US bullying is a test for Australian universities and our leaders

The ANU’s brush with Trumpism, along with other Australian universities, is but a touch of the spreading authoritarianism in the so-called land of the free.

The university revealed last week that one of its research projects had lost US funding after the US department that had been funding the project told the researcher involved that it was no longer in line with their departmental priorities.

Universities in the US and overseas have been receiving a 36-point questionnaire from the Trump Administration designed to weed out those with woke and/or green-left agendas, links to China, or what the President determines encourages terrorist views.

The ANU says it has not received the questionnaire but other Australian universities have, as well as the CSIRO.*

The ANU has 16 funded US government research contracts which are worth a total of $9.3 million.

US universities are quickly falling into line with the Trump survey rather than lose funding.

The question will be how resistant Australian universities will be to this type of extortion and trampling of academic freedoms, particularly if Peter Dutton continues to ape some elements of the Trump culture war and is tempted to go further if he wins the election.

In an interconnected world with relationships across the globe in many fields of endeavour, the potential is always present for security issues and for research areas that may not fit into a ruling government’s political framework.

But to base funding decisions on a vague set of obviously slanted questions lacks any kind of rigour or fair-mindedness. It also runs counter to the long-established principle in the West that universities need and deserve the freedom and independence to pursue excellence in whatever areas they decide to unlock human potential and encourage discovery within ethical and legal bounds.

Universities are engine rooms of productivity in the broadest sense. It has been sad to see the decline in government support over time that pushed them to rely so heavily on international students and undermined their financial wellbeing to the point that they are, like the ANU, taking an axe, it might say scalpel, to jobs and programs.

The Coalition, echoing some of the right-wing nonsense about universities being hotbeds of Marxist activism, has been taking potshots at them for years.

This means the potential is there for a victorious Dutton Government to try its hand at strong-arming universities into withdrawing from areas of research or sacking staff it may not agree with, say anything to do with discrimination or diversity, renewable energy, the Middle East if Israel is criticised, China, or gender.

But sounding off on social media is a far cry from being in government, so hopefully, in Australia, this type of intervention may be seen as too obviously counterproductive to the national interest.

In America, a more organised second Trump Administration is living up to all its campaign rhetoric and, alarmingly, showing just how fragile liberal democracy can be.

Despite all the vaunted institutional protections and guardrails, freedoms are vanishing at the stroke of a pen, the pillars of government are falling, and the rule of law is flailing.

Valid visitors are being detained and deported, permanent residents and citizens, including academics and students, are being whisked off the streets, and a chill is settling over the country.

For all the talk about Western civilisation being at risk from the ‘woke’, the relativists, the tolerant and the faithless, the fundamental tenets of the West are being swept away in a country that was supposed to be, despite its flaws, an example to the world.

It has now become not just an unreliable ally but also an unlikeable one. Xi and Putin must be pleasantly bemused.

The situation so early into the new Trump Administration shows how quickly a nation can succumb and why our leaders of all stripes need to defend those fundamentals, no matter how strongly they may disagree with each other.

*It was previously stated that ANU had received the questionnaire. ANU has clarified this.