In a troubling example of ideological heresy being recast as grounds for academic censorship, a peer-reviewed article by a Māori psychologist defending science against claims that this “white European” construct is associated with “white power” and actively disadvantages indigenous populations was consigned to an Orwellian memory hole after its publisher claimed it could “perpetuate harm to Māori”.
Published by the Journal of the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists in August 2025, the article was written by Māori clinical psychologist Dr Arna Mitchell and titled “He Wero Ano: Don’t Just Tell Me, Show Me How Science and Psychology Are Racist in New Zealand”.
Mitchell was responding principally to Systemic Racism and Oppression in Psychology, a report produced by the University of Waikato-based WERO research programme. Based on a survey of 293 psychologists, academics and students, the report claimed to “help fill a specific gap” in understanding the effects of “monocultural (Eurocentric) psychology” by demonstrating “the manifestations of racism across all levels within this discipline”.
On the basis of those qualitative findings, it called for New Zealand psychology to be transformed through decolonisation in accordance with the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi – the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and Māori chiefs – which the report interprets as requiring greater institutional recognition of Māori authority, values and knowledge systems throughout the profession.
Having argued that the report’s qualitative, self-selecting and non-representative evidence could not sustain many of its sweeping conclusions, Mitchell defended science against the suggestion that it was itself a construct of “white Europeans” associated with “white power”. She also upheld the scientist-practitioner model of clinical psychology against demands that Māori “ways of knowing” be accorded equal standing with scientific evidence in psychological training and practice.
As a practical illustration of the same tendency to provincialise values such as “empiricism” and “objectivity”, Mitchell also criticised a proposed new Code of Ethics issued for consultation by the New Zealand Psychologists Board, the profession’s statutory regulator.
Among other things, the draft stated that, for Māori and “other collectivist cultures”, ordinary concepts of privacy and confidentiality “may be somewhat altered” where sharing a client’s information was thought to facilitate additional support or culturally appropriate processes within the community.
Mitchell argued that this risked treating Māori as a homogeneous collective and granting Māori clients a weaker entitlement to autonomy and confidentiality than other patients, based on officially prescribed assumptions about their cultural identity. Although whānau – that is, the wider kinship group – may provide valuable support, it is not invariably benign. Like any extended family, it may also include controlling partners, abusive relatives or others from whom a patient has good reason to conceal sensitive clinical information.
Following publication, the article attracted criticism and several factual corrections were made. In December 2025, four psychologists jointly published a detailed response challenging Mitchell’s conception of science and her treatment of Māori psychology.
In other words, the ordinary processes of scholarly disagreement were already working: errors had been corrected and Mitchell’s arguments had been answered in print.
Then, in June 2026, after the journal’s editors sought guidance from the governing Council of the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists ( “CCP”), which publishes the journal, the Council ordered the article’s removal.
There was never any suggestion that Mitchell had plagiarised, fabricated evidence, engaged in research misconduct or committed some other fundamental error rendering her argument unreliable – grounds that might, as the journal’s former editor, Dr Kumari Valentine has pointed out, conventionally justify retraction. Instead, the CCP said the article was “not aligned with our values” and that retaining it could “perpetuate harm to Māori”.
That is not retraction in any defensible scholarly sense. Indeed, it was not really retraction at all, since rather than preserving the article within the scholarly record with a notice explaining the grounds, the CCP removed it from the journal entirely. As Michael Johnston observed for the New Zealand Initiative, had the article not been independently preserved in online repositories, scholars would have been unable to examine it and judge for themselves whether the allegations against it had any substance.
Retraction has traditionally existed to protect the integrity of the academic record when published work is fundamentally unreliable or compromised. It was never envisaged as a mechanism for deleting a contested argument because a professional body disapproves of its conclusions or believes that permitting readers to encounter them may produce some unspecified – and ideologically confected – form of cultural harm.
Once an article has been reviewed and published, disagreement should be answered through criticism, rebuttal, dialogue and further research. This is, in a sense, the scholarly embodiment of Justice Louis Brandeis’s oft-quoted concurring opinion in Whitney v California (1927): “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
Although perhaps that principle, too, must now be dismissed as an artefact of a Eurocentric liberal epistemology.
The fact that Dr Mitchell is herself Māori makes the CCP’s decision especially troubling. Evidently, Māori scholars, practitioners and patients no more speak with one voice than members of any other community. So suppressing one Māori perspective in the name of protecting an entire people from cultural harm imposes an institutional definition of what constitutes an “authentic” Māori voice.
It is a grim irony that this reproduces precisely the colonial epistemology against which the College and its allies would rail in almost any other context: an institutional authority deciding which indigenous subaltern voices may be recognised as authentic and which, in the terms of the quintessential postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, are denied the capacity to “speak” except through institutionally approved scripts.
But the decision is more circular still, with troubling implications not merely for the substance of this controversy, but for academic freedom more generally.
In challenging a framework that treated Māori interests as though Māori constituted a monolithic bloc, Mitchell advanced a series of empirical and normative claims plainly worthy of scholarly contestation. Under the relevant New Zealand legislation, for instance, she pointed out that health practitioners are under no obligation “to treat Māori individuals according to some activists’ claims about what Māori as a group think, value or desire”.
The draft Code was singled out because her clinical experience indicated that “the overwhelming majority of Māori individuals value confidentiality and autonomous decision making regarding their mental health care just as strongly as any other client”. Racially discriminating against Māori clients’ privacy rights in this way could, she said, “have a paradoxical effect by seriously eroding the confidence Māori have in the psychology profession’s ability to protect their confidentiality”.
That is a serious academic defence of individual autonomy and moral agency against a culturally deterministic model in which members of an ethnic group are presumed to share the same preferences, values and responses by virtue of their group membership.
Yet rather than accept that the scholarly environment was already doing what it was supposed to do – exposing Mitchell’s claims to scrutiny and challenge through the ordinary processes of post-publication exchange – the CCP deleted her article while invoking substantially the same framework that Mitchell had placed in dispute: the conception of Māori as a singular collective entity, vulnerable to a form of cultural harm assumed to operate across the group irrespective of the divergent judgments and experiences of individual Māori, and so grave that the only viable option was to remove the argument itself from circulation.
In other words, the premise under challenge was converted into the warrant for suppressing the challenge. What should have remained an object of scholarly inquiry became something closer to an institutional taboo; or, to switch briefly into a Schmittian register for greater precision, a form of political theology whose truth was presupposed so completely that the act of subjecting it to scrutiny could itself be recast as an intolerable harm.
Preserving independent editorial judgment, evidence-based peer review, and the intellectual risk involved in allowing criticism to unfold in an atmosphere of epistemic uncertainty may seem fraught with danger when one fervently believes oneself to be indubitably, indisputably right. History, however, reminds us what happens when those modest procedural safeguards are abandoned and authority begins deciding – indeed, knowing with certainty – which propositions may count as legitimate science, while insulating approved doctrines from ordinary empirical challenge.
Travel far enough down that road, and one reaches Lysenkoism.