An Australian Senate committee, looking into whether the country’s universities are under the control of left-wing academics, has found that no such bias exists, the newspaper The Australian reported.

The inquiry was started earlier this year by the Young Liberals, the youth division of Australia’s politically conservative Liberal Party, which was then in power. The Labor Party has since taken control of the Senate.

The Young Liberals’ inquiry encouraged students to “out” left-leaning professors by submitting recordings of lectures and excerpts from textbooks to Senate investigators.

The committee received 69 such submissions and concluded that if there were examples of bias, it was because of poor teaching rather than a result of a broad-based left-wing conspiracy. The panel’s chairman, a member of the Labor Party, called the inquiry a waste of time. —Martha Ann Overland