No, dear Free Speech Union, I do not wish to donate

Today I received an email from the Free Speech Union of New Zealand (FSU) that included the following,

Most importantly, we've decided to launch a specific membership with the Free Speech Union for academics.

The Inter-University Council on Academic Freedom, chaired by Prof. Paul Moon from Auckland University of Technology, and Prof. Elizabeth Rata from the University of Auckland, will be a branch of the Free Speech Union for academics, so we can take the fight for free speech into the academy.

Tane, it's time that academics and students who believe in free speech had a banner to organise under so they can get to work and stand up for this crucial freedom. We're going to make that possible.  

Each of these actions takes work for our talented (but small) team, and it takes money. To just do the last item, we need to launch a new website, set up a system to provide academics with a profession-specific membership, and engage with the profession of more than 20,000 academics. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars. 

The fight for free speech in our universities will not be won without Kiwis partnering with us to ensure we have enough money to keep the lights on! 

This whole saga needs to be a wake up call. If debates on free speech can’t occur at universities, where else should we expect them to take place?

A society that abandons free speech is necessarily condemned to be less equal, less free, and more violent.

Now is the time for each of us to take action and stand up for free speech.

No, dear Free Speech Union, I do not wish to donate. In my view one of the great strengths of the FSU has been that it represented all New Zealanders. The great unwashed masses were given a voice representing their right to express themselves without fear.

To then split the union and make an elite within it is not what I want to see happening.

As we have seen University Academics are apparently just like us, a rather distilled reflection in many cases, but instead of us lowly idiots they are highly educated idiots. The average person can see through the distorted intellectualism the educated sometimes tie themselves into knots to justify and the academics within the FSU need to be exposed to that simplicity of thought so they repeat the process.

Conversely, the non academic membership of the FSU needs to be exposed to the highly educated in order to soak up some of that education. I love Paul Moon and Elizabeth Rata for the things that they have taught me. Through the discussions of the FSU podcast I have been exposed to a myriad of thoughts and reasoning's and have been able to hold my own ideas up to them in order to test them.

Johnathon, Ani, Dane and all the others past and present who have been at the forefront of New Zealand society bravely taking it on for the team. Do not split the team, we are all in this together for the benefit of all.