Salmond is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated public intellectuals. She was writing in Newsroom on 18 November – the same day legislation requiring universities to protect open debate and remain “institutionally neutral” received royal assent. Salmond opposes the reform. For her, neutrality is a fiction: there is no common ground – only competing worldviews.
Salmond’s argument is stark: what she calls “universal reason” – the idea that claims can be judged using common standards of evidence and logic – does not exist. Different cultures, she says, see the world through incompatible lenses – all with their own “ways of knowing.” And anyone who claims otherwise is exhibiting closed-minded arrogance masquerading as openness.
Salmond’s is an attractive position. It sounds inclusive, modest and humane. It invokes cultural openness and rejects intellectual arrogance. But it is also profoundly wrong. And when such ideas gain institutional power, the consequences are serious – as New Zealand’s universities have demonstrated.
How New Zealand’s universities drifted from openness
The ideas Salmond champions – that knowledge is inseparable from identity, that marginalised perspectives have privileged access to truth, and that neutrality is oppressive – have reshaped Western universities over the past three decades.
Starting in American universities during the 1990s and 2000s, the ideas became institutionalised practices. Curricula shifted toward “lived experience,” diversity statements became hiring prerequisites, and an expanding bureaucracy began policing speech. What began as argument became policy. And what became policy soon shaped careers.
The shift accelerated after 2020. Following George Floyd’s death, DEI bureaucracies expanded across many American campuses, enforcing new orthodoxies on race, gender, and colonialism.
The bubble burst in late 2023. After Hamas’s October 7 attack, Harvard President Claudine Gay’s legalistic congressional testimony about students’ calls for genocide drew bipartisan condemnation. When Gay resigned on 2 January 2024, the costs of institutional capture had become undeniable.
By May, Harvard and Stanford adopted institutional neutrality policies based on the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report. This holds that a university’s mission is knowledge, not political advocacy. Over 100 institutions followed their lead.
Trump’s election initially appeared to reinforce this voluntary reform movement. But, as I argued in Quadrant earlier this year, his administration simply replaced one form of institutional capture with another.
Trump aside, New Zealand’s experience has followed a similar pattern – perhaps without the furore, but with the same logic. In 2018, Massey University Vice-Chancellor Jan Thomas cancelled a student event featuring former National leader Don Brash. In leaked emails, Thomas called Brash’s views “dangerously close to hate speech.” In 2019, AUT cancelled a Tiananmen Square commemoration following a complaint from the Chinese Vice-Consul-General.
But the consequences run deeper than deplatformed speakers. In 2021, the Royal Society investigated University of Auckland academics over a letter to The Listener defending science against being treated as “just another way of knowing,” retreating only after international backlash.
In 2025, Auckland University made courses including Te Ao Māori compulsory for all first-year students. Staff and students objected that the courses were politically loaded and irrelevant to their disciplines. After one semester, the Senate recommended that they be made voluntary, but the courses remain compulsory for all professional degrees.
The New Zealand Initiative’s 2024 report Unpopular Opinions shows how pervasive the chill has become. Half of academic respondents felt unfree to discuss colonialism; more than forty percent felt unable to question accepted views on sex and gender. At the University of Auckland, only 49 percent of staff agreed they could “respectfully voice their views without fear of any negative impact.”
As one respondent put it: “The strategy for many academics is to voice no position unless it is conformist.” When this becomes normal, a university stops being a place where arguments are tested – and becomes a place where they are managed.
New Zealand’s legislative response
The National-led coalition government responded with legislation. Section 267 of the Education and Training Act 2020 already guaranteed individual academics “the freedom… to question, and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions.”
However, universities had been ignoring these obligations. The Education and Training Amendment Act 2025 (No. 2) tries to address this gap between law and practice. Passed in November 2025, it requires university councils to adopt explicit freedom-of-expression statements (s 281A), establish complaints procedures for breaches of academic freedom (s 281B), and, crucially, to refrain from taking institutional positions “on matters that do not directly concern their role or functions” (s 281A(2)(d)). In other words, the Act supplements the existing protections in section 267 by adding institutional neutrality and procedural accountability.
In legislating for institutional neutrality, New Zealand has chosen a middle path between voluntary reform – which has proved toothless – and the risk of executive overreach.
