Dancing With Autocrats

When Carnegie Mellon University moved its branch campus in Rwanda to a new $10 million complex in 2019, its press release explicitly invoked CMU’s core identity.

“Technology companies, biotech firms and world-class universities sit side-by-side in an area of gently rolling hills,” intoned the release. “That could describe Silicon Valley or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and it could soon depict Kigali, Rwanda, home to Carnegie Mellon University Africa.”

Amid the glowing talk of innovation and entrepreneurship, however, the university has remained silent on the atrocious human-rights record of its key partner, Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president. Kidnappings, disappearances, torture, and the ruthless squelching of even mild criticism have been features of his presidency for the last 22 years.

The political climate in Rwanda is so bad that Freedom House rated it 22 out of 100 in last year’s “Freedom in the World” report, which gauges access to political rights and civil liberties. Reporters Without Borders puts Rwanda near the bottom of all the world’s nations for freedom of expression, noting “censorship is ubiquitous and self-censorship is widely used to avoid running afoul of the regime.” The Rwandan government is also implicated in grave abuses in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, including massacres, sexual slavery, and the widespread looting of mineral resources.

So it is hardly surprising that CMU officials are reluctant to talk about the misdeeds of Kagame, whom the university welcomed as an honored guest to Pittsburgh in 2011.

From the start, CMU-Africa has been driven by Kagame’s needs. The initiative began when Rwandan government officials made inquiries to Pittsburgh in 2007 seeking a first-rate engineering school. Rwanda agreed to subsidize tuition and provide a built-in profit stream for CMU. “This was Kagame’s baby,” recalled David Himbara, a former top economic adviser who fled the country more than a decade ago. “This is how he cleans his name: to bring in U.S. institutions to fly his flag. It’s how he builds an image for himself.” The project also burnished CMU’s image, allowing the university to portray itself as a friend to progress in a country that most Americans associate primarily with the 1994 genocide.

The Rwanda campus was established in downtown Kigali in 2011, but not without some unhappiness back in Pittsburgh. The year before, Kagame had been re-elected president with 93 percent of the vote; he faced no meaningful opposition. The country’s increasingly repressive political atmosphere seemed to conflict with CMU’s stated mission of “creating a collaborative environment open to the free exchange of ideas.” When Kagame visited the main CMU campus to give a speech in September 2011, some human-rights groups protested.

“The university is entering into an agreement with a war criminal, a mass murderer, and someone whose military is accused of genocide,” said Claude Gatebuke, a leader of the protest outside the auditorium where Kagame was giving a talk. CMU officials later invited Gatebuke and three others to a meeting to discuss the Rwanda partnership. He told me the conversation seemed more like a Wall Street shareholder call than a discussion among educators.

“If I can summarize it in two words, it would be ‘disaster capitalism,’” Gatebuke, himself a survivor of the 1994 genocide, recalled this month. “They thought they would get good publicity, and of course they were making millions off the deal.”

Ironically, CMU’s moral compromises haven’t even produced a good financial outcome. Tuition is the same price in Rwanda as in Pennsylvania, and the students from elite families whom the government was counting upon have not materialized in force. A 2017 report by the Rwandan auditor general’s office indicated that the branch campus was facing enrollment problems. At that point, CMU-Africa was expected to have at least 150 students taking classes — yet it had managed to recruit only half that number. The government was unable to draw back from its financial commitment, then $47 million and growing. (It is unclear if CMU helped cover that shortfall.)

Current enrollment numbers remain murky, but indicators suggest the sluggish trend continues. Last year, the campus enrolled “about 150” students, with a stated goal of 400. Even with the Rwandan government’s aid factored in, tuition costs $16,000 per year — far beyond the means of most families in the region. “It’s embarrassing,” said Himbara, the exiled adviser. “There was no market research. This was all about prestige, through and through. I used to teach in a university myself, and I never realized how opportunistic these universities can be.”

My interest in this has a strong personal element: my friend and former co-author Paul Rusesabagina, whose story was portrayed in the film Hotel Rwanda, was kidnapped by the regime in August 2020 and sentenced to 25 years in prison after a sham trial. To my knowledge, CMU has never spoken publicly about this or any other instance of Rwanda’s violent authoritarianism. The university did not respond to questions for this article, nor to my earlier email expressing concern about the branch campus. When I posted a human-rights report as a comment on the CMU-Africa Twitter feed, the administrator responded by blocking me.

Should the financial picture worsen and Rwanda grow tired of subsidizing CMU, it is entirely possible the Kigali campus could go the way of Yale-NUS College, an ill-fated attempt by Yale University to plant a pennant in Singapore, a country notorious for the suppression of speech. When it broke ground the year after CMU’s Rwanda campus was established, American commentators were optimistic that Yale’s outreach would have a liberalizing effect on Singapore’s autocratic government. “Singapore has a great deal to learn from America, and NUS has a great deal to learn from Yale,” enthused CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

But it was not to be. Instead, the Yale Daily News reported, professors complained of censorship, repression, and infringements on free speech, with one calling the partnership “a terrible idea.” Yale-NUS was also dogged by reports of inadequate fund raising. In 2021, Singaporean officials took Yale by surprise by announcing the college would be phased out.

If CMU went into Rwanda with a similar sense of idealism atop its apparent profit motive, the hope of any positive ideological outcome seems to have likewise evaporated.

Perhaps the lesson here is that universities should not think of themselves as magical change agents. In a contest of values between the institution, with its 18th-century notions of Lockean liberty, and the repressive dictatorship, with its far older notions of total control, the dictatorship always wins.