Late last week the University of Western Australia reversed course and rejected the $4m the Abbott government had awarded it to host Bjørn Lomborg’s Australian Consensus Centre. Christopher Pyne expressed the sentiments of the government:

What a sad day for academic freedom when staff at a university silence a dissenting voice rather than test their ideas in debate

Now the human rights commissioner, Tim Wilson, has weighed in, condemning the university for engaging in what he called “a culture of soft censorship”. The human right of free speech requires, he argues, “more than just stopping censorious laws. It also requires a culture that tolerates dissent and allows for challenging ideas to be voice, heard and debated”.

I’m 100% down with the idea that free speech requires more than stopping censorious laws, and I’m very much with Wilson on the point that it also requires a culture that tolerates dissent and allows challenging ideas to be voiced.

But the idea that all challenging ideas have a right to be heard is just nonsense – and it’s a nonsense that he himself has rejected in an earlier mood:

Walked past Occupy Melbourne protest, all people who think freedom of speech = freedom 2 b heard, time wasters ... send in the water cannons — Tim Wilson (@timwilsoncomau) October 21, 2011

Apart from the water cannons bit I agree. A right to free speech doesn’t mean a right to a platform to be heard.

We’re used to the idea that universities are rampantly radical institutions, full of unwashed students in desperate need of a water cannon and lecturers like me who only egg them on.

But actually, universities are fundamentally conservative institutions. We engage in what Wilson would call “soft censorship” of bad ideas all the time. It’s called learning.

In fact, the word censor comes from the Latin “to assess”. In universities – whether in the sciences, social sciences or the humanities – people voice their ideas by submitting them for peer review, and if they’re deemed good then they get a platform to be heard by a wider audience.

Great idea? Hurrah, you get published in Nature. Crap idea? You’ll be rejected by the journals that have a reputation for quality. You don’t get to have your ideas heard just because you really like them, because you say them over and over again, or because you’ve got powerful friends in the government.

So the academics and students at the University of Western Australia had every right to defend their reputation as a place that values actual scholarship – to defend their platform to be heard by students and the wider community – from the muckraking of the Abbott government and climate change action sceptics.

Lomborg’s assessment of the potential impact of climate change isn’t just a lighthearted contrarian take. It stands at odds with what the peer-reviewed science says, and Lomborg has presented insufficient evidence to sway such thinking.

Wilson argued that “the University of Western Australia essentially endorsed a culture of soft censorship by stopping these public policy questions even being asked”. Lomborg remains as welcome as he’s always been to submit his ideas to either the world of peer review or to raise his voice in other places. He just doesn’t get a free platform to be heard at taxpayer expense.