Just how effective this prohibition will prove remains to be tested – the proviso allowing positions on matters that “directly concern their role or functions” leaves considerable room for interpretation. But the provision sends a clear signal: universities are to be forums for contested ideas, not advocates for them.
The debate surrounding the Act’s passage was fierce. The Free Speech Union welcomed the Act’s requirements for institutional neutrality and explicit protection for dissenting scholars.
Salmond disagreed. In her Newsroom column, she argued that these reforms rested on a narrow, culturally specific idea of “universal reason” and risked suppressing alternative ways of knowing. Her critique gave philosophical voice to the resistance, casting the defence of academic freedom itself as an attempt to impose a dominant worldview.
What Salmond is really arguing
Salmond’s case rests on three explicit claims.
First, she denies there is any such thing as universal reason. As she puts it, “there is no such thing as a single ‘universal reason’ to be accepted into education or society.” From this perspective, every culture views the world through its own irreconcilable lens, rendering it impossible to establish shared standards for evaluating knowledge.
Second, she argues that appeals to neutrality mask the dominance of a particular worldview. “Universal reason,” she writes, “suggests there is only one right way to think.” What looks like a shared method of inquiry is, she argues, an attempt to impose a culturally specific way of knowing.
Third, she claims that defenders of academic freedom apply free speech selectively. The FSU and “fellow travellers,” she writes, show a “fixed belief in the virtue of their own convictions,” while claiming to defend open inquiry. This, she suggests, forecloses the very humility they demand of others.
Her position draws on three strands of contemporary philosophy.
The first is critical theory, developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. Thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that Enlightenment reason had been corrupted into a tool of domination. The second is postmodernism, associated with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, which goes further, claiming there are no neutral, universal standards – only competing cultural discourses.
The third strand is standpoint epistemology, developed by feminist theorists such as Sandra Harding and Patricia Hill Collins. They claim that marginalised groups have privileged access to truth through lived experience, and that their knowledge cannot be grasped by outsiders.
Salmond blends all three. From critical theory, she inherits the suspicion that free speech is domination. From postmodernism, the denial of shared standards. From standpoint epistemology, the idea that cultural perspectives produce truths inaccessible to outsiders.
The outcome of these strands is Salmond condemning closed minds while insisting that universities adopt her epistemological framework as orthodoxy. The irony is perfect: she demands intellectual openness through philosophical closure.
But there is a more fundamental problem with these ideas. And it is not that they are ironic. It is that they collapse when applied.
Why Salmond’s epistemology collapses
When defenders of academic freedom invoke what Salmond calls “universal reason,” they are not claiming a single worldview holds across all cultures. They are defending shared standards of evidence and argument – including the scientific method – that allow any culture to test its claims and learn from others.
When physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a postmodernist journal in 1996 with a paper of deliberate nonsense, he demonstrated that without such standards, discourse cannot distinguish sense from gibberish. The point is easiest to see through everyday examples.
Consider aircraft maintenance. A jet engine obeys the same physical laws regardless of who designed it or services it. When engineers inspect a turbine blade, they are not practising a “Western way of knowing.” They are applying universal principles of physics and materials science.
The same applies in medicine. Cardiologists reading an ECG are not relying on a cultural worldview. They are interpreting electrical signals produced by the human heart – signals which behave the same in Oslo, Lagos or Wellington. The cultural meaning of illness varies, but the biochemistry does not.
In engineering, bridges remain standing due to their tensile strength and effective load distribution, not due to any cosmological belief.
In law, courts evaluate evidence according to standards of logic and credibility, as justice requires stable criteria.
None of this denies cultural insight. It simply shows that the world pushes back. Some claims can be tested. Some explanations outperform others. The tools we use to discover those differences – reason, evidence, criticism – are not cultural impositions. They are the means by which cultures exchange knowledge and learn from one another.
This is why Salmond’s postmodern relativism collapses under its own weight. If all knowledge is culturally bounded, then her argument has no authority outside her cultural frame. If reasoning is merely constructed, then her invitation to “openness” offers no reason to accept it. And if disagreement is arrogance, she is doing what she condemns.
Salmond attempts to soften her position by affirming that “knowledge claims should be based on rigorous research and tested against evidence by those with relevant expertise.”
