Shaun Hendy, Siouxsie Wiles, and their employer, the University of Auckland

OPINIONSocietyJanuary 14, 2022

Why the Siouxsie Wiles and Shaun Hendy employment case matters

Guest writer

Shaun Hendy, Siouxsie Wiles, and their employer, the University of Auckland

Academic freedom comes with inherent risks, but the answer is more support for academics who fulfil their role as ‘critic and conscience’ of society, not less.

Two high-profile University of Auckland academics raised important questions about academic freedom with their complaint to the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) that their employer had failed its duty of care to them.

Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles and Professor Shaun Hendy have become well known for their work explaining the science behind Covid-19 and guiding the public and government response.

But not everyone has agreed with that response or valued their contribution, and the academics have been threatened by what they have called “a small but venomous sector of the public”. They argued the university had not adequately responded to their safety concerns and requests for protection.

The case has now been referred to the Employment Court and the outcome for all parties remains unknown.

My focus is on the initial determination by the ERA, which referred to a letter from the university to Wiles and Hendy in August 2021 that urged them “to keep their public commentary to a minimum and suggested they take paid leave to enable them ‘to minimise any social media comments at present'”.

According to the ERA, this advice was “apparently given after [the university] received recommendations from its legal advisors to amend its policies so as to ‘not require’ its employees to provide public commentary, in order to limit its potential liability for online harassment.”

The ERA also noted the university “says that the applicants are not ‘expected’ or required to provide public commentary on Covid-19 as part of their employment or roles with the respondent, but it acknowledges they are entitled to do so.”

This issue is central to my concerns about academic freedom.

Freedom and risk

The academics argued that the university is statutorily required to “accept a role as critic and conscience of society” – as is set out under section 268 of the Education and Training Act 2020.

Universities routinely fulfil this role when academic staff and students state controversial or unpopular opinions and the results of their independent scholarship. Asking academics to step back from those roles to avoid risk seems to acknowledge that the threat derives from them doing their work.

I also fail to see how it would mitigate risk. An electrician who tried to mitigate the risk of electrocution by spending less time around wires hasn’t actually reduced the risk of electrocution when doing their job. They’ve just reduced the amount of time they are doing their job.

The Auckland academics are not the first to receive threats because of their “critic and conscience” activities. In the US, my former boss Dr Anthony Fauci says he, too, has received death threats from members of the public because of his work on the pandemic.

Less visible but still damaging threats or derogatory comments can come from within the university community, too. Systemic discrimination based on gender and race is well documented in academia. And increasingly, there are conflicts arising out of commercial interests in public research organisations.

Elsewhere it can be even more dangerous, such as the state-sponsored attacks on academics reported in Turkey. As a fellow scientist, I empathise with colleagues forced into the spotlight by virtue of their expertise or conscience.

Uses and limits of institutional power

Universities provide an important protection of academic freedom by not using their power as employers to stifle opinion. But it’s not enough. Universities should be more active in enabling academics to fulfil their role as critic and conscience of society so that, as expected by parliament, academic freedom is “preserved and enhanced”.

But there are also limits. No university in Aotearoa New Zealand has the scale to protect its students and staff from the concerted actions of a hostile country, a multi-billion dollar multinational company, or even the whispers of co-conspirators at coffee breaks during the ranking of grants.

What universities should do cannot exceed what they can do.

A coalition of government, universities, unions, staff and students needs to work together to redefine what can be done.

The government could reaffirm its commitment to critic-and-conscience activities by creating or re-purposing funding explicitly for these. Accountability will follow because universities would be required to expose that activity to public oversight.

The expectations of the university and the government to preserve and enhance academic freedom should become a normal conversation.

The risk is governments might want to influence what does and does not constitute being a critic and conscience of society, and use funding to stifle criticism of its policies. While this risk exists already, the temptation to constrain academic freedom could become stronger.

But balance would be provided by using the United Nations’ higher education declaration as a benchmark, through the transparency of the funding accountability exercise, and the declared precondition the funding allocation process be subject to ongoing and open scrutiny by university staff and students.

Accepting risk with freedom

Universities would be expected to use their additional resources to enable students and staff, as safely as possible, to use their academic freedom for public service.

Jurisdictional responsibilities could be negotiated between universities and government so that, where appropriate, a threat requiring more than campus security would be covered by the country’s police or defence resources.

But students and staff have some responsibilities, too. The university community cannot and should not leave its own protection to others. It needs to take a greater role in self-policing prejudice, privilege and conflicts of interest within the academic community itself.

Confronting the ultimate holders of power within their own academies and professional bodies will be the most painful action for members. But it would be worse for the community to fail in this and therefore do less as the critic and conscience of society.

If the use of academic freedom did not create risk, parliament would not have needed to legislate for its protection. But that risk should not be shouldered by Wiles and Hendy, or anyone else, alone.

