Taking Liberties

Sydney University’s reliance on a totalitarian regime is a betrayal of the oldest civilising tradition in history. Free speech should not be for sale, especially at a university. By Will Jefferies.

Using the “racist” card in lieu of a reasoned argument has become common among the cultural warriors and intellectual sheep of Australia’s undergraduate courses. But until now I wasn’t aware of a university vice-chancellor using the tactic.

Such is the standard of debate in Australia today. Sydney University Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence last week said that scepticism regarding China’s influence on our tertiary sector, sparked by Chinese supporters brazenly suppressing pro-Hong Kong protests on two Australian campuses, might have “overtones of the White Australia Policy”.

He went on to say that “there would be risks, too, in just teaching the children of the scions of Mosman – no quality university is like that.”

Spence was oblivious to the irony that a “quality university” also isn’t financially reliant on a communist regime, least of all one whose supporters are increasingly prepared to emulate the regime’s totalitarianism under his very nose.

Spence, by the way, has enjoyed a 56 per cent increase in pay, to his current salary of $1.4 million, during the past five years.

As a student at Sydney University, I find Spence’s disingenuous ‘wokeness’ utterly depressing. I had enrolled in university hoping to encounter an environment that not only practised the Western tradition of free, robust debate – a tradition that goes back as far as Socrates, older than any other civilising force on Earth – but robustly defended it as well.

For a Vice-Chancellor to be cravenly obfuscating when a fundamental foundation of his institution is under threat is, to me, an unforgivable dereliction of his duty.

Last week Queensland Senator Amanda Stoker said, “it is legitimate to ask questions about how China came to have so much influence in (Australian university) institutions.”

Fellow MP David Sharma, from the Sydney electorate of Wentworth, said “some universities have become a little too dependent on foreign university students as a source of revenue.”

Yet another MP, Tim Wilson, of Goldstein in Melbourne, said Australia must “keep a watchful eye that universities not become a vehicle for foreign government to exercise soft influence in Australia.”

International students constituted 35.7% of all students at Sydney University in 2017, said Salvatore Barbones, an Associate Professor at Sydney University and Adjunct Scholar at the Centre for Independent Studies, in his paper The China Student Boom and the Risks it Poses to Australian Universities.

Further, Chinese students made up two thirds of the international student body (and 24 per cent of the total student population), and generated 71 per cent of the total international-student revenue (or 23 per cent of the university’s total revenue).

International students are disproportionately high among the general population too. In the United States, they constitute a mere 0.3 per cent of the total population; in Britain, they are 0.65 per cent. In Australia, the figure is 1.55 per cent.

“Australian universities’ revenues from international students grew roughly five times as fast as their revenues from government sources (during the past five years),” Babones said.

Spence’s response to legitimate questions about his university’s reliance on China is not surprising.

Sydney University, especially the humanities faculty, is plagued by postmodernist professors who claim that all human behaviours and organisations are primarily determined by – you guessed it - race, gender and socio-economic status, which coalesce into “power structures”. This vacuous pretext allows them to avoid genuine intellectual activity and instead lazily espouse the groupthink of our times.

Many Australians are not as sanguine as Professor Spence about the proportion of international students at our universities. According to a February 2019 national survey of 1500 people commissioned by the University of NSW, 54 per cent of Australians think foreign student numbers should not be increased. This figure increased to 62 per cent among those aged 18-34, the demographic most likely to have seen the effect foreign students are having on university courses.

Professor Spence said, however, that “the greatest crown risk to research intensive universities over the past 20 years has been the Australian government slashing research funding….not foreign governments.”

The consequences of this are clear. The Chinese Communist Party has encouraged this state of affairs so it can exercise soft power on campus, particularly through its Confucius Institute – an institute that the former Chinese propaganda chief Li Changchun says is “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.”

Centre for Social Impact professor emeritus John Fitzgerald said in The Australian last year that Confucius Institutes are run by “donors in China who assign a teacher to each program and sets clear limits on what can be said and done in the classroom…undermining their academic integrity, autonomy and freedom by ceding control over staffing and content to a donor.”

Just last week the NSW government announced that it would scrap its Chinese-funded Confucius Classrooms program after an internal review raised fears of “inappropriate foreign influence” within the state Education Department.

Professor Spence is less concerned about the Confucius Institutes, saying they are similar to the Alliance Francaise and the Goethe-Institut. These, however, are not run by the French or German government, as their Chinese equivalent is.

In 2017, Sydney University IT lecturer Dr Khimji Vaghjiani used a map of the world that showed an Indian version of the disputed India-Bhutan-China borders. As a consequence, the Chinese international students in the lecture reported the incident to Chinese social media app ‘WeChat’ – resulting in a group on the platform called the “Australian Red Scarves” mounting a campaign. Vaghjiani was forced to apologise.

In 2013, the University of Sydney cancelled the Dalai Llama’s visit to avoid antagonising the Chinese community. Professor Spence issued a statement that said the cancellation was “in the best interests of researchers across the university.”

Only weeks ago, in broad daylight, Chinese students tore down a mural on the main drag of Sydney University that was expressing support for the protesters in Hong Kong.

Sydney University’s student newspaper, Honi Soit, alleges that one of the students involved in the above suppression of free speech on campus is Jingrui (Jesse) Xu, the current Student Representative Councils Co-Education Officer – a position that pays $13,000 - to mobilise student protests and movements.

One of Xu’s factional competitors is the honorary secretary of the University of Sydney Union, Decheng Clement Sun, who in the past has favorably quoted Chairman Mao, the Chinese dictator who killed 30-70 million of his own people.

Sydney University should be a place that welcomes people from all places and political persuasions. But it should not be a campus that is financially over-reliant on one of these groups; nor should it stand back and blithely ignore serious threats to free speech and the robust exchange of ideas.

I hope Education Minister Dan Tehan’s meeting with vice-chancellors this week regarding national security within universities results in tangible reforms to this house of cards.