This sounds reasonable. But it contradicts her central claim that no shared standards for evaluating knowledge exist. Terms like “rigorous,” “evidence,” and “expertise” presuppose precisely the universal criteria she rejects. Her argument relies on the very evaluative framework it denies. If evidence and rigour matter, then there are shared standards. And if there are shared standards, her critique of “universal reason” collapses.
These contradictions might be harmless in a philosophy seminar. But when they shape university governance, the consequences are real.
Consider again Auckland University’s now partially abandoned compulsory course. If all frameworks are equally valid “ways of knowing,” on what grounds could one be mandated over others?
The claimed answer draws on standpoint epistemology. Because Western knowledge has historically dominated, proponents argue that mandating indigenous perspectives is not imposing a worldview but correcting an imbalance. Marginalised ways of knowing deserve institutional priority precisely because they have been marginalised.
But this deepens the contradiction. Claims about historical injustice and the need for correction are themselves knowledge claims. They require the very evaluative standards – evidence, argument, shared criteria – that Salmond’s framework denies to critics. The justification for compulsion relies on tools the framework has delegitimised.
The result is a framework that disarms resistance while enabling imposition. Critics who appeal to shared standards are dismissed as culturally arrogant. Yet those same standards are quietly invoked to mandate a particular worldview.
Salmond’s epistemology does not restrain institutional power. It immunises it from challenge.
This matters far beyond campus. A society relies on its universities for the knowledge that informs public decisions: how we teach children, treat illness, build bridges, assess risk, or respond to crises.
When universities no longer believe in shared standards of evidence and argument, the boundary between expertise and ideology collapses. Citizens lose any reliable way to judge competing claims. Organisations lose the capacity to correct error. Governments lose trustworthy sources of analysis.
What disappears is not just academic freedom, but the public’s ability to know anything with confidence.
The open university: a moral duty
Academic freedom is not a courtesy extended to scholars. It is a duty the institution owes to society. It is the principle that allows universities to function as critics and consciences. Without it, scholarship becomes performance.
Salmond’s critique is not merely a philosophical mistake. It is an invitation to intellectual retreat. The result would be a university where cultural narratives cannot be questioned, scientific claims cannot be challenged, and academic inquiry becomes a performance of approved truths. This is not openness. It is conformity.
An open-minded university requires three commitments. First, academic freedom – the right of scholars to question and test received wisdom. Second, institutional neutrality – the refusal of universities to declare official truths on contested matters. Third, shared standards of evidence and argument – a method, not a worldview, that allows cultures to learn from one another.
What makes universities open is not agreement on conclusions but commitment to these shared standards – the willingness to test any claim, from any tradition, against evidence and argument.
Salmond calls for open minds. On this point she is right. But an open mind is not one that refuses to evaluate claims. It is one that is willing to have its own claims evaluated. It is not one that protects ideas from criticism, but one that welcomes criticism as the price of progress.
If we want universities capable of genuine openness, we must defend the principles that make openness possible. Without them, we may have polite campuses, harmonious campuses, even orderly campuses. But they will no longer be open.
And a closed university cannot teach anyone to think.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was sourced HERE
Salmond’s is an attractive position. It sounds inclusive, modest and humane. It invokes cultural openness and rejects intellectual arrogance. But it is also profoundly wrong. And when such ideas gain institutional power, the consequences are serious – as New Zealand’s universities have demonstrated.
How New Zealand’s universities drifted from openness
The ideas Salmond champions – that knowledge is inseparable from identity, that marginalised perspectives have privileged access to truth, and that neutrality is oppressive – have reshaped Western universities over the past three decades.
Starting in American universities during the 1990s and 2000s, the ideas became institutionalised practices. Curricula shifted toward “lived experience,” diversity statements became hiring prerequisites, and an expanding bureaucracy began policing speech. What began as argument became policy. And what became policy soon shaped careers.
The shift accelerated after 2020. Following George Floyd’s death, DEI bureaucracies expanded across many American campuses, enforcing new orthodoxies on race, gender, and colonialism.
The bubble burst in late 2023. After Hamas’s October 7 attack, Harvard President Claudine Gay’s legalistic congressional testimony about students’ calls for genocide drew bipartisan condemnation. When Gay resigned on 2 January 2024, the costs of institutional capture had become undeniable.
