Latitudes

A college will close its Confucius Institute after a congressional inquiry

A New York college, under political fire for hosting a Confucius Institute while receiving grants from the U.S. Department of Defense, will shut down its Chinese-government-funded language and cultural center.

Alfred University will close its institute rather than seek a waiver from the Defense Department that might have allowed it to continue to operate.

A congressional select committee on China opened an investigation last month into the private college, suggesting that it was a national-security risk for it to conduct hypersonic-weapons research while housing a Confucius Institute. In a May 31 letter to Mark Zupan, Alfred’s president, U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican and the committee’s chairman, called the situation “alarming.”

A lawyer for Alfred noted that the university does not engage in classified research. Still, Mark Danes, the college’s vice president for marketing and communications, told The Chronicle that “current geopolitical concerns regarding China make it difficult to continue to run” the institute.

The center, which opened in 2008, will close as of June 30, Danes said.

Congress included language in the 2021 defense-authorization bill prohibiting colleges from receiving defense grants if they had Confucius Institutes. While the provision does not take effect until October, many college leaders opted to close their Chinese-sponsored centers rather than potentially jeopardize federal research funding.

Today, there are about a dozen Confucius Institutes operating at American colleges, according to the National Association of Scholars, down from some 120. Amid broader tensions with China, the centers have drawn criticism for opening up American campuses to Chinese influence, with policymakers from both parties questioning whether colleges have allowed their Chinese partners to have too much authority over curriculum and hiring.

This spring the Defense Department approved a plan to allow colleges to apply for waivers to host the language and culture centers while receiving defense grants. To get the waivers, colleges must demonstrate financial and managerial control over the institutes and show that they will be free of any constraints on academic freedom.

Danes said Alfred did submit paperwork for a waiver, “but after much consideration of all the related issues related to the geopolitical sensitivities in the meantime, we decided it would be best to close the institute.” It’s not clear how many colleges may have applied for or received the waivers.

In a press release following Alfred’s decision, Gallagher noted that three other colleges have Confucius Institutes and receive defense funding. But one of them, the University of Toledo, said it closed its Confucius Institute in June 2022, and another, St. Cloud State University, is listed by the National Association of Scholars as having “paused” its center while it conducts a review.

The third, the University of Utah, said it was closing its Confucius Institute at the end of the month, a plan that has been in place for 18 months and coincides with the end of its current contract. A spokeswoman said the university, which has an institutional budget of more than $5 billion, received $279,000 annually to run the center.

The University of Utah has not been contacted by Gallagher’s office, the spokeswoman said.

A a press secretary for the congressman did not respond to a request for a comment about the investigation and about the congressman’s opinion on the waiver process.

The investigation of Alfred suggests that even with a waiver program in place, hosting a Confucius Institute may continue to be politically charged — perhaps too politically charged — for campus leaders.

New network will focus on South Asia and higher education

A new professional network will connect scholars, higher-education practitioners, and students of South Asian descent or whose work deals with the region.

The South Asia International Education Network will support mentoring and professional development, partnership building with South Asian universities and other institutions, networking, and educational diplomacy between the United States and countries in the area.

The group is the brainchild of Rajika Bhandari, an international-education consultant and author, and Uttiyo Raychaudhuri, vice provost for internationalization at the University of Denver. Looking around, the pair saw that there were professional organizations linking the South Asian diaspora in fields like law, journalism, and the arts. But there was none within higher education.

That’s despite the increased presence and prominence of people of South Asian heritage within American academe. One-quarter of all international students come from the seven South Asian countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka — and there are many more American students with roots in the region. Many go on to take jobs in the field, as professors and scientists, admissions officers and foreign-student advisers. Increasingly, they are assuming leadership roles like Denver’s senior international officer, Raychaudhuri, and college presidents, like Neeli Bendapudi at Penn State and Sunil Kumar at Tufts, both Indian Americans. And the region is often a priority for American colleges’ global-partnership strategies.

