Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese dissident who found refuge last year in the United States with a fellowship at NYU is now claiming that he is being pushed out of NYU because his human rights advocacy and criticisms of the Chinese government is upsetting NYU’s relationship with China. From the NYTimes:
In a statement released Sunday, Mr. Chen said university officials were worried that his outspoken criticism of the Chinese government might threaten academic cooperation. N.Y.U. recently opened a campus in Shanghai, and a number of professors are involved in programs and research projects here that could be harmed if they were denied Chinese visas.
“The work of the Chinese Communists within academic circles in the United States is far greater than what people imagine, and some scholars have no option but to hold themselves back,” Mr. Chen said. “Academic independence and academic freedom in the United States are being greatly threatened by a totalitarian regime.”
According to the story, NYU “strenuously denies” the accusations. But, it does seem clear to me that neither this story, nor stories like it, are likely to go away anytime soon.
More and more of our institutions are developing extensive relationships and programs with overseas state partners. I raised a number of questions here a couple of months ago about some of the challenges associated with developing these programs in societies with more restrictive norms of academic freedom when LSE officials co-sponsoring a conference in UAE pulled the plug after government officials there denied an entry visa to LSE’s Kristian Coates Ulrichsen — apparently because of some of his views on the Arab Spring. Later this week, I’ll be on a couple of panels at the Worldviews 2013: Global Trends in Media and Higher Education conference in Toronto discussing the tensions between the financial, educational, and research allure in places like China, Singapore, UAE, Qatar, and elsewhere and the academic freedom and integrity of overseas programs and hubs. What are the tradeoffs between financial gains, expanded educational opportunities, and greater intellectual and cultural exchange versus the integrity of the mission of most of our institutions — liberal education — and the attendant elements of freedom of thought, exploration, and expression?
But, Chen also claims something else here — that it’s not just the institutions that are worrying about their access — but that scholars who are doing research or collaborating with scholars and institutions (in China) are also censoring themselves because they “have no option but to hold themselves back.” Since most of us work in countries around the globe and many have relationships with a wide range of states, I wonder what you all think of Chen’s claims? How many of you have either felt direct or indirect (external or internal) pressure to “hold back?” Do we censor ourselves or change our own norms of academic independence and freedom to ensure our own access to these countries?
I’m curious about your thoughts and experiences? Post comments anonymously if you feel more comfortable — not that it will necessarily help.
Perhaps this is not apparent to some American scholars, but the US is also a very difficult country to get access to and requires its own alterations, omissions and finesses in discourse and scholarship if foreign scholars want to get a visa to go there. I know of several cases where guest speakers or panelists were denied visas into the United States. This isn’t a problem unique to China or UAE. I do not mean to make the facetious argument that the two are equal, I am sure that the UAE has higher visa rejection rates, but it is important to realize that many scholars self censor to get entry into the US as well, that this is not a recent thing, and that the US also denies visiting lecturers visas. I’m not sure it’s helpful to have a dichotomy of authoritarian versus democratic as the US especially has some very strict entry and acceptance policies for non-American scholars. The cases I know are with Arab and Chinese scholars going to the US. Things seem to be better in Europe, I do not know of any denied visa cases there.
Agreed… this also applies to Israel, where scholars are banned from entry (often for up to 10 years) every single week for simply daring to visit the Palestinian territories. Moreover, in the U.S. the post-9/11 witch-hunts at universities only demonstrate the extent to which academic freedom there is curtailed.
TT, you are right of course. The US does reject visas — though I suspect a larger problem is that the US delays visa requests to the point where the scholar misses a scheduled event. In either event, the result is the same.
Cuban scholars have a hell of a time getting visas to do research and attend conferences in the United States. So many Cubans are denied visas for the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference when it’s held in the States that for a few years they tried to protest it by exclusively holding events in Latin America and Europe. Greg Weeks has a pretty good post outlining the insanity of the policies on his blog. https://weeksnotice.blogspot.com/2012/05/cubans-and-lasa.html
Unfortunately Miami Cubans are a key constituency for both parties, so any logic in Cuban-American relations is seen as a way for a party to kiss goodbye to Florida (and thus the presidency) for the foreseeable future.
Anthropologists working in Africa were notorious for denying evidence of (among other things) cannibalism because their visa’s and work permits would never be renewed if they didn’t. It happens, I imagine, in every field.
Whenever access to something desirable can be controlled by a few people at a chokepoint, there will be hard choices for those who want access to those things. The question is how many hoops and how small are they? US hoops are more numerous than what its declared values should support. China is consistent in allowing the controllers to make the hoops smaller and more numerous on zero notice so one does have to make choices.
We may have to develop specializations: some academic institutions that decide (for whatever reason) not try to run extensive programs in foreign countries so they can have whatever guests they want while others go the foreign route in the expectation that resulting contacts will make a difference.
Also, for some countries the visa-denying is episodic: I know enough Soviet specialists to know that some people banned from visiting during Brezhnev got visas during Andropov and Chernenko.
While I think a discussion of the potential political pitfalls of global expansion of US universities is an extremely important one to have, I feel that the Chen Guangcheng affair is a bad example to try to extrapolate from.
This actually seems to be a case where NYU made an effort to take in a Chinese dissident, despite the fact that they were in the middle of building a rather large campus in Shanghai. I’ve been following the case from the beginning (being a grad student at NYU with a deep personal interest in China), and it was always the case that this was a one-year fellowship, set up to get Chen and his family on their feet and get them started in the US after leaving China. What happened since then seems to be a matter of a much more messy political maneuvering by some of the well-known players on the evangelical right wing of Chinese-dissidents-in-exile – most notably Bob Fu (who btw seems to have installed spyware on the phone and tablet he donated to Chen on arrival: https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/21/spyware-planted-chen-guangcheng-nyu).
Chen’s press release was very likely written by media consultant Mark Corallo (https://corallomediastrategies.com/accolades.html), a Karl Rove veteran who has been working with Fu and other Chinese evangelicals.
Mattie J. Bekink, Chen’s former US adviser, calls the claims of NYU pressuring him “mystifying” (https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/06/19/mystifying-blind-activists-adviser-speaks-out-on-pressure-claims/)
Elizabeth Lynch has a great piece up on what the Chen affair tells us about US, China, and the game around the human rights policy here: https://chinalawandpolicy.com/2013/06/20/chen-guangcheng-and-the-commandeering-of-our-china-human-rights-policy/
(apologies for my failure to imbed hyperlinks)