A couple of weeks ago now, Victoria University’s long awaited panel event on free speech finally took place. VUW Vice-Chancellor Nic Smith told journalists after the event that new legislation to protect free speech was not necessary in our university sector, and ‘certainly [not] at my university.’
To any neutral observer, though, the event will have made clear quite how far our universities have strayed from being the politically disinterested, open institutions we pay them to be, and how urgently government intervention is now needed to make them fit for purpose again.
