For the leaders of New York University-Shanghai, there really wasn’t any question last fall about whether to hold a campuswide forum on Hong Kong’s student-led protests.
Being open to discussing provocative subjects, after all, is at the heart of the liberal-arts college’s mission, even if such discussions wouldn’t typically be permissible in China.
Rather, the debate was whether to ask students to avoid inviting friends from other local universities to the discussion. NYU’s pact with Chinese authorities was that its students and faculty members would have absolute freedom of expression. Would opening the assembly to non-NYU students constitute a “breach” of that agreement? wondered Jeffrey S. Lehman, the vice chancellor.
Administrators decided to say nothing, and outside students didn’t show up. But the incident highlights the tricky business of running a campus dedicated to Western ideals of academic freedom in an environment where they’re far from the norm.
Critics of NYU’s decision to establish a campus in Shanghai have expressed skepticism that the Chinese government’s pledge to protect speech there is ironclad. Even some of the college’s own professors say it’s a difficult balancing act. “Chinese authorities have a dilemma to deal with,” says Chen Jian, a prominent modern-Chinese historian whom Mr. Lehman recruited to return to his native Shanghai. “They don’t want us to be too much out of control, but they also want to show that they are tolerant.”
Mr. Lehman knows this challenge well. Before coming to NYU-Shanghai, he spent four years leading the Peking University School of Transnational Law, the first program to offer both Chinese and American law degrees. There were “absolutely zero problems,” at the cross-cultural law school, he says.
So far Chinese officials have lived up to their promise to allow “NYU to be NYU,” Mr. Lehman testified at a U.S. congressional subcommittee hearing this summer on academic freedom and China.
He points to NYU-Shanghai courses like one on constitutional law, in which students split into teams of “Western liberals” and “leftist Maoists” to debate politically sensitive topics like the detention without trial of Communist Party officials accused of corruption.
Mr. Lehman, a former president of Cornell University, himself teaches a required yearlong course on comparative intellectual history in which students at NYU-Shanghai read texts ranging from the Bible to Mao Zedong’s essay “On Contradiction.” Students have come up to the professor after class to say it is the first time they have ever looked critically at the writing of modern China’s founding father.
While such discussions are unlikely to happen in a Chinese classroom, Mr. Lehman chafes at the use of the word “bubble” to describe NYU-Shanghai, arguing that it makes the campus sound “hermetically sealed.” He’s more amenable to a reporter’s suggested alternative, “island.”
And, he acknowledges, “There are plenty of things off the island I don’t like and would do differently. I don’t control the larger world.”
If authorities were to “impinge on what goes on on the island,” he says, “that’s when I would get worried.”
Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.
