Writing earlier this week on these pages, Andrew Lynch, dean of law and justice at UNSW Sydney, accused those who have criticised the politicisation of law courses of advocating an absurdly narrow, “black letter” conception of the curriculum law schools should adopt.

Their goal, he claimed, is to ensure that “law schools teach just a bunch of ‘black letters’ on a page” – “an impoverished conception of law” that would “produce a profession ill-equipped to serve its society”.

Lynch’s characterisation of these intellectual troglodytes would hardly surprise Aristotle, who first identified the straw man fallacy in his On Sophistical Refutations.

Its telling sign is that the target is purely imaginary – for Lynch neither identifies, nor can plausibly identify, any living, breathing human being who fits his caricature.

But in this instance as in so many others, the “ignoratio elenchi” fallacy, which is surely the oldest trick in the academic book, serves its purpose. That purpose, Isaac Watts elegantly explained in Logick; or, The Right Use of Reason (1725), is to allow a disputant who “finds his adversary too hard for him”, to “with slyness and subtlety turn the discourse aside to some other kindred point which he can prove, and exult in that new argument wherein his opponent had never contradicted him”.

Once he has “with a great deal of pomp, attacked and confounded these images of straw”, he can proudly proclaim “a triumph over his adversary, as though (he) had utterly confuted his opinion”.

Thanks to that ruse, Lynch completely avoids what is actually at issue: whether it is acceptable for a law school to grade students on the enthusiasm with which they deliver a “welcome to country”.

The university’s own justification, if one can call it that, is manifestly pretextual. In effect, were it true, as Macquarie University contends, that those exercises in conspicuous virtue are needed for dealing with Indigenous clients, why would they be optional in the honours course, which opens the path to a practising certificate, but compulsory in an undergraduate course, which does not? The reality is that far from being formative of crucial legal skills, grading students on that basis is no less a form of indoctrination than would be assessing them on their fervour in reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

It is therefore hardly unreasonable to ask just how widespread phenomena of that kind are in our law schools, which, as well as being heavily funded by taxpayers, play a central role in training Australia’s governing elite. And the fact that Lynch himself seems confused on the responsibilities of universities makes that question especially pressing.

Thus, citing Hal Wootten, his school’s founding dean, Lynch emphasises the “absolute need” for a law school to “communicate to its students a keen concern for those on whom the law bears harshly”. It is, however, one thing to explore the social context and impact of the legal system; it is quite another to allow teaching to degenerate into preaching, imposing the lecturer’s conception of social justice on students who have little choice but to acquiesce.

Nor are the stakes trivial. As Lynch presumably knows, the 1915 Declaration of the American Association of University Professors, which defined the modern idea of academic freedom, justified the rights and privileges it ascribed to universities by reference to their role as “nonpartisan institutions of learning” that encourage students “to think for themselves”, rather than force-feeding them “readymade solutions”.

As US Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren wrote, in his enormously influential plurality opinion in Sweezy (1957), “the classroom”, if it is to live up to that function, must be a veritable microcosm of “the marketplace of ideas”, in which university students are “trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, (rather) than through any kind of authoritative selection’ ”.

And drawing on the same intellectual foundations, Warren’s colleague, Felix Frankfurter, a towering figure in jurisprudence, authoritatively defined the academic’s indispensable attributes.

“The special task of teachers,” he wrote in his oft-cited Wieman (1952) opinion, “is to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens, who, in turn, make possible an enlightened and effective public opinion.”

That teachers can only do “by precept and practice, by the very atmosphere which they generate: they must be exemplars of openmindedness and free inquiry” – for it is only in that way that they can they provide not just instruction but “the moral education” for democratic life, with its need for tolerance and civility.

If academics fail in that respect, stressed William Van Alstyne in a classic article published in 1972, the justification for the special freedoms of universities necessarily fails with them.

University administrators therefore have not just a right but a duty, said the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in a 1972 opinion co-authored by Professor John Paul Stevens before his appointment to the Supreme Court, to prevent, correct and reprimand behaviour by academics that is “destructive of the proper functioning of the institution” – including “uncontrolled expression at variance with established curricular standards” that amounts to compelled speech or forced indoctrination.

Not a single, solitary one of those opinions was penned by the Gradgrindian “black letter” lawyers who, like evil goblins, populate Lynch’s demonology. Rather, what the eminent judges had in common was an abiding, perhaps greatly exaggerated, belief in the contribution higher education could make to an often searingly divided democracy by teaching young people to face reality with an open countenance, unprotected by false certainties or fashionable prejudices.

And they well knew Max Weber’s famous statement that the university does not have “the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations”

– along with his warning that if universities abandoned the ideals of impartiality and objectivity, they would “spawn only fanatical sects but never a genuine community”.

However, the judges who authored those opinions knew one more thing too, which the AAUP itself had stressed in 1915. If universities refused to fulfil, with “judicial severity”, their responsibility to ensure impartiality and objectivity, and instead invoked academic freedom “as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship”, then it was inevitable that others would step in, more bluntly and forcibly, to correct their failings.

That is what we are now witnessing in the United States, where the Trump administration is exercising its right, which the Supreme Court confirmed in Rumsfeld v Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights (2006), to withdraw federal funding from errant institutions. With our own universities having in recent years tolerated the harassment of Jewish students and faculty, struck repugnant deals with Islamists and descended, in the voice referendum, into unabashed partisanship, it is high time they took a cold, hard look at themselves.