By May, Harvard and Stanford adopted institutional neutrality policies based on the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report. This holds that a university’s mission is knowledge, not political advocacy. Over 100 institutions followed their lead.
Trump’s election initially appeared to reinforce this voluntary reform movement. But, as I argued in Quadrant earlier this year, his administration simply replaced one form of institutional capture with another.
Trump aside, New Zealand’s experience has followed a similar pattern – perhaps without the furore, but with the same logic. In 2018, Massey University Vice-Chancellor Jan Thomas cancelled a student event featuring former National leader Don Brash. In leaked emails, Thomas called Brash’s views “dangerously close to hate speech.” In 2019, AUT cancelled a Tiananmen Square commemoration following a complaint from the Chinese Vice-Consul-General.
But the consequences run deeper than deplatformed speakers. In 2021, the Royal Society investigated University of Auckland academics over a letter to The Listener defending science against being treated as “just another way of knowing,” retreating only after international backlash.
In 2025, Auckland University made courses including Te Ao Māori compulsory for all first-year students. Staff and students objected that the courses were politically loaded and irrelevant to their disciplines. After one semester, the Senate recommended that they be made voluntary, but the courses remain compulsory for all professional degrees.
The New Zealand Initiative’s 2024 report Unpopular Opinions shows how pervasive the chill has become. Half of academic respondents felt unfree to discuss colonialism; more than forty percent felt unable to question accepted views on sex and gender. At the University of Auckland, only 49 percent of staff agreed they could “respectfully voice their views without fear of any negative impact.”
As one respondent put it: “The strategy for many academics is to voice no position unless it is conformist.” When this becomes normal, a university stops being a place where arguments are tested – and becomes a place where they are managed.
New Zealand’s legislative response
The National-led coalition government responded with legislation. Section 267 of the Education and Training Act 2020 already guaranteed individual academics “the freedom… to question, and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions.”
However, universities had been ignoring these obligations. The Education and Training Amendment Act 2025 (No. 2) tries to address this gap between law and practice. Passed in November 2025, it requires university councils to adopt explicit freedom-of-expression statements (s 281A), establish complaints procedures for breaches of academic freedom (s 281B), and, crucially, to refrain from taking institutional positions “on matters that do not directly concern their role or functions” (s 281A(2)(d)). In other words, the Act supplements the existing protections in section 267 by adding institutional neutrality and procedural accountability.
In legislating for institutional neutrality, New Zealand has chosen a middle path between voluntary reform – which has proved toothless – and the risk of executive overreach.
Just how effective this prohibition will prove remains to be tested – the proviso allowing positions on matters that “directly concern their role or functions” leaves considerable room for interpretation. But the provision sends a clear signal: universities are to be forums for contested ideas, not advocates for them.
The debate surrounding the Act’s passage was fierce. The Free Speech Union welcomed the Act’s requirements for institutional neutrality and explicit protection for dissenting scholars.
Salmond disagreed. In her Newsroom column, she argued that these reforms rested on a narrow, culturally specific idea of “universal reason” and risked suppressing alternative ways of knowing. Her critique gave philosophical voice to the resistance, casting the defence of academic freedom itself as an attempt to impose a dominant worldview.
What Salmond is really arguing
Salmond’s case rests on three explicit claims.
First, she denies there is any such thing as universal reason. As she puts it, “there is no such thing as a single ‘universal reason’ to be accepted into education or society.” From this perspective, every culture views the world through its own irreconcilable lens, rendering it impossible to establish shared standards for evaluating knowledge.
Second, she argues that appeals to neutrality mask the dominance of a particular worldview. “Universal reason,” she writes, “suggests there is only one right way to think.” What looks like a shared method of inquiry is, she argues, an attempt to impose a culturally specific way of knowing.
Third, she claims that defenders of academic freedom apply free speech selectively. The FSU and “fellow travellers,” she writes, show a “fixed belief in the virtue of their own convictions,” while claiming to defend open inquiry. This, she suggests, forecloses the very humility they demand of others.
Her position draws on three strands of contemporary philosophy.
The first is critical theory, developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. Thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that Enlightenment reason had been corrupted into a tool of domination. The second is postmodernism, associated with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, which goes further, claiming there are no neutral, universal standards – only competing cultural discourses.
