Monash University Vice Chancellor Sharon Pickering discusses the need for universities to move beyond simple conflict resolution and actively address the underlying causes of hate and prejudice on campus.
Monash vice chancellor Sharon Pickering, in the 11 months since she was appointed to lead Australia’s largest university, has spent a lot of time thinking about hate. Reflecting on a year when her university, along with so many others around Australia and in other liberal democracies, was engulfed by socially corrosive forces unleashed by the war in Gaza, Pickering says leaders in academia need to do more than take the heat out of campus conflicts.
In an interview with this masthead, Pickering says the first challenge for universities is to get better at recognizing hate when they see it, whether it is in the form of an anti-Zionist chant directed at Jewish students or the more subtle discrimination she has observed which makes Muslim students feel excluded from campus life.She says it is the essential job of universities to interrogate and better understand the origins, manifestations and impacts of such hatreds, rather than merely suppress expressions of antisemitism and Islamophobia.“You can’t think about a conflict as simply public order management. You have actually got to think about what building peace looks like. You can’t just deal with this as some kind of student conduct matter. It’s not.“This is deep conflict and disagreement. You have got to think about what we need to build that will start to unknot those big social, political and cultural problems. That means we have to find ways to better understand the prejudice and hate, and we need to find better ways of not just resolving that but creating conditions where you are not resorting to that. “When we are dealing with prejudice, hate and conflict, you can’t just turn it off in people’s lives, you can’t say just ‘leave it at the door
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