The Segal report presented to Prime Minister Albanese on Thursday, 10 July, represents an unprecedented challenge to Australia’s 39 public universities – to their autonomy, their independence and to their reputation both here and internationally.

Not that the general public would know, given the mild and accommodating response of the tertiary educational leadership. It is as if they don’t appreciate that a right-wing trojan horse is already sitting there securely within their gates.

The strategy for the takeover is contained in Section 3.4 of the report headed: ”Institutional Accountability and University Reform.” What follows is an outline of what are termed Four Key Actions. They are:

1. The Envoy will develop and launch a university report card assessing each university’s implementation of ‘effective practices and standards to combat antisemitism’.
2. The Envoy will work with government to enable funding to be withheld from universities, programs or individuals that facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism. Working with both government and grant authorities, the Envoy will, where possible, establish that all public grants provided to university centres, academics or researchers can be subject to termination where the recipient engages in antisemitic or otherwise discriminatory or hateful speech or actions.
3. There should be a commission of inquiry into campus antisemitism “including sources of funding for organised clusters of antisemitism”. The intimation is that foreign funds stoke relevant local activism.
4. The Envoy will work with the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency to ensure that systematic action is taken to reverse “a dangerous trajectory of normalised antisemitism in many university courses and campuses”.

So there we have it! The Envoy will be everywhere – scrutinising speech, research, course content, writing and behaviour generally. Have academics ever been so comprehensively threatened with supervisions by a government agent, by a Commissar? There was nothing comparable at the height of the Cold War – not even card-carrying communists were so comprehensively supervised. In fact, many universities openly shielded them and defended their right to freedom of speech. It was a time when university autonomy was both valued and upheld.

The response of the universities to the Envoy’s plans has been muted. They have officially welcomed the report, expressed their commitment to opposing antisemitism but few of them have voiced even the mildest concern about the far-reaching, inquisitional ambitions! If the university leaders are disturbed, they have kept it to themselves.

Serious and often severe criticism has been provided by an impressive cohort of public intellectuals including Robert Manne, Greg Barns, Richard Flanagan, Waleed Aly and, most notably, Louise Adler who declared:

• One must acknowledge the remarkably effective Jewish community organisations in Australia behind the latest antisemitism report.
• Collectively, with their News Ltd megaphone, they have successfully badgered the government of the day, cowed the ABC, intimidated vice-chancellors and threatened to defund arts organisations.

The anti-Zionist Jewish Council had released a warning about Segal’s appointment early in 2024 declaring that by choosing “a pro-war voice to this position” the government risked breeding division, increasing Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism and “ultimately making Jews less safe”.

The Envoy’s previous career is relevant to any assessment of her report. She was the immediate past president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the umbrella organisation for Jewish organisations right across Australia. It is also deeply committed to Israel and in its official promotion “reaffirms Australian Jewry’s strong and unshakable solidarity with Israel and her people”. In a speech as president of the ECAJ in October 2023, Segal declared:

“And we all resolve to support Israel now and ongoingly to the utmost, spiritually, and materially to the best of our abilities. This my friends is a battle between humanity and depravity, between humanity and barbarism. And it is a battle in which Israel will fight and she will win, and we will be right behind her.”

It was clearly a profoundly important, personal crusade. No other interpretation is possible. But the critical question which has to be addressed is when she moved from leader of the ECAJ to become the Prime Minister’s Envoy against antisemitism did her overriding concern remain the defence of Israel rather than the question of human rights in Australia?

Such questions bring us back to the inescapable problem – the conflation of criticism of the actions of the current Israeli Government and antisemitism. Definitions of antisemitism initially drafted more than 20 years ago are now worthless. Challenged both intellectually and morally all over the world, the Israeli Government defends itself from behind the defensive shield of antisemitism. Israeli patriots follow suit, be they in Tel Aviv or Sydney. But the decisions of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice between January and July 2024 have transformed the global debate — war crimes, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and genocide — and are hard to contend with unless you assume all the world’s leading jurists simultaneously came down with the same antisemitic virus.

But the gravity of the current situation seems to have passed our universities by. The leadership was swept up in the moral panic about antisemitism, seemingly without consultation with staff or students. What a chance it was to initiate campus-wide debates involving local experts from across a wide range of disciplines. Looking from outside it would appear that the administrators took the view that the less said about Gaza and the West Bank the better. While they expressed concern about Jewish students on campus, there is little evidence that they had any sympathy for the protesting pro-Palestinian students, some of whom were aware of the fate of their contemporaries in Gaza where all the universities had been destroyed along with many schools and all the libraries. At least a hundred of their professors had died many in targeted attacks. Devastation in Gaza did not measure up with discomfort in Melbourne and Sydney in the minds of parochial vice-chancellors. Have any of our universities expressed any interest in providing assistance to rebuild tertiary education in Gaza?

The plans outlined by the Envoy have a disturbing familiarity with developments in other Western countries where right-wing politicians have targeted the universities and have used accusations of antisemitism as the rationale for reactionary government intervention. Trump’s attacks on Harvard, Columbia and other Ivy League Colleges are now well known. Columbia’s recent capitulation illustrates how even the most prestigious institutions surrender their autonomy to the power of the state. If the Envoy has her way, she will have successfully drawn up a blueprint for future Australian Governments to intervene at will into the intellectual life of the universities. Can we have any confidence in the university leadership to hold their ground and defend the autonomy of the institutions they currently lead?

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.