Academic freedom for some

How New Zealand universities marginalise pro-Israel voices.

New Zealand’s tertiary institutions are facing a crisis not only of sustainability or funding, but of intellectual credibility. Universities, once guardians of critical inquiry and scholarly independence, are increasingly captured by ideological orthodoxy. The most revealing symptom of this decay is the treatment of Israel — a litmus test that exposes just how far our universities have drifted from their mission of honest, rigorous education.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the University of Otago. While the Free Speech Union (an organisation committed to defending open debate) was banned from participating in O-Week events, BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) activists were permitted to run campaigns targeting a local Dunedin pizza shop simply because of Israeli franchises offering free meals to IDF soldiers fighting a defensive war and protecting their people. In this environment, it is not ideas that are tested, but identities. The university’s silence in the face of such discriminatory activism is not neutrality — it is complicity.

That same silence is granted to faculty members who routinely use their academic platforms to promote anti-Israel narratives, free from critical challenge or scholarly balance. Professor Richard Jackson, for example, has built an academic career describing Israel as a colonial entity and an apartheid state — deploying highly politicised language without meaningful reference to international law, the complexity of the conflict, or the actions of actors like Hamas. The atrocities of October 7, 2023, in which Israeli civilians were raped, burned, and taken hostage, are routinely omitted or dismissed in such analyses. When these one-sided views are published and promoted under the banner of “peace studies,” it reflects not scholarly objectivity but advocacy masquerading as expertise.

Jackson is not alone. A growing group of Otago academics — including Dr. David Jenkins, Dr. Olivier Jutel, Dr. Abbi Virens, and Dr. Peyton Bond — have publicly endorsed calls for the university to sever all institutional ties with Israel. Through the “Otago Declaration on the Situation in Palestine” and public letters to university leadership, they urge Otago to adopt the principles of the BDS campaign and refuse academic engagement with Israeli institutions. These actions do not just represent individual political views; they signal a broader institutional alignment with a one-sided political cause, cloaked in academic respectability.

At Massey University, Associate Professor Mohan Dutta’s CARE research centre regularly platforms voices that denounce Israel in stark, ideological terms, while remaining silent on far more egregious human rights abuses in China, Iran, or Syria. He also glorified the October 7 Massacre on social media. Dutta and others frame Israel as a symbol of global oppression, yet their work rarely grapples with the complexities of Jewish history, regional politics, or the pluralistic reality of Israeli society. The purpose is not to understand but to indict.

The University of Auckland, long considered New Zealand’s flagship university, is deeply embedded in this intellectual conformity. In 2024, a group of University of Auckland academics signed an open letter expressing deep concern over the university’s response to pro-Palestinian protests and calling for institutional solidarity with Gaza. The letter criticised Israel’s actions but made no mention of Hamas, its October 7 massacre, or the legal framework surrounding self-defence in armed conflict. This was not a balanced legal assessment — it was political advocacy framed in academic terms. The signatories used their institutional authority to endorse a highly partisan position, without the analytical rigour expected in serious legal scholarship. No formal counterpoint or institutional clarification was issued by the university.

Likewise, Associate Professor Neal Curtis has repeatedly criticised Israel and Western democracies, yet has almost nothing to say about authoritarian violence in Russia or Iran.

More recently, Senior Lecturer Dylan Asafo joined other academics in publicly backing pro-Palestinian encampments at the University of Auckland, characterising Israel’s actions as genocide. Asafo, whose scholarship blends law and social justice, has frequently employed highly ideological rhetoric that leaves little room for competing views or legal nuance. Similarly, Dr. Emmy Rākete, a sociologist and activist recently affiliated with the university, has become a prominent voice in activist-academic spaces that reduce complex conflicts like Israel–Palestine into binary moral struggles. These academics are not outliers — they reflect a growing institutional consensus in which Israel is uniquely demonised, and any defence of it (no matter how reasoned) is treated with suspicion or outright hostility.

At the University of Canterbury, Associate Professor Jeremy Moses has been called out for promoting content that lacks scholarly rigour in its portrayal of Israel, according to reports by the Israel Institute of New Zealand. His teaching and online posts reportedly reflect a partisan narrative, raising serious questions about whether New Zealand students are being offered balanced education or indoctrination.

Students who challenge this orthodoxy pay a price. Jewish and Israeli students today report a climate in which they feel unable to speak openly in lectures or tutorials. The message is clear: some identities and narratives are welcome; others are to be marginalised or erased.

This is not just a problem of political imbalance. It is a collapse of academic integrity. Universities are no longer demanding intellectual rigour from their staff or students when it comes to the Middle East — especially when Israel is the subject. Allegations of apartheid are made without legal grounding. Historical claims are flattened into slogans. International law is cited only when it serves the predetermined conclusion. Critical scrutiny disappears, and with it, the university’s role as a place of learning.

New Zealand universities are not failing because they are too political. They are failing because they are too partisan — because they tolerate only a narrow band of views, particularly on Israel, and exclude others through silence, disinvitation, and subtle academic punishment.

To rebuild public trust and educational legitimacy, universities must reassert academic rigour over ideology. That means applying the same standards of evidence, balance, and critical thinking to Israel as they would to any other nation. It means creating space for dissenting views (including pro-Israel voices) rather than suppressing them. And it means recognising that silence in the face of intellectual bullying is not a neutral position. It is an endorsement.

If universities will not defend inquiry over ideology, then they forfeit their moral and academic authority. The public, the students, and the ideal of higher education itself all deserve far better.