The case of Xia Yeliang, a Peking University professor fired, he and his supporters contend, for his political beliefs, is raising anew questions about Western universities’ international engagement. For some observers, it is proof that colleges in the United States and elsewhere are risking their academic integrity by forging relationships in China and other authoritarian countries.
But others say the incident underscores the need for institutions to lay out principles of academic freedom in any agreement with a foreign partner and to stand up for those values if they are being threatened. American faculty members can and should play a greater role in advocating for their colleagues, the thinking goes, even if those colleagues are half a world away.
“We consider it our duty,” said Thomas Cushman, a professor of sociology at Wellesley College. Earlier this fall, Mr. Cushman organized an open letter to Peking administrators, signed by 136 of the liberal-arts college’s professors—some 40 percent of the faculty over all and more than 50 percent of those with tenure. In it, the professors said they would urge Wellesley to reconsider its partnership with the Chinese university if Mr. Xia’s contract were terminated.
The Wellesley professors’ effort was not enough to save Mr. Xia’s job. He was notified last Friday that he would be fired, although Peking officials have insisted the economist was let go for poor classroom performance, not his liberal political views.
As it turns out, Mr. Xia could soon become part of the Wellesley faculty. Mr. Cushman has been working to bring the outspoken academic to the United States as a visiting scholar, and Wellesley’s president, H. Kim Bottomly, has said, in a letter to the college community, that she supports having Mr. Xia on the campus. (Ms. Bottomly also said she believes Wellesley should continue its partnership with Peking but would ask that a faculty meeting be held to discuss the matter.)
Expanded Notion of Community
Thus far, professors at other institutions with relationships with Peking, including Stanford University and the London School of Economics and Political Science, have been less active than Wellesley faculty members in protesting Mr. Xia’s dismissal.
But as American colleges step up their international work—setting up student and faculty exchanges, offering joint degrees, and even establishing research centers or campuses overseas—many professors say they see the need for an expanded notion of academic community, one that does not stop at institutional boundaries or country borders.
Faculty members at New York University, for instance, called on officials at that institution to condemn the 2011 arrest of a lecturer at the University of Paris IV’s branch in Abu Dhabi, where NYU also has a campus. The American Association of University Professors has expressed concern about academic and personal freedoms both at NYU-Abu Dhabi and at Yale-NUS College, the new liberal-arts institution started in Singapore by Yale University and the National University of Singapore.
Keith A. Darden was one of the first hires at Yale-NUS before leaving the college this fall for American University over concerns, in part, about Singaporean restrictions on research funds. A scholar who studies nondemocratic governments, Mr. Darden said he worries that American universities could relax their standards on open inquiry in order to preserve partnerships in places like China and Singapore.
“Faculty carry general obligations to defend one another,” he said. “There is an unwritten international code.”
At the same time, professors abroad have occasionally bridled at outsiders’ criticisms of their institutions—some Singaporean faculty members, for example, have said the AAUP and detractors at Yale did not fully understand that country’s academic and political climate.
Such responses raise questions: Would Americans welcome foreign intrusion into their academic disputes, especially in cases, like Mr. Xia’s, where the facts are contested? Is it arrogant or culturally imperialistic for Western scholars to weigh in on academic expression in another culture, in which they might not understand the context?
Cary Nelson, for one, dismisses the idea that notions of academic freedom vary by nation. A former president of the AAUP, he points out that the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization has laid out global principles for academic freedom. “I don’t know that the life of the mind is culturally specific,” he said.
Sensitive Topics
But Kris Olds, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that even if academics worldwide value open inquiry and expression, the practice of such freedoms can vary. In a number of countries, said Mr. Olds, who studies international education, there is open classroom discussion and faculty members have latitude in their research. But venture into certain sensitive topics, such as politics, and academics can trigger limits. Complicating matters, added Mr. Olds, who has taught in Singapore, it’s not always clear, particularly to outsiders, what the rules are.
For that reason, Mr. Olds and others argue, colleges working with foreign partners need to do greater due diligence to understand the system in which they propose to work. And they should clearly articulate their expectations and standards for academic freedom as part of any international agreement, an approach Robert Quinn, executive director of the Scholars at Risk Network, called “engagement with values.”
Mr. Quinn, whose organization promotes academic freedom and advocates on behalf of threatened scholars worldwide, said he hopes to assemble a group to draft model language on free expression that colleges might use in their own international agreements. Faculty members should play a central role in such work, he said, because “right now, lawyers are deciding these things.”
For Mr. Quinn, backing away from engaging in countries like China is a “false choice.” Others aren’t so sure.
Peter Conn, a professor of English and education at the University of Pennsylvania, questions whether it’s truly possible for American universities to work on an institutional level in authoritarian regimes. It may be preferable, said Mr. Conn, who spent this past summer in China as part of a Ford Foundation program, to focus on direct connections between faculty members and students, rather than “imperil their academic integrity.”
If colleges are going to work in China, he said, “they ought to codify their expectations in advance.
“And they should be prepared to walk away.”
