US Universities Sell Academic Freedom to ANY bidder....

In the 25 years Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University have run a joint campus in China, it’s never published an academic journal. When American student Brendon Stewart tried last year, he found out why.


Intended to showcase the best work by Chinese and American students and faculty to a far-flung audience, Stewart’s journal broke the Hopkins-Nanjing Center’s rules that confine academic freedom to the classroom. Administrators prevented the journal from circulating outside campus, and a student was pressured to withdraw an article about Chinese protest movements. About 75 copies sat in a box in Stewart’s dorm room for a year.

“You think you’re going to a place that has academic freedom, and maybe in theory you do, but in reality you don’t,” said Stewart, 27, who earned a master’s degree in international studies this year from Hopkins-Nanjing and now works for an accounting firm in Beijing. “The place is run by Chinese administrators, and I don’t think the U.S. side had a lot of bargaining power to protect the interests of its students. At the end of the day, it’s a campus on Chinese soil.”

The muzzling of Stewart’s journal exposes the compromises to academic freedom that some American universities make in China. While professors and students openly discuss sensitive subjects such as the Tibetan independence movement or the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests on the Hopkins-Nanjing campus, they can’t do so in the surrounding community. Even on-campus protections only cover class discussions, not activities typical of U.S. campuses, such as showing documentary films in a student lounge.


Academic freedom “gives both students and faculty the right to express their views -- in speech, writing and through electronic communication, both on and off campus -- without fear of sanction,” Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, wrote in a 2010 essay.

Limits on academic freedom are one reason Stanford University and Columbia University haven’t opened campuses in China. Columbia has a study center in Beijing, while Stanford plans to open one on the campus of Peking University next year. Such centers, which provide offices for visiting professors and host lectures and fundraisers, are easily exited, Columbia President Lee Bollinger said.

“The one thing we have to do is maintain our academic integrity, our academic independence,” Bollinger said. “There are too many examples of a strict and stern control that lead you to think that this is kind of an explosive mix.”

U.S. universities also encounter challenges to academic freedom in the Middle East. The University of Connecticut scrapped plans in 2007 to expand to Dubai amid criticism of the Emirate’s Israel policies.

NYU last year opened an Abu Dhabi campus, which enjoys the same academic freedom as the Washington Square campus, according to the university’s web site. Of course when asked if there were classes on democracy, activism, gender studies, homosexuality, judaism or atheism the University offered no comment.