Sydney University has been accused of “serious academic bias’’ after a student reported lecturers at the institution were likening current conservative politicians to Nazis.
Lecturers also compared Australia’s handling of refugees to the Nazis’ treatment of mentally ill people murdered in Germany in the 1940s.
According to free speech advocate Matthew Lesh, who is running a project with the Institute of Public Affairs to reveal bias on campus, universities are becoming “closed intellectual shops” where “only certain ideas are allowed to be expressed’’.
During a lecture this month about the treatment of gay people in Nazi Germany, students were told it was “something out of … (Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi’s) handbook”.
A second-year student ended up pulling out of the subject — The Holocaust, History and Aftermath — after he was prevented from presenting his class assignment on modern instances of anti-Semitism.
The 22-year-old, who was afraid to be named for fear of reprisals, said he was told by the tutor not to explain how anti-Israel sentiment can be linked to anti-Semitism.
“I was halfway through my slides when the tutor told me to skip the rest of the presentation, saying ‘We don’t want people to get the wrong idea about you’,” the student said.
“It was clear I was not allowed to discuss this. It was quite dogmatic.”
The student quit the subject and later received what he described as an unfairly low mark.
The free speech think-tank issued a report recently which found eight in 10 universities it examined had policies or had restricted free speech.
“Students should be free to express views, not be interrupted and punished,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the university said it did not seek to avoid politics in lectures.
This article was originally published on news.com.au
