BY HANK REICHMAN
In June 2014 the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure issued a report, “On Partnerships with Foreign Governments: The Case of Confucius Institutes.” That report warned that Confucius Institutes, then established at some 90 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, may “function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom.” The report added, “Allowing any third-party control of academic matters is inconsistent with principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and the institutional autonomy of colleges and universities.” It recommended that institutions
cease their involvement in Confucius Institutes unless the agreement between the university and Hanban is renegotiated so that (1) the university has unilateral control, consistent with principles articulated in the AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, over all academic matters, including recruitment of teachers, determination of curriculum, and choice of texts; (2) the university affords Confucius Institute teachers the same academic freedom rights, as defined in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, that it affords all other faculty in the university; and (3) the university-Hanban agreement is made available to all members of the university community. More generally, these conditions should apply to any partnerships or collaborations with foreign governments or foreign government-related agencies.
This morning Inside Higher Ed reports that Texas A&M University has terminated its agreement to host Confucius Institutes at two campuses, the flagship campus in College Station and the Prairie View campus, a historically black university. While I suspect the university’s agreement with the Chinese government did not conform to the criteria urged by the AAUP, this was not the institution’s rationale. Instead, Texas A&M was responding to an open letter from two Texas members of Congress — Democrat Henry Cuellar and Republican Michael McCaul — urging the university to terminate the agreements. “These organizations are a threat to our nation’s security by serving as a platform for China’s intelligence collection and political agenda,” the congressmen wrote. “We have a responsibility to uphold our American values of free expression, and to do whatever is necessary to counter any behavior that poses a threat to our democracy.”
In a brief statement, Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp declared, “We have great respect for Congressmen McCaul and Cuellar. I don’t question their judgment, nor their patriotism. In addition, they have access to classified information we do not have. We are terminating the contract as they suggested.”
Of the Confucius Institutes, Hans-Joerg Tiede, associate secretary for academic freedom, tenure and governance at the AAUP, told Inside Higher Ed, “We have concerns about their operations, but we also have concerns about politicians telling universities what to do.”
I agree. Marshall Sahlins, whose brief booklet Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware offers the most thorough documentation of the institutes’ threat to academic freedom, was more caustic. “In the incipient cold war with China, the critical discourse on Confucius Institutes has shifted from academic freedom to spying, having been taken over from the academics and the universities by conservative politicians and state security agencies. In the ironic upshot, as the Texas A&M episode shows, agents and agencies of the American government now mimic the totalitarian actions of the Chinese government by dictating what can and cannot be taught in our own universities,” Sahlins emailed Inside Higher Ed.
It’s not just Texas A&M. FBI director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee in February that the FBI has concerns about Confucius Institutes and has “developed appropriate investigative steps” in relation to them. Congressman Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, has also written to universities in his state urging them to close their Confucius Institutes, according to The Boston Globe. Recently staff members from the Government Accounting Office interviewed me at some length about the institutes, as part of a Congressionally mandated study. Although I communicated the AAUP’s concerns about the peril to academic freedom involved in some of the institute contracts, I did not endorse claims that the Confucius Institutes engage in espionage or similar nefarious activity.
This governmental campaign against Confucius Institutes and the institutions that host them is rendered more troubling in light of the ongoing campaign of harassment against Chinese-born and Chinese-American scientists accused of passing classified scientific information to Beijing. As the AAUP reported last November in a report on “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom,” these efforts have often exaggerated the security threat without providing the kind of evidence that makes that concern credible. Under both the Obama and Trump administrations Chinese and Chinese American scientists have been targeted and charged with espionage, most notably Temple University physicist Xiaoxing Xi. Professor Xi and his family were held at gunpoint by federal agents and he faced eighty years in prison and a $1 million fine. But before a trial date was set the charges were dropped. Professor Xi and the ACLU have now filed a civil suit charging malicious prosecution and violation of his First Amendment rights.
This incident and others, including the Texas A&M action, should be a lesson to colleges and universities that if we fail to protect academic freedom from one threat we may only invite even more dangerous interference. As Sahlins put it, “the professoriate and their universities have no one to blame but themselves that the attack on academic freedom has thus been redoubled, as they failed to recognize the threat to their own intellectual values posed more than a decade ago by the establishment of Confucius Institutes in their midst.”
