadrant article:
All that said, in Roger’s most recent Quadrant attack on Team Trump he turns to the issue of Donald Trump and American universities. Roger’s basic line is that, yes, the universities have become too politicised. Hence Trump’s diagnosis is correct. However, says Roger, Trump’s remedy is wrong. It is dangerously too aggressive. It threatens too much governmental control of universities. It risks attacking academic freedom. It may cross a dangerous line. It’s too controlling. Constitutional concerns have been raised. No, make that “profound constitutional [concerns]”. Roger pleads for governmental neutrality. We can fix the universities by “insisting on neutrality, enforcing civil rights laws fairly and using market and cultural pressure to restore true academic freedom”. That’s the basic line he takes.
Now before I say why I think that Roger Partridge is living in cloud cuckoo land on this one let me preface what is to come by laying my cards on the table. I am a political conservative who has spent most of his professional life working in orthodox Left (as in politically Left-wing) institutions. For more than the last 30 years I have worked teaching in university law schools around the common law world – four years in pre-handover Hong Kong, 11 in New Zealand at the University of Otago, 20 at the University of Queensland, with teaching sabbaticals at Cornell University and the University of San Diego law schools in the US, Osgoode Hall and the Dalhousie law schools in Canada, and King’s College law school in Britain. Whatever else one might think about my views, I know law schools and universities. It would barely be an exaggeration to claim that every single year of the last three decades anglosphere universities have become more woke. More Left wing. Less open to the free exchange of ideas. There is more self-censorship, amongst students and academics. All sorts of progressive Left-wing causes from native peoples’ land acknowledgements and supposed greater legitimacy to the lands through ever more rainbow and other progressive flags taking pride of place (no pun intended) on buildings, moving on to university computers opening up to the latest transgender rights pleas of the day and pro-Palestinian encampments being tolerated for weeks on end, all the way over to overt and covert support for Left wing political causes (and sometimes political parties). For a concrete Australian example, in last year’s constitutional Voice referendum – the one that 60% of voters rejected – you could count on one hand, a machine operator’s hand at that, the number of legal academics out of thousands who came out openly for ‘No’. For the sake of intellectual diversity in the Australian tertiary sector, the four of us thought it prudent not to travel on the same plane together. Whatever readers’ memories might be of their time at university 40 or 30 or 20 years, heck a decade ago, the politicisation on campus is far, far worse today. Take the unbelievable skew or political one-sidedness of academics across anglosphere universities, which has been documented myriad times in the US where donations to political parties are public information. The skew is at least 15:1, Democrat to Republican. One University of Notre Dame (US) law school academic looked at five years of political donations by all US law professors ending in 2023 and came up with a 36:1 ratio. And I’d say it’s every bit as bad in Canada, Britain and Australia. As for Roger’s native New Zealand, it is just as bad there too. So as I said, across the Anglosphere world, it is barely an exaggeration to say that academic conservatives (and more so, open and public conservatives like me) are an endangered species on campus.
It is worth making the current dire state of our universities abundantly clear for two reasons. One is that while Roger certainly acknowledges the problem – including admitting that a 2022 Harvard University survey found only 1% of faculty identified as conservative – he followed that up by noting that organisations like the Heterodox Academy and FIRE (‘Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’) have long recognised this problem and been working to fix it – “to defend free speech, due process and institutional neutrality within universities”. The implication Roger leaves with the reader is that these two organisations have been something other than totally and completely useless in trying to fix the problem. Because the truth is they have done nothing to fix the problem. Nada. Nothing. Zero. They haven’t even managed to slow down the trend-rate towards the ever-greater collapse of viewpoint diversity on campus. Or to ameliorate antisemitic violence and harassment on campus. Or to achieve a campus where academics and students feel no need to self-censor. Or to go any distance towards hiring based on merit.
The other reason is that Roger’s remedy for this woeful state of affairs, let us recall, is to “insist” on neutrality. I read that and I felt as though I were reading a P.G. Wodehouse novel where the most damning thing Bertie would threaten to do would be to write a stern letter to the Times. Roger, if you think “insisting” on any of these reforms will have the slightest effect on the caste or cabal that now runs our universities then I’m afraid that I think you are living in cloud cuckoo land. And as for market pressures on Harvard from donors, sure that eventually helped get rid of the former President who was a documented plagiarist and who let the pro-Palestinian encampments operate on campus for months. But even with all sorts of press coverage it still took some time. And don’t forget that she was given a massively highly paid sinecure on departure, one no conservative would ever receive. Moreover, it’s not remotely credible to believe the replacement Harvard President wants to end DEI-based hiring or student selection. And remember, Harvard has a US $50 billion endowment. It would take a century of donor pressure to reshape the university, assume away the fact that many rich people – a majority I’d say – are Left-wing progressives who feel no need at all for university change. (Recall that Kamala Harris had seven or eight billionaire donors for every one that supported Trump.) As for building new universities which meet the sort of neutral ideals Roger and I both want, well, the University of Austin, Texas is one. I’m all for it and admire its founders. It’s just now up-and-running a small cohort of programmes. It has attracted enough funding to survive. But there are what? 330 or more US universities? I’m not sure this island dot in a sea of established universities will be the fix we need.