The third strand is standpoint epistemology, developed by feminist theorists such as Sandra Harding and Patricia Hill Collins. They claim that marginalised groups have privileged access to truth through lived experience, and that their knowledge cannot be grasped by outsiders.
Salmond blends all three. From critical theory, she inherits the suspicion that free speech is domination. From postmodernism, the denial of shared standards. From standpoint epistemology, the idea that cultural perspectives produce truths inaccessible to outsiders.
The outcome of these strands is Salmond condemning closed minds while insisting that universities adopt her epistemological framework as orthodoxy. The irony is perfect: she demands intellectual openness through philosophical closure.
But there is a more fundamental problem with these ideas. And it is not that they are ironic. It is that they collapse when applied.
Why Salmond’s epistemology collapses
When defenders of academic freedom invoke what Salmond calls “universal reason,” they are not claiming a single worldview holds across all cultures. They are defending shared standards of evidence and argument – including the scientific method – that allow any culture to test its claims and learn from others.
When physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a postmodernist journal in 1996 with a paper of deliberate nonsense, he demonstrated that without such standards, discourse cannot distinguish sense from gibberish. The point is easiest to see through everyday examples.
Consider aircraft maintenance. A jet engine obeys the same physical laws regardless of who designed it or services it. When engineers inspect a turbine blade, they are not practising a “Western way of knowing.” They are applying universal principles of physics and materials science.
The same applies in medicine. Cardiologists reading an ECG are not relying on a cultural worldview. They are interpreting electrical signals produced by the human heart – signals which behave the same in Oslo, Lagos or Wellington. The cultural meaning of illness varies, but the biochemistry does not.
In engineering, bridges remain standing due to their tensile strength and effective load distribution, not due to any cosmological belief.
In law, courts evaluate evidence according to standards of logic and credibility, as justice requires stable criteria.
None of this denies cultural insight. It simply shows that the world pushes back. Some claims can be tested. Some explanations outperform others. The tools we use to discover those differences – reason, evidence, criticism – are not cultural impositions. They are the means by which cultures exchange knowledge and learn from one another.
This is why Salmond’s postmodern relativism collapses under its own weight. If all knowledge is culturally bounded, then her argument has no authority outside her cultural frame. If reasoning is merely constructed, then her invitation to “openness” offers no reason to accept it. And if disagreement is arrogance, she is doing what she condemns.
Salmond attempts to soften her position by affirming that “knowledge claims should be based on rigorous research and tested against evidence by those with relevant expertise.”
This sounds reasonable. But it contradicts her central claim that no shared standards for evaluating knowledge exist. Terms like “rigorous,” “evidence,” and “expertise” presuppose precisely the universal criteria she rejects. Her argument relies on the very evaluative framework it denies. If evidence and rigour matter, then there are shared standards. And if there are shared standards, her critique of “universal reason” collapses.
These contradictions might be harmless in a philosophy seminar. But when they shape university governance, the consequences are real.
Consider again Auckland University’s now partially abandoned compulsory course. If all frameworks are equally valid “ways of knowing,” on what grounds could one be mandated over others?
The claimed answer draws on standpoint epistemology. Because Western knowledge has historically dominated, proponents argue that mandating indigenous perspectives is not imposing a worldview but correcting an imbalance. Marginalised ways of knowing deserve institutional priority precisely because they have been marginalised.
But this deepens the contradiction. Claims about historical injustice and the need for correction are themselves knowledge claims. They require the very evaluative standards – evidence, argument, shared criteria – that Salmond’s framework denies to critics. The justification for compulsion relies on tools the framework has delegitimised.
The result is a framework that disarms resistance while enabling imposition. Critics who appeal to shared standards are dismissed as culturally arrogant. Yet those same standards are quietly invoked to mandate a particular worldview.
Salmond’s epistemology does not restrain institutional power. It immunises it from challenge.
This matters far beyond campus. A society relies on its universities for the knowledge that informs public decisions: how we teach children, treat illness, build bridges, assess risk, or respond to crises.
When universities no longer believe in shared standards of evidence and argument, the boundary between expertise and ideology collapses. Citizens lose any reliable way to judge competing claims. Organisations lose the capacity to correct error. Governments lose trustworthy sources of analysis.
What disappears is not just academic freedom, but the public’s ability to know anything with confidence.
