Last September, Wellesley College found itself embroiled in a debate about academic freedom in China.
Led by Thomas Cushman, a sociologist at the college, a group of faculty members rallied support for a Peking University professor who said he was under fire for his political views. Mr. Cushman and others argued that the high-profile case raised questions about Wellesley’s work in China and challenged the administration to reconsider a nascent partnership with Peking.
A year later, the liberal-arts college still works with the Chinese institution, but it has overhauled its process for setting up international collaborations, giving faculty a much louder say. And while the controversy has died down on the Massachusetts campus, Mr. Cushman wants to take his campaign beyond Wellesley.
He is working with Xia Yeliang, the embattled Peking faculty member who is now a visiting fellow with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, to press for a broader conversation about the agreements struck between American colleges and those in China and other authoritarian countries. Colleges need to examine the consequences of these ties, they argue. And American faculty members must play a more prominent role in setting the terms for overseas partnerships, particularly in places with differing notions of academic freedom.
“What’s the purpose of education? What’s the purpose of international exchange?” Mr. Xia says. “You have to keep that principle in mind.”
Otherwise, he warns, international partners may “just want to borrow your good name and ruin that name.”
Contentious Confrontation
With its gracious buildings and verdant lawns, Wellesley seems the picture of serenity. But the atmosphere last fall at the 140-year-old women’s college was anything but. Over several contentious months of debate, Mr. Cushman and his allies were branded as cultural imperialists seeking to impose Western academic principles. And Mr. Cushman wasn’t shy about playing hardball, suggesting that those who wanted to continue the relationship with Peking had an agenda and even accusing one, a Chinese-born mathematics professor, of promoting the views of the Communist Party of China.
That a relatively modest partnership led to such acrimony highlights what a hot-button issue international projects can become. After all, Peking and Wellesley have no plans to set up a joint campus or joint degree programs, just exchange a handful of students and scholars.
In fact, the debate was really three: one about Mr. Xia, another about Wellesley’s work with Peking and in China, and a third about professors’ part in major initiatives at the college, including its global strategy.
The uproar began when professors at Wellesley learned that Mr. Xia, an economist and human-rights campaigner, said he might be fired by Peking. Mr. Cushman and others drafted a petition, eventually signed by nearly 40 percent of the faculty, protesting Mr. Xia’s likely dismissal and calling on Wellesley to rethink the partnership if he was let go.
Mr. Xia was indeed sacked and he maintains it was retribution for his criticism of the Chinese government, including his decision to sign Charter 08, an appeal for democracy and human rights in China. Peking administrators have disputed that, saying his contract was terminated because he was a poor teacher.
The contested narrative around Mr. Xia’s firing led several petition signers at Wellesley to withdraw their support.
Philip L. Kohl, a professor of anthropology, was one who came to see the Xia case as less than clear-cut. In the end, he says, he felt there was a greater chance of effecting change in Chinese higher education by continuing the partnership, rather than dissolving it. “I think positive results are better achieved by being engaged than by condemning from afar,” he says.
Mr. Cushman insists he wasn’t out to kill the partnership, pointing out that the Wellesley petition never called for severing connections, only reconsidering the relationship.
The sociology professor cut his academic teeth abroad, studying dissidents in the twilight of the Soviet Union, and he brings a cold warrior’s skepticism to working with Communist China. Still, he says, “You can say that exchanges are a good idea and that we need to be careful. I don’t know why you can’t do both. ‘Make friends with the wolf but keep one hand on the ax,’ as the Russians say.”
But others on campus viewed Mr. Cushman’s critique as too black-and-white. “I understand my colleagues’ desire to help the guy,” Charles Bu, the professor accused of promoting the Communist Party, says of Mr. Xia. (Mr. Bu has denied the allegation.) “But they don’t understand the culture,” he says.
“The way they went about it was just shortsighted.”
The heart of Mr. Cushman’s critique—and that of Mr. Xia, who is also a visiting fellow at Wellesley’s Freedom Project, an academic endeavor directed by Mr. Cushman that explores the concept of freedom in different societies—is that working with universities in authoritarian countries like China could limit academic freedom on American college campuses. Will topics taboo in China, like Tibetan independence and pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, be similarly off-limits at Wellesley, at least in the context of the partnership with Peking?
Deferring to ‘Realpolitik’
American colleges haven’t done enough, Mr. Cushman argues, to ensure that core academic values are part of international partnerships. Instead of pressing for these principles, he charges that American colleges have too often adopted a cautious approach. “We’re being deferential to realpolitik concerns,” he says. “We’re being more diplomats than critical intellectuals.”
The agreement signed in June 2013 by the presidents of Peking and Wellesley, a copy of which was obtained by The Chronicle, makes no mention of academic freedom, characterizing the partnership only in the broadest of terms.
That won’t be the case with new international agreements. A special panel, named in the wake of the Xia case and chaired by Wellesley’s provost, Andrew Shennan, has drafted a template for future collaborations with foreign universities that includes provisions on academic freedom.
In addition, all institutional partnerships will now have to be vetted by a faculty international-studies committee, though relationships between individual researchers or at the department level won’t be subject to such review.
Mr. Shennan calls the past year’s discussion constructive and says faculty members were right to insist that they be “central actors” in overseas projects, like the one with Peking, that have an academic component. Wellesley’s governance structures, he says, had not kept up with its international activities. “The conversation we had on campus was a good one that needed to happen,” he says. “It’s possible it slowed us down, but that’s all to the good.”
While Mr. Cushman, too, is satisfied with the outcome, he and Mr. Xia believe that it’s not sufficient for such discussions to happen at Wellesley alone. After all, similar debates over international linkages and professors’ role have convulsed other institutions, including Duke, New York, and Yale Universities.
Indeed, such concerns are not limited to American higher education—this summer Mr. Cushman was asked to give a speech on the subject at the British Parliament, sponsored by the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank.
But Rupert Sutton, the author of a report on the influence of foreign sources of revenue on British universities released by the society, says institutions’ decisions to forge connections with and accept funds from abroad are rarely discussed. Instead, the debates that occur tend to be one-off, on a campus-by-campus basis, and “really only come up when there’s something really big and controversial,” Mr. Sutton says.
Mr. Xia and Mr. Cushman would like to encourage a broader and more sustained conversation about—and scrutiny of—colleges’ overseas activities. They hope to organize a scholarly conference that would bring together academics to examine the implications of overseas partnerships from a variety of perspectives, including economic, political, and anthropological. As a sociologist, Mr. Cushman is interested in questions like how international academic exchanges may influence the transmission of knowledge and whether they affect the policies and institutional processes of colleges themselves, a concept known as isomorphism. Eventually, they want to publish an edited volume.
Plans for the meeting and the volume, however, have yet to move from conceptual to concrete. And given Mr. Cushman’s tough view of China and the lingering questions about Mr. Xia’s firing, it’s fair to ask if the pair can rally others to rejuvenate a long-simmering debate.
Mr. Cushman is confident they will. In the end, he says, he hopes when American college administrators “think about doing business with a sultan or a shah or a premier or a czar or the autocrat du jour, they ask some questions about what they gain, what they lose, what the risks and benefits are.”
Correction (10/6/2014, 5:39 p.m.): This article originally reported incorrectly that Thomas Cushman had accused Charles Bu of being a spy for the Communist Party of China. Mr. Cushman in fact said Mr. Bu was promoting the agenda of the Communist Party of China. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