And anyway, you’ll be “insisting” to whom Roger? The only institution with the power to take on the incredibly wealthy university sector is the federal government. Right? And when Roger goes on to advocate “enforcing civil rights laws fairly” as his supporting remedy I wondered what he thought Donald Trump was in fact doing. Part of the problem, I think, is the way Roger is characterising what the Trump administration is doing.
Here’s how Roger put it in his Quadrant article:
(After a first Dept. of Education letter ordering the end of DEI programmes within 14 days) Harvard received a more specific letter from the Federal Government demanding sweeping changes to its governance structure, leadership, hiring practices and admissions processes. The Trump administration required elimination of all DEI programmes, barring of specific student groups and detailed mandates on disciplinary procedures, protest regulations, and hiring preferences.
Compare that to the way in which Niall Ferguson characterised the tussle between Team Trump and Harvard. And remember that Ferguson was a professor at Harvard for 12 years. He’s the man who co-founded the new little University of Austin that Roger, like me, praises, the one trying to offer up a non-woke, non-progressive, free speech alternative. It’s Ferguson, writing recently in the Times (of London, not New York), who said that “we all must think twice before we uncritically toe the line that Trump is the villain”. The first Team Trump letter, said Ferguson, accused Harvard of having “fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964”. (Some might say that Trump was here “insisting on the enforcement of civil rights laws”, Roger’s own remedy.) The second Trump administration letter to the university, and again, these are Ferguson’s words, “demanded that… Harvard hire a third party [not any Trump partisans] to audit certain programmes, identify faculty members who contributed to antisemitism on campus, and sanction them ‘within the bounds of academic freedom and the First Amendment’; implement merit-based hiring and admissions reforms, to be audited by a third party; and shut down all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes and offices”. Then the third Team Trump letter informed the Harvard President that he should expect no more grants from the federal government as the university had engaged “in a systemic pattern of violating federal law”.
The extra nuance and detail in the Ferguson characterisation leaves one wondering why the federal government should not be demanding all of this of Harvard, under pain of not receiving taxpayers’ monies. I wonder that. And by the way, so does Ferguson, who comes within an inch of agreeing that Harvard has this coming. Niall Ferguson’s worry is not as regards the substance of what Trump is doing. He endorses the substance. No, Ferguson worries that being Trump he will manage to turn Harvard and other rich US universities into martyrs that get unwarranted sympathy from the public. Personally, leaving aside the odd Roger Partridge here and there, I don’t think that worry of Ferguson’s will come to pass because I think well over half of Americans have already come to see the universities as hot-beds of Left-wing indoctrination – and, to be clear, I think that too as regards many degree programs in many, many Anglosphere universities.
A few other points need mentioning. One has to do with the whole concept of academic freedom. I do not believe this protection attaches to any corporate body like a university. Academics are entitled to academic freedom, not universities. And the best account of what academic freedom is, to my mind, is the one offered up by the American legal philosopher Larry Alexander (or, if you prefer the exact same position from a different vantage, then by Stanley Fish). Academic freedom is nothing more and nothing less than the freedom to do your job as an academic without your university limiting that. Outside your job you are entitled to no more and no less free speech or anything else than other citizens. Academic freedom is not linked to some grandiose – and laughable, if you’ve ever worked in a university – view that academics are the critics and conscience of society or anything else. Hence, nothing the Trump administration is doing or threatening strikes me as affecting academic freedom.