The open university: a moral duty
Academic freedom is not a courtesy extended to scholars. It is a duty the institution owes to society. It is the principle that allows universities to function as critics and consciences. Without it, scholarship becomes performance.
Salmond’s critique is not merely a philosophical mistake. It is an invitation to intellectual retreat. The result would be a university where cultural narratives cannot be questioned, scientific claims cannot be challenged, and academic inquiry becomes a performance of approved truths. This is not openness. It is conformity.
An open-minded university requires three commitments. First, academic freedom – the right of scholars to question and test received wisdom. Second, institutional neutrality – the refusal of universities to declare official truths on contested matters. Third, shared standards of evidence and argument – a method, not a worldview, that allows cultures to learn from one another.
What makes universities open is not agreement on conclusions but commitment to these shared standards – the willingness to test any claim, from any tradition, against evidence and argument.
Salmond calls for open minds. On this point she is right. But an open mind is not one that refuses to evaluate claims. It is one that is willing to have its own claims evaluated. It is not one that protects ideas from criticism, but one that welcomes criticism as the price of progress.
If we want universities capable of genuine openness, we must defend the principles that make openness possible. Without them, we may have polite campuses, harmonious campuses, even orderly campuses. But they will no longer be open.
And a closed university cannot teach anyone to think.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was sourced HERE
15 comments:
The problem: Prof Salmond is entitled to her opinion. But no one else is - they are wrong and invariably racist and often cancelled if they challenge ideas. An arrogant position.
This is how woke cultural marxists operate (the academy being a key area of this doctrine as per CRT). Behind the esoteric language and convoluted arguments, they have a political agenda to indoctrinate and control a nation' s development.
Basically they are very dangerous enemies of democracy - and unpleasant when crossed.
Has Professor Salmond trained PhD students who have gone on to become leading Anthropologists? Maybe. Interesting that Salmond could study and write about Maori and Pacific cultures. But Identity Politics, which of course leads to intellectually uninteresting research (neither engaging with nor advancing important debates) and which Salmond helped to foster, means that today only Maori can study Maori and Pasifika can study Pasifika. Salmond would never have been appointed to an academic job if she was an applicant today. A sad relection on Academia.
I’m 100% positive that Anne Salmond could be replaced by AI and not be missed. AI could mimic her idiocy in all areas and deliver far more witty reparte in the process. The problem is that this woke retard Continues to draw air time via our equally stupid main stream media.
It’s sad that no one in our captured universities has yet grown a pair of big boy balls to stand up and protest against all this BS.
Funny how none of us have, and that platforms like this are one of the few remaining places where common sense is expressed freely.
Salmond is the problem, not the solution.
The problem with the universal reasoning style is that it is based on the evaluation of empirical data. It involves some higher-order cognitive processes that are conspicuous by their absence among many social pseudoscientists. Universities have become havens for the intellectually challenged.
I (we?) believe that Salmond has the right to be right in her mind while being wrong in mine (ours?). Where we probably differ is that she does not have the right to impose her view upon others while trying to deny them the right to question or critique that view. I also wish that she were not in a position to influence the young minds as she clearly tries to do but what do I know after 75 years of lived experience that screams when people like Salmond espouse their (IMHO) warped opinions.
To 7:40am: Many people in the universities in humanities and social sciences who did stand up against this have by now been removed from the universities. Hostile VCs and PVCs and Provosts and Deans and the crazy colleagues in captured disciplinary areas all have nothing to gain and everything to loose if their house of cards collapses. Over recent years they have been getting rid of people they see as dangerous to them and their games.
New Zealand’s problem isn’t just a few zealous professors lecturing the country about “ways of knowing.”
It’s the entire academic-bureaucratic ecosystem they’ve managed to populate — a network of high-table grandees, policy whisperers, media anointers, and consultancy entrepreneurs who move in synchrony like a murmuration of starlings, except with more funding applications.
For years, parents have been told they have no right to question what their children are taught — whether it’s the content, the ideology, or the mandatory cultural catechisms disguised as “national identity.”
Ordinary citizens, meanwhile, find themselves overridden by panels, advisory groups, diversity officers, and ministries staffed with the same small circle of credentialed insiders. These are the people who insist they’re protecting pluralism while using institutional power to narrow the range of acceptable thought.
