Michael Sexton SC

I want to start, as the Chancellor has just done, by congratulating the new graduates, all of whom have spent years of study in undergraduate courses or postgraduate work. Today is the culmination of those efforts, and it is a day that all of you, together with your family and friends, will always remember. I include your family and friends, as the Chancellor did, because most of you would have had enormous support from them over recent years, and it’s their success today as well as yours.

My own graduation from law school at Melbourne University took place at the end of the 1960s; you’ll be able to work out my great age from those dates. Australian universities were very different places at that time. Almost all of us were full-time students and had no need to find outside employment during our years at university, and we knew that there would be very little difficulty in finding a job in our particular field at the end of our course of study. And I think that was true, as well, for engineering students at Melbourne University at that time. Of course, there were no IT students then. Those Arcadian days are, of course, long past, and I realise that life now is much more arduous, both during student days and on leaving university for the wider world. Nevertheless, while appreciating that you will be much occupied in the next few years in establishing a foothold in your chosen profession, I wanted to urge you today to hold on to a value that should be at the heart of universities, and that is the search for truth.

In the 1960s, the American economist and author, John Kenneth Galbraith, who died in 2006 at the great age of 97, coined the phrase ‘the conventional wisdom’ to describe views about history, politics and economics that were widely accepted, seldom challenged, and often false. Although rejecting many of these views in his books, Galbraith recognised, however, the pressures that many members of society, including members of the academic community, felt to accept them.

There is a great deal of conventional wisdom in Australia at this time, and considerable pressure, especially on young people starting in their careers, to accept it. Some of that pressure is designed to frustrate the search for truth by restricting freedom of speech, and so ultimately, freedom of thought. This was in many ways the theme of a letter of advice to students commencing at American universities in September of this year from 15 academics at Yale, Princeton and Harvard. The letter advised students, ‘Think for yourself, and refer to the vice of conformism, where it is all too easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion.’ They went on to say that open-mindedness, critical thinking and debate are essential to discovering the truth.

As I mentioned, this value, the search for truth, should be at the heart of any university, but even universities, particularly in the United States, on some occasions, and on some occasions in this country, have encountered attacks on freedom of speech. I should say at this point that freedom of speech is not, of course, an unqualified value. It has always been subject to a range of restrictions under the legal system, including the law of defamation, which is designed to protect individual reputation; the law of contempt, which is designed to protect the administration of justice; and laws dealing with issues of national security. But it’s only in relatively recent years in Australia that some members of the community have argued that publications should be prohibited if they offend any section of society, and there are laws, bad laws in my view, at both the federal and state level in Australia that make it unlawful to offend section of society, irrespective of whether what is said is true or not.

I don’t suggest setting out to offend people, but sometimes debate on political, social and economic issues can be robust, and some people are very easily offended. The right response to views one disagrees with is not to suppress those views, but to put a contrary view. As I’ve already noted, this attitude has manifested itself in quite a number of American universities, where student groups have objected that persons with whose views they disagree should not be allowed to speak on campus, and if those persons have come to speak anyway, their meetings have been disrupted by attempts to stop them being heard. This has not occurred to anything like the same extent in Australian universities, but there have been instances of that kind of conduct in recent years. Another example of this phenomenon has been the use of so-called trigger warnings in the course of materials in various American universities to warn students that some of them might be offended by references to example, certain historical events. Again, this has not been a common occurrence in Australian universities, but there have been instances of this conduct on the part of academics in this country.

All this, of course, represents an attack on the search for truth. It’s designed to prevent people from becoming aware of another side to a political, social or economic question. So I want to suggest that even after leaving the university environment, you exercise your freedom of thought by looking with some scepticism – not cynicism, but scepticism, at those who promulgate conventional wisdom, to emphasise what Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the University of Virginia, called the inimitable freedom of the human mind.

I realise this is not an easy course to take, and that as I’ve already suggested, young people starting off in organisations, whether in the public or the private sector, are often expected by those who occupy senior positions in those organisations, to publicly conform to the corporate view, even on political and social questions that are unrelated to business activities. You’ll have to use your own judgement as to how far you are prepared to have your own opinions confined by those kinds of constraints.

In any event, none of those weighty questions should detract from today as a day of celebration on the part of yourselves, your family and your friends, of your achievements over recent years in various courses of study, and the recognition of those achievements at this ceremony. Congratulations again, and my very best wishes for success in your future career. Chancellor.