BY HANK REICHMAN
When I began work earlier this year on guest-editing the new issue of Academe devoted to “academic freedom around the world,” I was motivated by the recognition that, as I put it in the editor’s note, “Scholarship today is global” and “threats to scholarship outside the United States inevitably affect scholarship here.” Essays in the issue reveal multiple examples: attacks on gender studies experienced by American scholars are amplified in Europe and Brazil; neoliberal “reforms’ in the United Kingdom foreshadow similar efforts here; American professors of Turkish descent have been swept up in that country’s repressive response to an academic peace movement. In China, as Jennifer Ruth and Yu Xiao argue, increasingly repressive policies may even trigger an “epidemic of self-censorship” among American China specialists. In Russia, Dmitry Dubrovskiy argues, internationalization has paradoxically tended to alienate Russian scholarship from the international community, also to the detriment, I might add, of American Russianists.
In an online-only article, a group of faculty members at American University in Cairo argue that their institution has been the target of a “neoliberal coup” led not by the authoritarian Egyptian regime but by a board of governors headquartered in New York. Their experience sounds in some ways similar to that of New York University faculty members teaching at that institution’s controversial Abu Dhabi campus, about which NYU’s AAUP chapter has raised serious concerns.
Recent events only emphasize these developments. Yale University’s partnership with the National University of Singapore, Yale–NUS, raised concerns about academic freedom from the start. These intensified when last month a course on activism was canceled because it might violate Singaporean law, prompting concern that “instead of Singapore becoming more like Yale in terms of academic freedom, it looks like Yale is becoming more like Singapore.” Yale’s internal investigation of the matter concluded that all was well, but few were mollified, with the instructor of the class disputing some of the report’s claims. Even as Yale asserted that the decision to cancel the class was not prompted by government interference, Singapore’s Minister of Education weighed in, declaring that “academic freedom cannot be carte blanche for anyone to misuse an academic institution for political advocacy.”
Meanwhile, here in the US, Iranian students headed to US universities to start graduate programs in engineering and computer science had their visas revoked at the last minute and the Department of Education threatened to cancel funding for a Middle East Studies program for transparently political reasons. Although the number of Chinese students coming to the US to study is declining, as are applications to U.S. business schools by international students, the notorious Professor Watchlist has gone international. And let us never forget the plight of Princeton University graduate student Xiyue Wang, still held prisoner on bogus charges in Iran.
Over the past twenty years Scholars at Risk (SAR) has developed a network of more than five hundred institutions in thirty-nine countries to assist and defend threatened faculty. Its work has been critical to the defense of academic freedom around the world. SAR’s 2020 global congress will be held in March in the US. For more information go here. In a survey of the group’s activities that is this issue’s lead article, SAR’s executive director, Robert Quinn, argues that because educators are now more globally connected, “there has never been a better time to fight for academic freedom.” I might add as well that there has never been a greater need for the work of both Scholars at Risk and the AAUP.
I hope AAUP members and others will read and learn from the articles in this important issue of Academe.
