Australian universities may need to appoint “internal ombudsmen” to referee campus disputes, after a bruising week of Royal Commission hearings exposed the difficulty of ensuring safety in a polarised world.
Marketing consultant Tim Winkler said vice-chancellors’ apologies over their handling of pro-Palestinian protests demonstrated that they had an antisemitism problem that they were unlikely to solve by simply updating their policies.
Winkler said the World Cup had demonstrated the need for on-the-ground adjudicators to determine whether rules had been broken, even in a highly codified game like football.
“Perhaps we need more umpires in our institutions to look at [things] quickly and deal with [them] in an objective manner,” he said.
“They won’t get it right all the time, but they will address things relatively rapidly and get people to move on. It’s pretty clear that if students and staff aren’t feeling safe, and institutions are saying they’ve failed in their current approach, new approaches are needed.”