Next, Roger mentioned the big 2023 US Supreme Court case of Students for Fair Administration, in which that top court held that affirmative action programmes were unconstitutional. This was based on myriad evidence that Harvard was discriminating hugely against Asian-American students (and Jews and to a lesser extent white males). Roger describes this case as a “powerful tool when properly wielded”. In fact, no conservative actually working in any university would agree with Roger. When that US Supreme Court case came out I said that every university would do everything it could to evade, cheat and ignore the judges. Every single conservative I know working in academia agreed with me. And so, by the way, does Niall Ferguson. In that above mentioned Times article Ferguson even quotes a liberal/progressive commentator, Matthew Yglesias, who recently wrote that “Harvard and most other elite schools do not appear, in practice, to have dramatically altered admissions practices”. Ferguson observes “that should not surprise us”. Put differently, Roger again displays a sort of stunning – if half-admirable – naïveté about how today’s universities and their upper echelon management work. And if these universities are predictably and most definitely thumbing their noses at the demand (judicial and by Team Trump) to stop with all the DEI crap and reverse discrimination – including, as Ferguson notes and confirms happens, telling departments “you cannot hire a white man for this position” – how would Roger proceed? He needs to be precise here. Is it time to pull out the sternly worded letter to the Times, old boy? It is defeatist claptrap to say that “university reform requires patience, strategy and commitment to principle over expedience” but then balk when an administration actually demands that universities live up to top court rulings, stop violating civil rights laws, put in third party auditors (or do we just take their word for it?), stamp out antisemitism and sanction all malfeasors “within the bounds of academic freedom and the First Amendment”.
Next there is the question of taking away Harvard’s tax exempt status and forcing it to pay taxes on the income earned by that $50 billion dollar endowment. This can be done based on the Bob Jones University Supreme Court precedent – holding that tax exempt status goes if the university applies racially discriminatory policies. Roger mentions the case, says you need “clear unlawful conduct” for it to apply, and then silently sails on as though it is somehow clear that Harvard (and many, many other US universities) were not clearly indulging in racial discrimination. But they were and they still are. Niall Ferguson says it bluntly: “There is a prima facie case that Harvard has in multiple ways violated civil rights law in ways that would justify the loss of its tax-exempt status… [in line with] the standard the Supreme Court set in 1982… [in the] Bob Jones University case.”
I will finish first with the concluding words of Niall Ferguson, and then my own. Ferguson laments that “I sincerely wish Harvard could heal itself. … But I know the place too well. Without significant external pressure, it is as likely to give up the excesses of DEI as Bob Jones University was likely to give up segregation.” Sure, Ferguson then worries about Trump managing to turn Harvard into martyrs. For me, that’s a risk well worth taking because there is absolutely nothing that Roger Partridge has offered (or FIRE or the Heterodox Academy or any conservative politician anywhere in the anglosphere other than Trump) that will fix our skewed, speech-inhibiting, conservative academic shunning, DEI-loving universities. But threaten to take away taxpayer monies if unis don’t stop the blatant discrimination, the DEI hiring and student recruitment, the antisemitism and the like and that threat, says Roger, “raises serious constitutional concerns”. Why? Trump may win in court. He may not. Where are the concerns? Remember, the Obama administration regularly told universities what to do. The difference was they were Left-wing commands the universities were only too happy to abide by. Roger characterises this as “singling out ideological opponents for retaliation”, tells readers Trump’s “methods resemble those of authoritarian regimes internationally” and offers no remotely effective way forward. Now at the risk of repeating myself, I think it’s laughable to categorising what Team Trump is doing with the universities as resembling the actions of authoritarian regimes around the world. That said, I am grateful Roger ditched the comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini and this time only invoked Hungary’s Viktor Orban – who keeps winning big majorities in fully fair democratic elections against the clear wishes of the EU elites.
I’ll say it one last time. I know today’s Anglosphere universities. I doubt that even what Trump is doing will have much of an effect on these top-to-bottom bastions of progressive orthodoxy that deep-down dislike open debate and the existence on campus of more than a sprinkling of conservative academics. But by God I like the fact that Trump is trying. Roger prefers “insisting” they do better. A near lifetime working in unis has me guffawing at the naïveté. No sane person remotely believes there is any danger of a conservative government dominating our anglosphere universities. And why would any Left-wing government bother to ‘dominate’ universities, to tell them to do what they already so willing do of their own accord? I’m afraid it’s just more TDS at work.
Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University.This article was first published HERE
9 comments:
I did a law degree in the 80s, and then students were expected to think for themselves. I remember a Malaysian student asking a lecturer for her opinion on a question of family law policy. The lecturer replied, "I'm not a student on this course. What's your opinion?"
Now things have completely changed and universities are just producing political clones, especially on any topic relating to Maori. At the same time, lecturers have been becoming less and less connected with the real world. They claim to teach things that they are incapable of doing themselves.
The one exception to these comments is student politics, which has always been crazy. All intellectual rigor was left aside and replaced with childish, woke generalizations. In my day, leaders of student politics grew up when they got real jobs. Today, rather than growing up, those puerile politicians have become the leaders of the Labour Party.
Thank you for writing this. What you say about the universities is correct.
