Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was invited to deliver a lecture by the Sydney University Law Society. He was shouted down, sworn at and labelled ‘ruling class scum’ (RCS) by a motley collection of student protesters and others. The former PM had to be escorted out by the police. Turnbull was livid, describing what had happened to him as ‘complete fascism, just extraordinary’. He challenged Australia’s oldest university, and Turnbull’s alma mater as it happens, to take some action to protect free speech on campus.

Based on my own rough and ready reckoning on the back of an envelope – look out Neil Ferguson, Imperial College pandemic modelling professorship here I come – that makes twice when I’ve ever fully agreed with Mr Turnbull. (The other time was when, as PM, he offered the states income tax power – as exists in every other federal democracy in the world – and our useless, mendicant, one-size-fits-all loving premiers, Liberal as well as Labor, turned him down flat.) But my point here is that Turnbull is right, at least in this sense. In today’s academic world, Australia’s and the wider anglosphere’s, if you’re perceived to be a conservative (I don’t say that these protesting students were particularly bright, or that they excelled in aptly characterising the actual location on the political spectrum of visiting RCS speakers) then the scope to speak one’s mind, for many, is a good deal more circumscribed than it is for those espousing bog-standard progressive orthodoxies and green-left woke creeds. You never read of lefties being shouted down on campus, do you?

Needless to say, this incident provokes various observations. First off, Mr Turnbull was prime minister at one point in time, right? Is it just now dawning on the man that our universities aren’t nearly as open to the John Stuart Mill notion of a cauldron of competing views to drive the search for truth as they were back in his day at Sydney Uni? Has our former PM missed the whole woke takeover of universities under which listeners’ sensibilities and feelings of being offended trump speakers’ entitlements to say their piece so that campuses need safe spaces and trigger warnings and, heck, statues need to be taken down because they’re too confronting? I work in the university sector so trust me, I know. This problem existed just as much four years ago, when Mr Turnbull was PM, as it does today. So what did the Turnbull government do, or try to do, to fix this university free speech problem? Nothing, would be my answer. Team Turnbull was completely useless on every axis of concern.  If you attended university three or four decades ago then what you recall is nothing like today’s campus reality.

Senior university administrators could fix this problem in under a month. On entering university you tell all students that part of the deal is being exposed to views they may not like. Higher education in part demands that. It needs students to think analytically about views different to their own. If you attend, that’s the deal, full stop. Then, if anyone is shouted down on campus (be it guest speaker or in-house professor) expel all the students involved, no exceptions, no backing down, no way back to the university for them. Do it very publicly too. Be prepared to weather any student protests as regards this disciplinary action.

Take this approach once or twice and the problem of shouting down speakers disappears, even as regards invited RCS lecturers. But top university administrators around the English-speaking world almost never do that. They hedge, equivocate, duck and weave. They tell Mr Turnbull the matter is being looked into and he’ll be welcomed back on campus but students are unlucky if they receive even a mild admonishment. In essence these vice-chancellors and the other (now myriad) senior apparatchiks deal in sophistry and casuistry. I think in part that’s because bravery is not a characteristic that is rewarded in the struggle to move up the university sector greasy pole. And also in part it’s because university top administrators are even more left-leaning politically than the median campus professor (and boy is that saying something in a world of collapsing viewpoint diversity where conservative academics are becoming an endangered species).

In the US, where political donations are public information, they know this is true, that top administrators are even more pronouncedly left-leaning than their left-leaning faculty. I think it’s true here in Australia too. Try this thought experiment. How many academics who were opposed to reciting an acknowledgement of country do you think could ever get any administrative job at all? How many who oppose the Voice or indirect quotas for women and various minorities could get one of those $600,000 p.a. deputy vice-chancellor gigs? How many Liberal-voting VCs do you reckon there are in this country, and I mean when it’s a PM Abbott or Dutton not Malcolm? Let’s be blunt. Sometimes (though probably not in this Turnbull instance because, heck, he’s not actually a conservative) the top university administrators feel a modicum of sympathy for the protesting students’ position.

And now a third, related observation. Our universities today make a point of making open displays, in vague and amorphous terms, of their commitments to free speech on campus. The facts on the ground, however, are often otherwise. Codes of conduct make the university both investigator and judge. In the Peter Ridd case in the Full Federal Court the majority justices were at least honest, they said academic freedom (and hence free speech) wasn’t really a protected value. Bad luck. At the High Court of Australia the justices went into overdrive virtue-signalling about the importance of academic freedom but then held against Peter Ridd because he infringed the Code of Conduct by speaking out about what was happening to him in the disciplinary proceedings. Our top judges implied there was some magical unspecified way Ridd should have run his case. Bollocks! For me, that shows our top judges haven’t really got a clue what life is like on today’s university campuses for many iconoclasts, dissidents and non-conformists, call them ‘conservatives’ to save time. Heck, as I write this I personally know of conservative academics currently having their codes of conduct (not from my uni) brought to bear for refusing to play the woke, ‘genuflect before the new identity politics Gods’ game. Just telling me, or anyone, breaches the code of conduct (so we used top spycraft).

Under the Ridd decision they’re in big trouble if this can be proved. So how do they run a defence and raise money? The Ridd decision was a woeful one in practice. It leaves university dissenters, in practice, out in the cold. They’re treated like RCS, but without the R and C. So just the S.