And this isn’t accidental. It’s structural. Once you replace shared standards of evidence with “lived experience,” and once you treat epistemology as a competitive sport between identity groups, every institution becomes a stage for the same performance.
Universities produce the language, bureaucracies enforce it, media launder it, and corporate HR departments rubber-stamp it. The effect is a country governed not by elected representatives or public argument, but by a caste of interpretive priests — all reading from the same script.
Economist and social philosopher Thomas Sowell — the anti-DEI oracle who was dismantling these ideas decades before they had an acronym saw this coming decades ago.
And he wasn’t just warning – he was diagnosing.
The pattern is thus, Sowell says.
‘’when a society outsources moral judgment to self-appointed elites, the elites don’t relinquish power. They extend it. They expand contradictions, invent crises, and redefine disagreement as harm.”
In Sowell’s world, ideology always triumphs over evidence — not because evidence is lacking, but because evidence threatens them.
It is a kind of intellectual gentrification: whole neighbourhoods of thought knocked down and rebuilt into uniform high-density doctrine blocks, complete with heritage-style façades to reassure you that nothing has really changed. Inside, though, everything is compulsory — the worldview, the vocabulary, the reverence. Woe betide anyone who suggests the plumbing is leaking.
So what’s the solution? It starts with stripping institutions of their assumed moral authority. A university should not tell the country what to think; it should teach people how to think. Government departments should administer services, not curate national virtue. Media outlets should report, not sermonise.
And schools should be answerable to parents, not to ideological subcontractors.
All of that requires one foundational move: a return to shared standards of reasoning. Not Western reasoning. Not cultural reasoning. Just reason — the ancient, stubborn, universal method that lets us distinguish truth from fashion and argument from assertion.
Because without it, we’re not citizens.
We’re passengers on an aircraft maintained by people who think physics is a colonial construct.
And that’s when we must stop worrying about institutional capture and start worrying about whether the wings are still attached.
—PB
Am reading this disagreement politically, primarily as a culture wars issue. No special insight into Dame Anne's thinking, but it's common for grand themes, like 'universal reason' and 'Western Civilisation' to be deployed as a sort of code for 'none of that woke, DEI or (especially) Maori stuff'. ACT has been going for that vote, and also leading the push for the new academic freedom rules to bind universities. Dame Anne and other academics were targetted by memes, and the FSU endorsed ACT's right to criticise academics, and at least two of their Board members (Chair Stephen Franks, and Ani O'Brien) shared the memes on X in their personal capacities. It is hardly original to opine that the FSU is a right-wing pressure group, hostile to progressive academics. The ACT links are also clear (cf TPU - FSU co-founder Jordan Williams) without any wittering about the Atlas Network. So were I Dame Anne, I would read the carry-on about universal values and Western Civilisation as part of this kind of ACT / FSU culture war. Dame Anne's initial ripose was to former FSU CEO Jonathan Ayling, who's setting up Charter School which highlights traditional western values.
Anon@8.26
What’s intriguing in your final sentence is the possibility that Dame Anne should naturally view Ayling’s charter-school project as a threat.
His stated principles — open inquiry, contestability, humility before truth — aren’t incompatible with pluralism, and they don’t preclude teaching Māori history or culture well.
The only reason for alarm is if charter schools represent something more fundamental: a genuine alternative to the tightly-managed curriculum orthodoxy the academic high-table has spent decades entrenching.
In that ecosystem, Treaty doctrine isn’t just one framework among many — it has become the governing lens through which all knowledge is expected to pass.
Charter schools disrupt that. They create space where history can be taught historically rather than theologically; where the Enlightenment isn’t treated as an ideological contaminant; where Māori perspectives can be taught robustly without being elevated into a compulsory epistemology. In other words, they break the wheel — the wheel of centralised curricular control.
If that is what unsettles Dame Anne, then it could be read that her quarrel is not with Ayling’s principles, but with intellectual pluralism itself.
—PB
For PB Thanks for the thoughtful response. I can't speak for Dame Anne, but what I was getting at overall was the gap between stated principles and actual behaviour. As I said, invocations of Western Civilisation could be code for the perceived enemies of Western Civilisation, especially as regards Maori and the Treaty. This may not true either of Ayling's proposed school or of Dame Anne's perception of it. But insofar as the FSU lines up with ACT, then it's participating in the Party's race-baiting. For example, the FSU sent one of their staff to Auckland Uni's campus to interview students about what they called the 'Treaty Courses' (the courses were not all about the Treaty); at the same time, ACT's tertiary ed spokesperson Dr Parmar was criticising the new courses in every venue open to her as an expensive waste of money and an offence to overseas students.
