In response to the Creative Matters call for statements on risk, I ended up writing at length on a panel organised by Memo Review to discuss the repression of work by Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi, firstly by Creative Australia in rescinding his invitation to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, and then by Monash University in their ‘indefinite postponement’ of the Stolon Press exhibition featuring Sabsabi’s work. The essay became too long for Creative Matters, but is published in full in Overland, and, available here. Below, an excerpt that addresses the implications for current University activity.
“Universities are places where concepts are ideally produced through the critical application of expert knowledge and debate, and both the swiftness and non-discursiveness of the decision-making – around the withdrawal of opportunities for Khaled Sabsabi – reflects a continuing trend of risk management strategies that by definition silence the critical activity that is the university’s historical function. In 2023, for example, the University of Melbourne where I work adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-semitism, with little support from academics Jewish or otherwise, and deliberately sidelining long standing academic debates, particularly among Jewish intellectuals, of what constitutes racism and the degree to which a nation state can claim to represent a cultural or religious tradition. As the university institutions pursue the insulation of their own practice from academic knowledge it houses and sells, it has fallen to students to fight for universities to remain accountable their core values of knowledge-based dialogue and debate – it is primarily due to student protests that the university where I work has undertaken to, some day, disclose its investments in weapons manufacture.
As any observer of the state of universities internationally is aware, there is nothing specifically Australian about the treatment of Sabsabi by Monash University.
Anti antisemitism is now the most prominent rationale for attacks on the autonomy of Anglophone universities, in a McCarthyist logic of expansion echoing Beck’s analysis of the inexhaustible character of civilisational risk. The Trump administration in the United States announced that it would remove $US 400 million of government funding from Columbia University due to their ‘failure to protect students from antisemitism’, despite the University having unleashed the most aggressive responses to pro-Palestine student protests in the nation, including inviting police to disperse non-violent protest on campus. The administration also pursued the detention and deportation of Palestinian Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil in another clear example-setting exercise highlighting their power and lack of regard for due process. The University’s prompt caving to Trump’s demands of compliance to receive the funding, of course, achieved nothing – interim President Dr. Katrina Armstrong, who presided over the policy changes, soon stepped down after private suggestions they might slow-walk their compliance were leaked. Once again, these examples are designed to distribute risk to the rest of the sector.
Where one might have expected a university like Columbia to advocate against the illegal detention of one of its students, the corporate university sees human rights as an area of study that can be productised for student consumers, rather than a value that might be upheld in its operations.
While Australian universities are not governed by unaccountable boards of trustees like US institutions, the financialisation of their dealings creates an environment of risk management that is modelled on the corporate form. The dominance of government funding in the Australian system also presents itself now as a substantial risk: my own institution would be the most likely to be able to weather a withholding of public funds, but it would still be far worse than the situation at any large private university in the US that it considers a rankings peer. And as Harvard University is finding out, even the largest private endowment in the world does not insulate institutions from other mechanisms of authoritarian government control, such as through student visa revocations.”
For the Creative Matters audience, what can be learned by thinking through the risks attached by institutions to the work of Sabsabi?
One implication is that we can no longer afford to pretend that as artists we are not deeply implicated in the politics of higher education and the decisions of our institutions of higher learning.
As what Sahhar (2025) describes as ‘the pursuit of an alarming sort of quiet’ suffuses spaces of higher learning, it will be a challenge to provide sanctuary for artistic reflection on serious issues, and to not have the academic debate on this sidelined by modes of organisational risk management which has no intellectual accountability to the communities that produce knowledge in our fields. Our institutions have ceded authority in discursive production to media platforms outside the university that work on logics of attention and affect management rather than conceptual rigour. How to articulate the historical possibility of university knowledge into this dynamic environment of public speech is a risky challenge for us all.
References
Bates, Chandi. “University of Melbourne Urged to Drop Repressive Anti-Protest and Surveillance Policies.” Human Rights Law Centre, April 16, 2025. https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2025/4/16/university-of-melbourne-urged-to-drop-repressive-anti-protest-and-surveillance-policies.
Campbell, Marion, and Philip Morrissey, eds. The People’s Tribunal: An Inquiry into the “Business Improvement Program” at The University of Melbourne. Melbourne: Aboriginal Humanities Project, Melbourne, in association with Discipline, 2016.
Gordon, Neve. “Antisemitism and Zionism: The Internal Operations of the IHRA Definition.” Middle East Critique 33, no. 3 (July 2, 2024): 345–60.
Klinke, Andreas, and Ortwin Renn. “A New Approach to Risk Evaluation and Management: Risk-Based, Precaution-Based, and Discourse-Based Strategies.” Risk Analysis: An Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis 22, no. 6 (December 1, 2002): 1071–94.
Sahhar, Micaela. “Seeking a Quieter Australia: On the Silencing of Khaled Sabsabi.” Overland, February 17, 2025. https://overland.org.au/2025/02/seeking-a-quieter-australia-on-the-silencing-of-khaled-sabsabi/.
Danny Butt is Coordinator of Research in Design and Production at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. His book Artistic Research in the Future Academy was published by Intellect / University of Chicago Press in 2017.