Ferguson is right that there’s no hope of change from within. I’d add that there’s some safety in that. You don’t want to see the current, looney elite in our universities come out, in a year or so, ‘born-again’, professing themselves suddenly to be ‘scholars’ rather than activists. Their lack of scholarly integrity makes them unfit. Harvard might retain enough scholarly talent to be able to return to its traditionally high standards. But New Zealand is going to have a harder road because the looney elite here has driven out too much of the talent. The scholars all pooled together might leave NZ one or two real universities. Certainly not 8.
We all wish these institutions could "heal themselves". However, when ideology becomes too entrenched and different camps refuse to have a debate on issues, a Trump- like figure is needed. That is my take on the situation. The US is not Trump they are a country of 350 million people. They voted for him in a democratic election. I agree he is doing a great job in the first 100 days. Anybody who watches alternative media can see that.
We need someone like that here. Lack of action on critical issues like our present race one will only make our country poorer. New Zealand and the US were drifting down the wrong path. The US are correcting the situation, we are not. Luxon leaves any unpleasant situation to his junior lackeys. Trump fronts up. Luxon is missing when anything important is being debated. Trump fronts up. It's called leadership.
I'm with you james.
I am with Dr. James Allan AND Janine.
So am I, Anon 8:38 AM I have just been encouraged by listening to Thomas Sowell's talk on Pope Leo , rejecting LGBTQ ideology. I am not Catholic but this talk and James' article has given me hope for the Western World not self destructing with Progressivism nonsense. This depends on people taking stands , like Trump and the Pope that literally are life threatening.
I've been reading Rogers anti-trump pieces too and wondering what is going through his head...thankyou for calling it out. It's as though Roger hasn't woken up to the fact that Global MSM that's broken, not just NZ's. He keeps talking as though he is taking his cues from the BBC/ Stuff.
Commentators are free to consider Trump has done a great job in his first hundred days. But it seems to me there is more than a little confirmation bias in that opinion. Doing a great job? Yeah right! In no particular order, a great job of tanking America's economy, previously the envy of the world. A great job of destroying American's wealth, in both the stock and bond markets. A great job of destroying the international rules-based trading order that brought unparallelled prosperity to America and the world. A great job of undermining the security of the Western world that American diplomacy had spent eighty years building after WW2. A great job of attacking the Constitution of his own country that is carefully designed to combat the very despotism he is promoting. A great job of destroying the trust and confidence the rest of the world used to have in the integrity of the United States. And of course, the great job he is doing using the Presidency to enrich himself and his family at the expense of the American taxpayer.
It's a pity so many of those executive orders he rushed out in the first hundred days have been overturned by the Courts because they are illegal. It's a pity Elon Musk has been forced off stage because of his excesses. It's a pity Trump's cabinet doesn't have an original idea amongst them, except to think up new and ingenious ways of kissing his arse (his words not mine).
Oh yes. He's going a great job all right. Pity it's the wrong job.
I always enjoy debating Jim. But in this case, he's not so much engaging with my argument as performing a ventriloquist act with a strawman.
He reduces my call to “insist on neutrality” to little more than hand-waving – as if I’m proposing to restore viewpoint diversity by writing a politely indignant letter to The Times. That’s not just a misreading. It’s a distortion that lets him duck the real debate.
In fact, I explicitly support robust, constitutionally grounded tools to counter the politicisation of universities. That includes enforcing civil rights law through the courts when universities discriminate – including the use of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard to challenge race-based admissions and hiring. It includes withholding public funding from institutions that violate clearly defined, viewpoint-neutral legal standards – not by ideological fiat, but through lawful process. It includes challenging tax-exempt status in cases that meet the Bob Jones test for sustained, proven unlawful discrimination.
And yes, it includes building alternative institutions and encouraging donor and alumni pressure.
What I oppose is not pressure – it’s overreach. I object to the executive branch dictating university governance, hiring, and disciplinary procedures by decree, especially at private institutions. When the Department of Education issues a “Dear Colleague” letter demanding ideological conformity under threat of defunding, we’ve left the realm of neutral enforcement and entered the territory of state-imposed orthodoxy.
Ferguson sees the same danger: that an overaggressive approach could backfire, turning genuine offenders into constitutional martyrs. That doesn’t mean we do nothing. It means we do it right – with precision, legality, and principle.
Yes, universities are a mess. I’ve said so. But if conservatives adopt the methods they once condemned – executive overreach, partisan enforcement, punishment without due process – they will hollow out the very values they claim to uphold: limited government, institutional pluralism, and the rule of law.
That’s the core of my argument. I want universities reformed. I just don’t want to become the thing we’re trying to fix.
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