On the surface, the University of New South Wales banning the use of language deemed ‘offensive’ towards Indigenous Australians seems like the kind of well-meaning measure that’s hard to disagree with. After all, who doesn’t want to give the role of Indigenous Australians in our nation’s history the recognition it deserves?

However, by policing the words staff and students use to discuss a topic as broad and complex as Australia’s history, UNSW’s ‘diversity toolkit’ goes far beyond teaching respect for the story of Indigenous people in our past. Indeed, it uses language as a fillip for imposing ideological conformity.

It’s one thing to try make a taboo out of words like ‘aboriginal’ and ‘dreamtime’ that have long since become uncontroversial parts of our nation’s vernacular.

But when students are taught to shun basic facts like ‘Indigenous Australians have been here for 40,000 years’, cultural sensitivity starts to look more like politically correct doublethink.

More brazen still is the diversity toolkit’s attempt to recast Australia’s colonial history as a war of foreign aggression.

Teaching students that instead of talking about Australia’s ‘settlement’ or ‘discovery’, they should refer to Captain Cook’s ‘invasion’ is about more than semantics. It lends credence to a view of history that holds early British settlers as war criminals responsible for perpetuating a military takeover of the Australian continent.

To be sure, that’s certainly one take of history. But it’s hardly the only one.

The reality is that what has happened between Captain Cook’s first voyage some 246 years ago and Australia becoming the country it is today is a long and complicated story upon which fair-minded people can have totally different opinions.

On one hand, many note that since Cook’s first voyage was a scientific expedition and spent less than a year on the Australian mainland, villainising Cook as an ‘invader’ is both unfair and, more importantly, misleading.

Others insist that although large-scale Indigenous deaths from smallpox were an undoubtable tragedy, an unintended consequence of first contact can hardly be called genocide.

What’s more, historian Keith Windschuttle has argued that accusations of Indigenous genocide are implausible given the profound influence of Enlightenment values and the Church of England’s evangelical revival on colonial behaviour.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that Native Title land rights don’t come close to redressing the wrong of dispossessing Indigenous people from their traditional lands. Some go further, arguing that Australia’s status as a sovereign country is based on nothing more than a convenient legal fiction.

These are great debates to be had. And if there’s any place where the right to engage in free and open discussion about Australia’s past deserves to be encouraged – not stifled – it’s a university history class. History is about reaching an informed conclusion based on all the available facts, evidence and ideas. Ideologically zealous administrators who suppress opinions because they run against the grain of the campus hivemind aren’t just abusing their authority. By closing their students’ minds to conflicting ideas and perspectives, they are reneging on their first duty as educators.

Indeed, those who are firmly wedded to one view of history have just as much to gain from the free flow of ideas as everyone else. Exposure to opinions you disagree with is educationally valuable for everyone, if only because it forces people to reflect critically on why it is they believe what they do.

Universities should aim to produce graduates that are well-versed in grappling with the widest possible variety of ideas and perspectives. Let’s be clear – creating an environment where students are led to believe the best way to get a good grade is to wrap themselves in post-colonial guilt is doing precisely the opposite.

The same can be said about blacklisting the phrase ‘Australian history’ in favour of dividing history into two periods – ‘pre’ and ‘post’ invasion.

No doubt it’s fashionable among some circles to denounce the very notion of ‘Australian history’ as an Anglo-centric social construct created by centuries of colonial occupation. Yet at the same time, there’s plenty of people who think the phrase Australian history usefully denotes the period following when Australia became a colony of the British empire.

Once again, this is a legitimate point of difference between two competing historical perspectives. A university more interested in free-enquiry than ideological inoculation should encourage the airing of both and leave it up to students to decide

The sad reality is that while it might be satisfying for tenured Professors to use word games to instil students with their own ideologically charged vision of history, it does nothing for the plight of Indigenous Australians today.

In fact, among the many practical challenges the Indigenous community is yet to overcome, a lack of empathy from history majors in sandstone universities does surely not rate highly.

Universities pay plenty of lip service to ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’. Unfortunately, they seem to lack follow through when it comes to the battle of ideas in the classroom; the very place where toleration deserves its staunchest defence.

If we want universities where ideas are tested on their merits rather than enclaves of ideological uniformity, we should resist any attempt to force-feed students one version of history while using verbal sleight-of-hands to censor the rest.

That means tearing up the diversity toolkit and trusting students to make their minds up for themselves.