UC Berkeley announced on Nov. 11 that it plans to open a campus in Shanghai. Stanford Center will open in Peking Universityin 2012. New York University announced (a new campus) in Shanghai in 2013, and Duke is building a degree-granting campus f Kunshan in 2012. NYU and Duke both e promised to maintain an openness comparable to their operations in America.
“Many of our American institutions are being seduced by the promise of an infusion of much-needed wealth from China,” says Orville Schell, director of the Center for U.S.-China relations at the Asia Society. “But one has to pay a price: one has to play by the rules of China’s game, and a university committed to academic freedom is bound to run into problems,” adding that they have to “either make accommodations or do without” the campus.
The Johns Hopkins University (already has a) Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies. Carolyn Townsley, who directs the Hopkins–Nanjing Support Centerin D,C. says “In our country we fortunately have academic freedom, and our classes are very open. And we know that in China that is not true,” Townsley responds that “anything is pretty much fair game,” but “we are not trying to be instigators in sensitive areas. The mission of the center is to build better relations with the Chinese, so we’re not going to stir that up.” Jonathan Tsentas, who graduated from the Center ,, says, “You just had to be careful not to offend anyone”. When a Chinese torchbearer was attacked in Paris before the Beijing Olympics “we got a notice saying that we should not bring up that issue in class, and we shouldn’t encourage the students to talk about it, as they might get excited or agitated.” Rowena He teaches courses at Harvard University about the 1989 Tiananmen Square —a course that she could not teach in China. “The problem is, we don’t know where the line is and what the punishment would be. That’s where fear and self-censorship comes from,” she says.
When asked about inviting people like the Dalai Lama, who spoke at Johns Hopkins in the U.S. in 2001, or if she would be willing to invite dissident artist Ai Weiwei to speak to her campus in Nanjing, Hopkins’ Townsley responds, “We are not going to be deliberately insensitive to our partners by trying to be provocative in whatever we do at the center.”
Cheng Li, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, says that the idea that Duke and NYU could maintain comparable academic freedom in China is self-deceiving. “It’s completely out of touch with China’s political reality,” he says. “They’re universities, not islands.”