Anon at 4.12.
Thanks — and you’re right that none can speak for Dame Anne. But we don’t need to.
She’s told us what she believes in her riposte to Ayling, and that piece is remarkably revealing once you strip away the soft language.
Salmond doesn’t simply disagree with Ayling’s project; she defines his entire approach — the push for knowledge-rich curricula, for universals over identities, for schools that emphasise shared civic foundations — as a threat to what she calls “relational” or “place-based” authority.
In other words: a direct challenge to the framework of Treaty-derived cultural governance that has become embedded in education policy for too long.
Two lines in particular reveal the core of her argument.
First, she dismisses Ayling’s emphasis on universal civic principles as “a return to monocultural notions of knowledge,” framing the very idea of a common curriculum as inherently suspect.
Second, she describes the alternative — the model currently dominant in education policy — as one in which “relationships, whakapapa and place” must guide authority and learning.
Those aren’t incidental phrases.
They tell you exactly why charter schools of the Ayling type would trouble her.
They represent a break from the framework Salmond sees as foundational: a system where education is organised through a Treaty-derived cultural lens, not universalist principles.
Clearly, Salmond fears the possibility that parallel institutions might demonstrate that you can teach NZ history, civics, and Treaty topics through a broad, knowledge-rich curriculum — without the existing orthodoxy as the compulsory frame.
That’s an interpretation, yes — but one grounded entirely in what she wrote.
—PB
PB - I think this bit from Dame Anne's piece illustrates what I'm getting at: In supporting 'David Seymour’s decision to remove a reference to Te Tiriti o Waitangi from the Education and Training Act, Ayling goes on to argue for “an Enlightenment approach to education grounded in universal reason.”' a That is, the argument in favour of 'universal reason' is, in practice, a way of decentring the Treaty. One may well wish to decentre the Treaty, but in evoking 'universal reason', you're using what looks like an overall principle to achieve a specific political end . Playing partisan culture-wars politics while affecting not to. I can't judge if this is what Ayling will do in setting up his school, but it's certainly what ACT is about.
Anon at 10.20pm
The key issue is what “centring” or “decentring” the Treaty actually means in practice.
If we’re talking politics: yes, ACT is explicitly arguing for a different constitutional direction.
That’s an ideological project — just as Dame Anne’s view of the Treaty as a perpetual organising principle is an ideological project. No surprises on either side.
But when it comes to education, the picture shifts.
Ayling’s view, as he sets it out, is that a curriculum grounded in universal knowledge and clear reasoning avoids politicising the classroom, rather than smuggling politics into it.
Removing statutory Treaty clauses from the Education and Training Act doesn’t erase the Treaty from the curriculum; it simply stops a particular, currently dominant interpretive framework from being embedded as compulsory doctrine.
New Zealand history, including the Treaty, will still be taught — and should be — without requiring every subject to revolve around one contemporary reading of it.
That’s a practical, pedagogical concern about clarity and scope, not a partisan attempt to “decentre” the Treaty for its own sake.
In other words:
Ayling is trying to remove politics from education; ACT is trying to remove ambiguity from legislation; Dame Anne reads both as attacks on a political project she feels duty-bound to defend.
That’s the real disagreement — not over whether the Treaty exists, but whether one interpretive orthodoxy should be welded onto the entire education system indefinitely.
Without doubt most parents will agree that at some point the curriculum needs to teach children something other than how to spell “principles of the Treaty” in 72-point bold.
— PB
Nah, don't agree that ACT is trying to remove ambiguity from legislation. They, like NZF, perceive a voter base that is easily worried by the impact of the Treaty in education. and are trying to assure them that Maori will have their influence curtailed and the country brought bac'k to what it was like in the 50s and 60s, when people didn't go in for this 'Aotearoa' nonsense, ha! My experience of Ayling suggests that he'd like his own kind of politics in the ascendant. He's anything but apolitical, so it'll be interesting to see how his school functions in practice. But I'll leave the topic at that.
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