BY JENNIFER RUTH
If you follow the news, you are already familiar with the controversy that erupted over a tweet by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey. To recap: On October 4, Morey tweeted, “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” The NBA is hugely popular in China. The Hong Kong protests decidedly are not. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) responded by threatening to cut off the Rockets, and the NBA more generally, from their lucrative fan base on the mainland by canceling game broadcasts and pulling merchandise. After some initial kowtowing–apologizing for the offense and promising to do better–and then some backlash to that kowtowing, the NBA decided to stand by its reputation for supporting the political speech of its players and employees (or at least not censoring such speech). “The NBA will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees and team owners say or will not say on these issues,” Commissioner Adam Silver said. Acknowledging the material losses the NBA might sustain as a result, he added, “If that’s the consequence of us adhering to our values, we still feel it’s critically important to adhere to those values.”
Was Silver willing to forfeit millions of dollars for a principle? Perhaps and perhaps Silver understood that the NBA’s brand was at stake, that diminishing the league’s reputation for supporting outspoken personalities would hurt the NBA among its audiences in the long run. Perhaps he also recognized the NBA’s cultural power among Chinese fans, many of whom might not be pleased about losing access to the sports league. At any rate, he not only bucked the alarming trend of business after business catering to unreasonable political demands from China for fear of losing the Chinese market, but he also happily found that he’d called China’s bluff. The airing of NBA games has quietly resumed in China.
The fall issue of Academe focuses on the international arena. My colleague Yu Xiao and I contributed “Academic Freedom and China,” an article on the problems posed by the CCP for academic freedom both within and outside China. In it, we discuss a survey of US-based scholars of China that identified an interesting concern. It will surprise no one to learn that faculty were anxious about the CCP blocking access to research or otherwise interfering in scholarship, but is it surprising that we are also concerned that our own administrators do not have our backs? Faculty worry that administrators do not understand how vital it is to stand with their faculty and support the academic freedom of professors who research or teach topics sensitive to the CCP. Pursuing collaborations, recruiting students from mainland China, maintaining access to funding streams (such as those supplied by and through Confucius Institutes): all of these threaten to distract administrators from what must be the organizing principle of the university—the independent pursuit of truth. Once American universities are seen as putting profit above this principle, the “brand,” if you’ll excuse the term, nose-dives in the international higher-education “market.” Administrators need to follow Silver’s example. More often than not, like Silver, they will find that the power of the American brand is still strong enough that China will continue to engage with them. And if it doesn’t, they must, like Adam Silver, “still feel it’s critically important to adhere to those values,” values that presumably define our enterprise even more than they do that of the sport of basketball.
Guest blogger Jennifer Ruth is professor of film studies at Portland State University.
Articles from the current and past issues of Academe are available online. AAUP members receive a subscription to the magazine, available both by mail and as a downloadable PDF, as a benefit of membership.
