Comment: Nearly 600 years ago, the Gutenberg printing press was invented. At first blush, this might seem an arcane fact and certainly not a relevant starting point for stimulating a discussion on free speech, disinformation, and our ability to have challenging conversations in Aotearoa today. But bear with me.

Just before Christmas, the descendants of Gutenberg’s press churned out National and ACT’s coalition agreement. While this document may not have been top of your summer reading list, it is undoubtably relevant to the subject of free speech.

If you turn to page 8 of this agreement, you’ll spot a clause promising to amend the law to require universities (and other tertiary players that get public funding) to “commit to a free speech policy”.

Followers of the various media storms about who should and shouldn’t be able to speak on university campuses will doubtless pick this as one of ACT’s policy progeny. Leader David Seymour, now Minister of Regulation, and an Associate Minister of Education, has previously criticised universities for declining to host certain speakers and argued the institutions should lose funding if they don’t “protect free speech”.

One inference of all this is that anyone who wants to speak on campus should be able to do so. However, while it may seem antithetical to some, I do not agree that universities platforming all comers will help.

In my view, an all-comers approach will actually reduce our capacity to expose relevant truths and understand the world in new ways. Paradoxically, I believe insisting on everybody having a platform will diminish our capacity for people to talk respectfully together about difficult topics and discuss conflicting ideas.

This is particularly concerning for me given that so much of our literature and science has been shaped by productively bringing conflicting views together. For centuries the clashes of our ideas have drawn participation in, and audiences to, our artistic, political, and even sporting theatres. Central to what has made these forums so valuable is the conflict and associated passion and reflection that has challenged, informed, and inspired us to new ways of understanding.

The problem is that today, these formats are increasingly being replaced by harsher versions—places where protagonists often shout at each other from evermore extreme positions, each asserting they occupy the higher ground. This is creating an environment where the reputational risk is just too high for many with views that contain shades of grey that cannot be captured in a sound bite. The result is that those occupying the middle ground are stepping back from publicly contributing to discussions.

Fueled by social media, this dynamic is creating an acrid cocktail of opinions that are too often conflated with the identities of their authors. In the process, evidence is being discarded by those with little interest in listening to others or evolving their position.

The result is that important topics are not discussed or understood from multiple perspectives, and the route to ultimate resolution has accordingly become even more difficult.

Rewinding to my starting point, six centuries ago when the Gutenberg printing press was invented, higher education and research was much more isolated and largely the preserve of the elite. What the press ushered in was an era of information democratisation with unparalleled potential for facilitating collective understanding.

However, this opportunity was initially buried by a stream of opinions and propaganda: if anyone could print anything, what was reliable information and what wasn’t? The resulting deficit in trust was ultimately only addressed by encouraging discussion in places that insisted on combining debate with evidence and scrutiny—universities.

Today, with more powerful and pervasive dissemination technologies, our next period of information overload could be longer and more intense. This has the potential to be catastrophic as we face existential challenges ranging from geo-political polarisation to climate stability.

For these reasons it is more important than ever that we can trust universities to help us again separate informed debate from the shouting, support differences of perspective that can be sustained yet still respected, and comfortably hold gaps in our understanding until they’re able to be filled with evidence to everybody’s satisfaction.

It is for these reasons that I very much hope Minister Seymour will think more deeply about these issues and join the university sector in our efforts to rebuild trust in our universities and, in turn, trust them to help us isolate misinformation from information, polarisation from understanding, and absolutism from nuance, for all our futures.

A law that requires a commitment to a free speech policy, but which could make speech less free, is not the answer.

This article was originally published by Stuff. 

Professor Nic Smith is Vice-Chancellor of Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.