Education
Australian universities risk their reputations if they fail to respond to increasing efforts by foreign actors to spread propaganda and stifle research, says a former honorary fellow of the Australia India Institute. By Farrah Ahmed.
The fight for academic freedoms
The recent investigations of the Australia India Institute by The Saturday Paper reveal significant breaches of academic freedom at the University of Melbourne. The coverage has exposed pressures on the institute to project a favourable vision of India, and also how the institute stifled scholarly work – by downgrading a public lecture on violence to a private seminar and failing to support the publication of a piece addressing Mahatma Gandhi’s chequered legacy on race, secularism and caste. More troubling still are the reported experiences of scholars – in a university institute – who could not speak their minds freely. Some topics and viewpoints were “taboo” and researchers did not feel supported in tackling them.
Hosting institutes is attractive to universities facing incentives to demonstrate policy impact, to serve government priorities and to engage with industry and other external institutions. But concerns about universities collaborating to create institutes such as the Australia India Institute are not new. Confucius Institutes, for example, have long faced accusations of Chinese propaganda, interferences with free speech and academic freedom and espionage. And some staff and students at the University of Melbourne have criticised its hosting of the Robert Menzies Institute, which describes itself as “celebrating the legacy of Australia’s greatest Prime Minister”. They have argued that the institute is driven by a political agenda without room for critical inquiry.
The exodus of honorary fellows such as myself from the Australia India Institute in March last year should focus attention on the quasi-diplomatic or hagiographic missions of university-based institutes or research centres. The mass resignation of academic fellows demonstrates that such missions sit uneasily with those of universities.
The mission of the Australia India Institute, for instance, sets it up for breaches of academic freedom. The institute aspires to be the “principal convener of strategic dialogue” and to help “forge a stronger and more enduring relationship” between Australia and India. Scholarly activities, including those critical of the actions of the Indian government or problems in Indian society, might well be in tension with that aspiration.
But academic freedom is not the only worry. Philosopher and University of Melbourne associate professor Karen Jones has argued that the trustworthiness of universities matters too. Universities must not only be trustworthy, they must also signal or communicate their trustworthiness. Institutes such as the Australia India Institute can undermine their host university’s trustworthiness, both actual and perceived. Our tertiary institutions are entrusted with offering education, generating and disseminating knowledge and certifying claims to knowledge. Any dissemination of knowledge that is biased, skewed or distorted by concerns about implications for a diplomatic relationship breaches that trust. Allegations that the Australia India Institute promotes only “good news” stories about India and the bilateral relationship, and refuses to support critical independent research, are therefore worrying.
Scholars, students, policymakers and officials trust universities as independent sources of knowledge that will be unswayed in their truth-seeking mission. The Australia India Institute, on the other hand, is, by its own admission, “not a research institute or an academic organisation” and is “not an academic centre”. Housing a quasi-diplomatic mission within a university allows that mission to trade off the university’s trustworthiness. While the advantages for the quasi-diplomatic mission are evident, those advantages are to the detriment of the university.
Members of the public trust the university to stay true to its professed public-spirited mission. Therefore it is also a breach of this trust to host an institute that supports propaganda-like activity favouring an authoritarian ethno-nationalist government and its dominant culture, while refusing to support independent scholarship that may not meet with the approval of that government and its ideological allies.
This paper’s reporting suggests that universities are aware of the magnitude and seriousness of the threats to academic freedom from external actors including foreign governments, corporations, think tanks and diasporic groups. For many researchers of India in Australia, the fear of visas to India being denied, of talks being disrupted and, for Indian citizens, of detention in India is real and serves to stifle academic freedom. These pressures are likely to be felt particularly strongly by researchers working under precarious conditions, such as casual or short-term contracts.
Given the risk of interference, why do universities host establishments such as the Australia India Institute?
Some argue this is a product of universities’ particularly strong interest in attracting students from overseas at the moment. Of course, there is nothing wrong with seeking to attract a diverse range of international students, including from India. But the received wisdom conflates student preferences with government and diasporic ideological commitments. Students from India, for example, are just as committed to academic rigour, and possess just as much of the spirit of inquiry, as other students. They understand, as much as other members of the university community, that no university is going to thrive without independent research and researchers.
Universities are also under pressure to diversify their sources of funding beyond the government. Concerns about academic freedom and trustworthiness do not preclude them from engaging in a wide variety of activities, including fundraising, with partners and collaborators. But if trustworthiness is to be maintained, these activities need to be constrained by the need to advance – or at least not undermine – the university’s mission.
The Australia India Institute affair shows that universities need to go further than the norms, processes and institutions that they have developed around research ethics, conflicts of interest and academic freedom. Universities need policies that respond directly to the threats to trustworthiness from collaborators whose diverse interests may collide with university commitments and values.
The University of Melbourne’s failure to address the substance of the serious allegations made by former fellows, and the breaches of academic freedom, such as the ones reported in this paper, suggest a need for accountability mechanisms with teeth.
Moreover, whistleblowers are essential to bringing concerns about such serious breaches to light. University institutes are often established through collaboration between the university and other powerful and/or well-funded external groups. Whistleblowing that embarrasses or inconveniences powerful institutional actors can have serious consequences for the lives and careers of researchers. Universities ought therefore to be particularly solicitous in supporting whistleblowers, particularly those in precarious positions or with other vulnerabilities.
Most importantly, the controversy at the Australia India Institute should be of concern outside university hallways. There should be no compromise on the independence and trustworthiness of Australia’s universities for any supposed diplomatic or other gain. The public is entitled to expect that universities will act with integrity with respect to their core mission. As public institutions, they should not be excluded from scrutiny in the current national reckoning on how to maintain integrity in public life.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 4, 2023 as "A mission compromised".
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