Raychaudhuri said many of those he and Bhandari originally reached out to were surprised to learn such a network wasn’t already established. “They are itching for it,” he said.

Bhandari said she became acutely aware of the desire for mentorship and connection after she heard from many South Asian graduate students and young professionals after the 2021 publication of her book, America Calling: A Foreign Student in a Country of Possibility, which details her own experience coming to study in the United States from India.

Although she and Raychaudhuri are both Indian, they made the conscious choice to make the group pan-regional, given the area’s shared heritage. Raychaudhuri also pointed out that some of the national divisions were the result of political decisions made by former colonial powers.

For now, the effort will focus on American higher education, although the pair said they’ve have heard from people interested in forming groups to connect the South Asian diaspora in Australia, Britain, and the Middle East.

The organization will also be open to those who are not of South Asian descent but whose scholarship or other work focuses on the region. One of the founders’ goals is to help with institutional projects and partnerships in the region, such as potentially highlighting best practices for international collaboration. “There’s a lot of activity” by American colleges in the region, Bhandari said, “but there’s also a lot of noise.”

First, though, they plan to begin with the necessary but prosaic work of mapping education-related activity between South Asia and the United States. After holding an initial organizational meeting in May at the conference of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, they’re also applying for grants for some initial seed funding.

Education levels are rising among immigrants

The educational level of immigrants is continuing to rise, according to a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Nearly half of immigrants to the advanced economies that make up the group have at least some college education, up from a third a decade ago. But migrants are often more overqualified for their jobs than are native-born workers, the report finds.

You can read more about how immigrants and their children are faring in terms of education, employability, social integration, and 80 other indicators.

Around the globe

A review by the U.S. Government Accountability Office has concluded that the National Institutes of Health did not exercise sufficient oversight of three Chinese universities that were the subrecipients of federal grants, for compliance requirements like biosafety. The federal agency said last week that it would increase reporting requirements for foreign researchers working with American universities on such grants.

Civil-liberties groups for Asian Americans and others are calling on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to do more to ensure transparency and accountability in its investigations, including those of researchers and scholars who have been the focus of inquiries into their China ties.

A new law in Nevada will allow undocumented students who have lived in the state for at least one year to qualify for in-state tuition at public colleges.

The United States leads the world in its contribution to health-sciences research, but China has the edge in the natural sciences, according to the Nature Index Annual Tables of research publications.

Could the U.S. government let a four-decades-old cooperative agreement for science and technology with China expire?

Indian students who can show that their intent to come to Canada was “genuine” will not face deportation as part of an investigation into student-visa fraud, the country’s immigration minister announced.

Britain is shaking up the way it evaluates applications for national research funding, putting greater weight on research culture and less on publications.

South Korea’s universities must innovate or close, said Yoon Suk Yeol, the country’s president.

Two of New Zealand’s eight universities have announced major job cuts because of budget shortfalls caused, in part, by a three-year closure of the country’s borders to new international students during Covid-19.

The U.S. Department of State is asking for feedback on information it plans to collect from colleges and other private groups that apply to sponsor refugees as part of a new program called the Welcome Corps.

A new survey is seeking colleges’ feedback on higher education’s capacity to support refugee resettlement, including identifying best practices, as well as barriers and resource gaps.

And finally …

When the “Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian American Studies” was advertised on The Chronicle and other job boards, Twitter had a field day.

“Consider the lower-status postdoc whose CV will forever be an orange chicken ad,” Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, said in a post.

“Two writing samples? Is that like two sides, one lo mein, one rice?” another Twitter user wrote.

But the story behind the new fellowship, at the University of Pennsylvania, is a lot more nuanced, about two former international students who became an American success story and their daughter, who advocated for the creation of Penn’s Asian American studies program. My colleague Francie Diep’s got the details.

Thanks for reading. I always welcome your feedback and ideas for future reporting, so drop me a line at karin.fischer@chronicle.com. You can also connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. If you like this newsletter, please share it with colleagues and friends. They can sign up here.