Members of the Wellesley College faculty reacted strongly when word spread that Peking University might fire professor Xia Yeliang (夏業良), a critic of the Chinese government. Xia, an economist, had visited Wellesley over the summer after the college signed a partnership agreement with Peking University.
In September, 130 Wellesley faculty members sent an open letter to Peking University’s president, warning that if Xia were dismissed for his political views, they would seek reconsideration of the partnership. The next month, Xia was fired. Peking University said it was because of his teaching, not his politics, but many at Wellesley doubted that. Still, after much debate, the faculty voted to keep the partnership, as the college president preferred.
Like US corporations, US colleges and universities have been extending their brands overseas, building campuses, study centers and partnerships, often in countries with autocratic governments. Unlike corporations, universities claim to place ideals and principles, especially academic freedom, over income. However, as professors abroad face consequences for what they say, most universities are doing little more than wringing their hands. Unlike foreign programs that used to be faculty-driven, most of the newer ones are driven by administrations and money.
“Globalization raises all kinds of issues that didn’t come up when it was just kids spending junior year in France,” said Susan Reverby, one of the Wellesley professors supporting Xia.
“What does it mean to let our name be used? Where do we draw a line in the sand? Does a partnership with another university make their faculty our colleagues, obliging us to stand up for them? Do we wait for another Tienanmen Square?” she said.
Wellesley is hardly alone in wrestling with these issues. Many US universities have partnerships with Peking University, but few reacted to Xia’s dismissal.
“We went into our relationship with Peking University with the knowledge that American standards of academic freedom are the product of 100 years of evolution,” said Richard Saller, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, which opened a US$7 million center at Peking University last year.
“We think engagement is a better strategy than taking such moral high ground that we can’t engage with some of these universities,” he said.
This week, another prominent professor, Zhang Xuezhong (張雪忠), who teaches at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, lost his job after refusing to apologize for writing that the Chinese Communist Party was hostile to the rule of law. The university has many partnerships with foreign institutions, including an exchange program with the law school at Willamette University in Oregon and an executive MBA program offered with the University of Wisconsin Law School.
With so many universities seeking a foothold in China — New York University (NYU) opened a Shanghai campus this year and Duke will open one in Kunshan next year — concern is growing over China’s record of censorship. Earlier this year, the Chinese government banned classroom discussion of seven topics, which includes human rights and the past mistakes of the Chinese Communist Party.
Of course, similar issues arise elsewhere. Last year, just as Yale was starting a liberal arts college in partnership with the National University of Singapore, the Yale faculty, despite the university president’s objections, passed a resolution expressing concern about Singapore’s “recent history of lack of respect for civil and political rights.”
“There’s a million unanswered questions about Yale and Singapore,” Yale professor Christopher Miller said. “We don’t know how much of the Singapore specialty of self-censorship has taken place. I continue to think the whole setup is inappropriate, and deeply regret that this was set up where it was and the way it was.”
Last month, Brandeis University president Frederick Lawrence suspended a 15-year partnership with Al-Quds University, a Palestinian university in Jerusalem, after campus demonstrators in black military garb raised a Nazi-like salute, and the president of Al-Quds, asked to condemn the demonstration, responded with a letter that Lawrence deemed “unacceptable and inflammatory.” Syracuse University followed suit. However, Bard College, which offers dual degrees with Al-Quds, is staying.
Many US colleges argue that their presence abroad helps to spread liberal values and push other societies toward openness, whereas leaving would accomplish little.
“I think engagement is more important than rules right now,” Institute of International Education president Allan Goodman said. “It’s in our institute’s DNA to advocate engagement, because that process is what brings change.”
Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth cautioned that universities must be prepared to revoke partnerships that violate basic principles of freedom.
“I do see value in liberal education, but you have to ask on what terms,” he said. “If a country like China wants to legitimize a cramped version of liberal education by attracting prestigious Western universities, there’s a real possibility of those universities compromising the values on which they were built because they’re so eager to get into China.”
Some universities, including Columbia in New York City, have created study centers rather than branch campuses, in part to avoid commitments that would be hard to break.
At Wellesley, the faculty protest did have some effect: Wellesley’s president announced that a faculty group would develop recommendations “for the parameters and elements of the partnership” to be approved by the full faculty. Xia is being invited to spend two years as a visiting fellow at the Freedom Project at the college.
However, given that Chinese universities have many Chinese Communist Party representatives in their administration, Thomas Cushman, the sociology professor who leads that project, is still deeply concerned.
“We’re not telling them to adopt the Bill of Rights,” he said. “We’re asking what it means for Wellesley to work with a regime that instills fear in people. I’m concerned that a formal relationship could affect how we work here — that maybe in our exchange program, we’d only send people who talk about safe subjects.”
When US universities establish campuses abroad, they usually have explicit agreements guaranteeing free speech for faculty and students within the cloister of the campus — but implicitly accepting local limits on off-campus expression.
“As I believe would be true in any country,” Duke provost Peter Lange said. “Your behavior there is governed by the laws of that country.”
That understanding also holds at New York University’s campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, both paid for by those governments. While university president John Sexton sees it as the first global university, that vision has many critics. The faculty has voted no-confidence in Sexton partly over this issue.
In 2011, after the arrest of three dissidents in the United Arab Emirates, Human Rights Watch called on NYU to protest: “Is NYU going to advertise the magnificence of studying in Abu Dhabi while the government persecutes an academic for his political beliefs?” the group’s Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson said.
NYU responded that in Abu Dhabi or elsewhere, it did not get involved in matters outside its academic mission. In September, the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote to the trustees, describing their concerns about the overseas campuses.
“Accepting vast sums of money from foreign governments puts NYU and every scholar affiliated with the university in a morally compromising situation,” it said. “In such situations, academic freedom is usually the first casualty.”
While working inside a bubble in a country hostile to free speech, the letter said, faculty’s important public role is stifled.
The trustees did not respond, NYU AAUP chapter head Andrew Ross said.
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