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Are American Universities the Quislings of China?

 

 

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.”


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