A third of students at the University of Melbourne do not feel free to express their views on campus.

Those are not the numbers of a fringe complaint. It is what students told the federal government in its own survey.

The figures come from unpublished Education Department data, obtained by the Menzies Research Centre and released this week.

The annual Quality Indicators for Teaching and Learning survey asked 38 public universities whether students agreed with the statement, “I am free to express my views”.

At the University of Melbourne, 38.8 per cent of undergraduates and 40.2 per cent of postgraduates said they were not. At 16 universities – including the University of Sydney, the Australian Catholic University, and Charles Darwin University – at least one-third of students reported the same.

The figures were highest in disciplines where open inquiry should be most jealously protected. In humanities, social sciences and law at the University of Melbourne, 44 per cent of undergraduates felt unable to express their opinions. Among postgraduate students of society and culture at Central Queensland University, the figure reached 53 per cent.

University of Sydney associate professor of sociology Salvatore Babones put the problem plainly: “Universities cannot preach open inquiry while so many students do not feel free to express their views on campus.”

The report notes, pointedly, that university academics are vocal advocates for their own academic freedom – and for students exercising that freedom in causes the academics themselves support. They are considerably less prominent when the issue is students’ freedom to question their professors.

These numbers do not exist in isolation. The Australian Christian Freedom Index, launched at Parliament House in May 2026, found that a staggering 92 per cent of Christians working in healthcare do not feel safe openly sharing their beliefs. It includes documented cases of Christians losing employment, being subjected to legal proceedings, or facing professional consequences for expressing faith in public settings, including universities.

This pressure comes in an increasingly hostile legal environment. The ACFI documents 74 laws across nine Australian jurisdictions that restrict Christian freedoms – almost half passed since 2000.

The QILT survey data did not reveal whether self-censoring students were religious or conservative. It did not need to. The pattern it documents – students across all disciplines and institutions choosing not to speak – is consistent with what the ACFI records for Christians in public life more broadly. The mechanism is the same. People calculate the cost and stay silent.

A university is not functioning as a university if a third of its students have made that calculation.

The Menzies Research Centre has called on the Education Department to publish university-level data automatically, rather than requiring paid applications to access it. That is a reasonable first step. It is also a revealing one.

The fact that data on whether publicly-funded universities are protecting free expression had to be purchased for more than $1000 suggests the sector is not especially eager to be measured.

Australia has no general statutory protection for freedom of expression. In the absence of such protection, the chilling of speech – in universities, in workplaces, in professional life – is left to accumulate without remedy.