Jack Heinemann is professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Canterbury

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Ah, memories: The author as a child, bringing up the rear at her school’s athletics day (Photo: supplied)

SocietyJanuary 14, 2022

The unmitigated joy of never again having to do athletics day

Sharon Lam

Contributing writer

Ah, memories: The author as a child, bringing up the rear at her school’s athletics day (Photo: supplied)

As the Olympics came to a close, Sharon Lam reflected on another proud Kiwi sporting tradition she’d rather forget.

First published on August 8, 2021

As the swimming events at the Olympics gave way for track events in August, I felt the familiar feeling that it was in error that humans ever left the primordial soup. After watching smooth, triangular shark-people swoop left and right across a cerulean screen, the muddy brown lanes and bipedalism of athletics appeared alien, harsh.

When a discus thrower appeared on screen, I felt two things. Firstly, awe, at the spectacle of people who have entire lives built around the throwing of an object. Secondly, cringe, at the flashbacks of my own abysmal attempts at throwing said object. The cringe extended itself into memories of a dread that had punched each year of my childhood with annual precision. That is, the Antipodean horror of athletics day.

Athletics days were obviously not designed by someone who was bad at athletics. If you want to have fun while being bad at something there is bowling, sex, the alto saxophone. Not 100m sprints. If not already clear, I was useless at athletics day. Completely, absolutely, shit. How the teachers kept a straight face when they saw me waddle up to take my turn, I have no idea. Shotputs would land at my feet. Once, they started the next race before I had made it to the finish line. Even the novelty events were a tragedy, as I tripped over gormlessly in a musty old sack.

I was even bad at the downtime between events. Athletics days were one of the only days of the year when houses were physically segregated. Of course, all my friends were in green and I was in yellow. In the too hot sun, I’d sit in a pastorally cordoned-off line, trying to fit in with second-tier friends. Mentally, I’d be counting down with worry how many more events I had to plod through.

This is not to say that I didn’t try. Before the day itself, PE classes would switch into athletics mode. Each year, my idiotic self would scrounge up some sad glimmer of hope that I had grown stronger or taller and would finally be able to not completely fail. I’d stand in line as our class waited to do high jump, nerves worsening as it got closer to my turn, clenching my shins in a wishful attempt to awaken some hidden genetic ability. I’d watch as Caitlin, Elliot, Hee Jae, took turns in succeeding to run and jump over the pole, and I would try to imprint their movements into my own muscle memory. When it was my turn, I would “run”, mistime my jump, and crash into the mattress, feeling the pain of the pole against my genetically inactivated shins. And so this scene would repeat the year after, and the year after that, and the year after that.

Whenever athletics day came around, teachers and children alike already knew who was good and who was not. The day itself would just formalise this with points and whatever it was that the winners received. A certificate? A trophy? Self esteem? I wonder if us terrestrially-challenged children were more of a hindrance to the competent ones. Would we have been better off having a day off school? Chances for daytime television and a hot lunch were rare in childhood!

The divide in kids’ physical abilities and inevitable embarrassment hasn’t gone unnoticed. Some schools in the UK now have “non-competitive” sports days, where there are no individual events or awards. While this may be well intended, in practice seems useless. Anyone who has been 11 years old knows that as long as there are a group of children doing some kind of movement of their limbs, they’re going to know who’s better than others, regardless of adults giving them awards or not. I would also like to think that all my time spent losing in front of others year after year as a child at least set me up well to lose in front of others year after year as an adult. Perhaps we will have to wait for the “non-competitive” children to grow up and see how they face their own adult losses.

Just like the Olympics, Athletics Days teach us how to win, and lose (Photo by Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)

Today, my journey of adapting to life on land continues. I have even started jogging. The other day my jogging took me through my old primary school field. It felt smaller, as it rightly should have; the sands of time shrink all that was once monumental. But the signifiers were still there – the shallow pit that would be filled with sand for the long jump, a slightly flatter area of grass where the high jump mattress was dragged out, the rugby posts that demarcated the sitting area.

I wondered if there were others who passed through this field with different memories. Imagine: 8am on a weekend morning, strolling by in athleisure and a golden retriever in tow. “That’s where I beat Ashley in the sprints,” one would say to their physically proportional partner. “That’s lovely, dear,” they would reply, “I was the best shot-putter in Year 8.” “Yes, I know, that’s why I married you.” And then the two would laugh the laugh of winners.

There was no one else around the day I visited, though, and in the ghostly pantheon of embarrassments I found a sense of peace. None of this mattered any more! How nice it was to not be 10, 11, or 12! It was a sweet pocket of adulthood – running alone, unwatched, unambitious, unbothered.

As the winter wind picked up, I wished I could pass this unbothered feeling through space and time like a relay baton (not that I would know the feeling of that) to the me who had agonised in that very same place. A reassurance to her that her suffering won’t be for nothing, that no matter what happens in the future, you will always have this for comfort: that one day, you will never have to compete in an athletics day ever again.

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