Editorial: Let unwelcome views face fair scrutiny

Politicians like Peters, hope to prosper on a backlash against prevailing liberal values that they and their supporters find oppressive. Photo / Getty Images

The provost of Stanford University in the United States, John Etchemendy, made a speech last week that bears wider consideration. He said, "Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country, not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines - there we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for.

"It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines, in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups we find offensive, in constant calls for the university to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers while we fail to notice the echo chamber we've built around ourselves."

Coincidentally as he spoke, an incident on this side of the Pacific, at Auckland University, illustrated exactly what he was talking about. The Students' Association, acting on complaints, it said, had met the University Proctor to relay its concern that a club calling itself the European Students Association was being allowed to set up a stall with other clubs in the university's orientation week.

The club's Facebook page used images and symbols that led complainants to think it might be a European nationalist group. The words "Nazi" and "white pride" were mentioned, by complainants, not the club.

The next day the club announced it was withdrawing its application to affiliate with the university, citing "constant threats to our safety, exposure of privacy and general abuse". It's unnamed president said they had not intended to be more than a club for people with an interest in history and culture.

"However due to an extremely high number of physical threats and severe and unfounded accusations of racism and fascism," he [or she] said, "we see the costs outweigh the benefits to taking this club any further."

So we will never know whether it intended to do any more than delight in their British and European heritage, but even that might be an unwelcome activity in the life of a modern university. Etchemendy's "intellectual monocultures" can be as intolerant as the racism they proscribe.

The students who called the club fascist ought to learn enough history to know the democracies did not have to suppress fascism in their midst to defeat it in World War II. Suppression of speech never works, it merely feeds the thinking it fears.

Addressing students at Victoria University this week, Winston Peters blamed the Herald for the demise of the European club, presumably because we, among others, reported the criticism of it.

Politicians like Peters, buoyed by the election of Donald Trump, hope to prosper on a backlash against prevailing liberal values that they and their supporters find oppressive. It is therefore more important than ever that unwelcome views are heard, vented, given their space.

Offensive their views may be to many but hearing them or reading them is not "unsafe". Universities, like mass media, should be open to unfashionable attitudes. Examined in bright light they will probably wilt.