On: New anti-racism standard will force Australian universities to use definitions...

July 13, 2026.

A royal commission compels Australian universities to adopt official definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia. The breakfast table pauses over this one.

I have watched professions define their own diseases before. The physician who names a fever after himself is not seeking truth - he is seeking a monument. The definition becomes a fence around the definer’s authority. Who drafted these particular definitions? What cases were collected before the words were fixed?

One definition is an opinion. Twenty contested incidents, examined carefully, constitute a body of evidence from which a workable definition might emerge. But the order here is reversed: the definition descends first, and the cases must be squeezed into it afterward. This is diagnosis by decree, not by observation.

The university’s instinct - to resist external imposition - is not wholly wrong, though it carries the familiar scent of professional pride. The academic who insists only colleagues may judge colleagues is protecting something, and it is not always standards. But the commission’s instinct - to impose definitions from above - carries its own pride. The bureaucrat who has never sat in a lecture hall, never witnessed a Jewish student flinch at a slur or a Muslim student find her scarf pulled, presumes to define the wound from a comfortable distance.

The dangerous case is the one where the definition and the evidence disagree. A student makes a political argument about Israel. Is it antisemitism? The definition says perhaps. The evidence - the actual words, the actual context, the actual harm - may say otherwise. Which prevails?

When the definition overrides the evidence, we are no longer diagnosing. We are sorting. The royal commission means well. Royal commissions generally do. But meaning well and observing well are different disciplines, and the second is rarer.