Feature
Canterbury tales
by Philip Matthews
Ten years ago, Canterbury University passed a controversial master’s thesis that denied the Holocaust. The student has long since apologised for the offence that it caused and repudiated some of its content, but others at Canterbury are unwilling to let the matter rest. This year, the controversy was re-ignited when the university withdrew a history department journal, a historian threatened to resign and the original student re-entered the debate. Is Canterbury University in the business of suppressing academic freedom? Or is this issue really about academic standards? And why do New Zealand academics allow themselves and their work to be exploited by Holocaust deniers?
There is a question that, judging from the tone of his response, no one had previously thought to put to Canterbury University historian Thomas Fudge. What is his opinion of the Joel Hayward master’s thesis on which he seems to have staked both his public and academic reputation? “My opinion on the Hayward thesis?” he says. “I don’t know that I’ve got an opinion on the Hayward thesis.”
Well, is the thesis correct or is it flawed? “I’m not in a position to judge that, actually.”
Because he is not a specialist in the area? “Yeah, yeah.”
Its rightness or wrongness is not an issue? “No, it isn’t. And I’m not just trying to dodge the question. It is a subject that is not within my scholarly purview. It would be unfair of me to say that it’s a good thesis or a bad thesis.”
So, because his field of expertise is medieval and reformation history, Fudge is unable to offer any judgment on such Hayward claims as “The weight of evidence supports the view that the Nazis did not systematically exterminate Jews in gas chambers …” He can’t even hazard a guess or offer a hunch. But this seems to contradict his privately circulated views of the thesis.
Last year, when the Listener investigated the ongoing controversy of the Hayward thesis (“In denial”, November 2, 2002), the thesis’s supervisor and examiner, Canterbury history professor Vincent Orange, broke his silence at the eleventh hour to release a letter to the Listener. The letter, written to former Canterbury University chancellor Phyllis Guthardt in April 2001, describes the documents that Orange had compiled in his and Hayward’s defence when a Canterbury University working party examined the thesis – although Orange did not release the documents themselves.
Describing a letter from Fudge to Orange, written in April 2000 just as the Hayward thesis became a national story, Orange writes, “His [Fudge’s] warm approval of the thesis attracts no comment from the working party …” In another entry, Fudge “finds much merit in the work”, according to Orange. He offers support to both Hayward and Orange in further letters, as does fellow Canterbury history professor Ian Campbell.
Orange’s summary of Fudge’s April 2000 letter continues, “and yet Thomas is recognised as a careful scholar. It may be objected that he is not a specialist in Holocaust studies. The same is true of all three members of the working party. I regret that the university did not ensure that at least one member of that party had proven expertise in the field.”
The one historian who did have unquestionable expertise in the field was Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge. In 2000, Evans had just completed work as an expert witness in the David Irving trial at the High Court in London. Irving, the world’s most famous Holocaust denier, had sued author Deborah Lipstadt; Evans’s analysis of the falsifications in Irving’s work destroyed both his legal case and his reputation as a historian. The New Zealand Jewish Council sought Evans’s opinion on the Hayward thesis and submitted that opinion – a 71-page report – to the working party. Evans argued that Hayward’s thesis was “a thoroughly tendentious, biased and dishonest piece of work” that clearly constituted Holocaust denial. He recommended that Canterbury strip Hayward of his master’s degree. While agreeing that the thesis was “flawed”, the university was unable to prove dishonesty, a required grounds for revoking a degree. Thus, Canterbury remained the only reputable university in the world to endorse a work of Holocaust denial.
Yet the affair still nagged at Fudge. In his capacity as editor of the history department’s journal, History Now, Ian Campbell commissioned an essay from Fudge on the Hayward story. Given the support that both men had offered Hayward, it was no surprise that the resulting essay attacked Evans and others while seeking to rehabilitate the Holocaust-denying thesis. When the journal appeared in May, the department withdrew it, sacked Campbell as its editor and held a crisis meeting at which the volatile Fudge spontaneously offered his resignation (he has since publicly signalled his intention to remain “for 30 years”; but also says, in a subsequent interview, that he may yet leave).
Why did the department withdraw the journal? Among the reasons cited are fears of defamation action, Fudge’s misuse of personal and interdepartmental correspondence and breaching of an informal agreement that Fudge would stop discussing the Hayward affair in public. It was also noted that Campbell should have sought the prior approval of his departmental colleagues, most of whom did not share Fudge’s view that Hayward was an academic martyr.
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