A democracy and human rights festival set to be held at the University of Queensland this week includes an event asking how Australia should tackle the 'rise of the far right'.

Sounds scary huh? When I think far right, I think fascists or white nationalists or even Nazis. Authoritarians, one and all. True threats to democracies.

However, the event links Pauline Hanson's One Nation to broader international currents of right-wing populism, characterising this political trajectory as having a 'toxic gravitational pull'.

One presenter even suggests trade unionism could operate as a kind of 'vaccine' against such ideologies.

Universities are entitled, indeed obliged, to facilitate such discussions. An academy incapable of interrogating the resurgence of populism, or the relationship between grievance politics and democratic legitimacy, is failing in one of its core duties.

One Nation's enduring presence in Australian politics warrants scrutiny. Academic freedom should not be curtailed merely because political figures resent criticism.

Universities must not become engines of censorship.

But the issue isn't whether right-wing populism should be examined - of course it should. The issue is the glaring asymmetry of the scholarly gaze. This isn't just about who universities invite to an event or what label they slap on One Nation, as much as I believe the 'far-right' label goes too far. It's about intellectual selectivity.

These groupthink ideological get-togethers will scrutinise the so-called 'far right' with enthusiasm, but rarely apply the same critical energy to the ideological left that dominates much of university life, including the far left.

That selectivity turns legitimate academic inquiry into institutional bias. The problem isn't that academics have political convictions - everyone does. It's the entrenched habit of pathologising one form of alleged radicalism as a democratic threat while lauding another as a marker of moral seriousness.

If universities were serious about challenging extremism, they would critique the far-left movements that are mainstays on campuses right around the country.

Instead, in this case at least, they single out One Nation while turning a blind eye to the left equivalent of political radicalism.

Progressive ideologies have their own illiberal tendencies, orthodoxies and intolerance of dissent. They too can substitute moral condemnation for argument. Yet within the academy, left-wing radicalism is rarely diagnosed as such.

It's more often presented as 'activism', 'solidarity' or 'social justice'. This linguistic double standard shapes the boundaries of acceptable discourse: one side of politics is clinically diagnosed (by the untrained, I might add), while the other is morally affirmed.

Universities don't describe the Greens, for example, as far left because they don't want to. More likely, many academics don't come close to thinking they are. Yet the Greens are as far left as One Nation is far right. The inconsistency tells you plenty about political bias on some university campuses. Labels are not neutral descriptors; they set the parameters of acceptable debate before the argument even begins.

Beyond the immediate political framing, this asymmetry poses a deeper educational danger. When students are insulated from critiques of progressive orthodoxies, the university fails in its most basic purpose: cultivating independent thinkers.

A serious education requires the friction of opposing ideas. By shielding the campus left from the same scrutiny applied to the right, universities risk fostering intellectual fragility.

Students graduate equipped not with the habits of persuasion, but with the vocabulary of condemnation. Or they rail against it and become tribal opponents.

It also damages the university's capacity to understand the society around it. When a scholarly community shares too many of the same assumptions, its blind spots become institutionalised. Academic discourse, designed to test ideas, risks becoming an exercise in mutual affirmation. That helps explain why parts of the academy so often misread the broader public mood.

To be sure, universities aren't monoliths. Some are worse than others. Serious scholarship still occurs across the sector, including work that challenges fashionable assumptions. But the broader institutional pattern is hard to deny. The right is scrutinised relentlessly, while the campus left is normalised.

The irony is that this asymmetry fuels the very populism the academy claims to be dissecting. When voters who are already suspicious of elite institutions see universities labelling right-wing populism as pure evil, while treating progressive orthodoxies as common sense, trust in expertise erodes.

It reinforces the populist narrative that institutions are stacked against them.

The standard institutional defence is that universities remain formally neutral while academics exercise individual freedom. That's true to some extent, but institutional neutrality isn't the same as intellectual balance. A university can be formally neutral while remaining culturally predictable. It can permit debate while rewarding only certain modes of dissent.

Can you ever see a seminar on the dangers of progressive illiberalism, or the way activist politics can erode democratic legitimacy, being held on campuses such as the University of Queensland?

Maybe it happens all the time and my invitations have been lost in the mail.

The greatest danger to higher education is not bias itself. It is bias so deeply embedded that it no longer recognises itself as bias at all.

Once that threshold is crossed, scholarship stops testing ideas and starts preaching them. Universities then become less places of inquiry than institutions of ideological affirmation. That is not merely a failure of balance, it's a betrayal of what higher education is supposed to be all about.