The Brash Saga

Massey University Misdirects Itself

Obvious Lessons Ignored

Grant Miller
Stuff

Massey University will have eagerly turned the page on 2018, but choices loom about the year ahead.  The university's leadership will have to figure out what being a Treaty of Waitangi-led organisation means day to day.

More importantly, there's a badly battered reputation in need of repair. Massey's self-inflicted wounds came from the university forgetting what universities are supposed to be about – robust debate, for example.

The university council brought in Douglas Martin of consulting firm MartinJenkins to review the decision to cancel a politics club event where former National Party leader Don Brash had been due to speak.   The review team made many reasonable observations. The conclusion vice-chancellor Jan Thomas did not lie about her intentions was also fair.

However, Thomas had turned Massey into New Zealand's most embarrassing university and the university council's response was to endorse this state of affairs.  We may infer from council members' quick backing of the vice-chancellor that they didn't grasp how badly into the mire the institution had been plunged.


The council also showed its naivete by expressing the hope not talking about the controversy might avoid adding fuel to it. With advice of this calibre, Thomas has every reason to doubt the council's usefulness as a bearer of wisdom.

Some people at the university think framing the episode as being about free speech is to misunderstand the issue. Not so.  Right from the start, Massey made clear the decision to ban Brash was not just about security. Naively, the vice-chancellor took the chance to take pot shots at Brash.

If recommendations from the MartinJenkins report are all Massey University learns from the Don Brash censorship saga, the university will not have learnt nearly enough.  It quickly became obvious there was basically no substance to any security threat. If the event cancellation were purely about security, the university could have reversed its decision within days and apologised.

If the politics club and university were running out of time to be sure of hosting a safe event, they could have postponed it. Instead, the institution floundered and its communications were a mess.

The front cover of the final report proclaims that it will be about "lessons from this episode". Yet there was a lesson almost impossible to miss and the reviewers missed it.  The university's leadership failed to place sufficient value on freedom of speech and that's one big reason why it managed the crisis so badly for so long.

Freedom of speech is important to the public. It is important to students, former students and parents of students. It should be important to universities too.

Grant Miller is a news director for Stuff in Manawatū.