The attempt to limit speech through peer pressure risks turning campuses into surveillance states.
The attempt to limit speech through peer pressure risks turning campuses into surveillance states.
S hortly before the 2022 Winter Olympic Games began in Beijing, posters satirizing China’s record on human rights began showing up on the George Washington University campus.
The GWU Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) immediately called on the university to “severely” punish those responsible for the posters. They claimed that the images, which featured faceless athletes engaging in winter sports above messages referring to violence against Tibetan monks and Muslim Uyghurs, “insulted China” and represented an “extremely vicious” act against Asian students.
Initially, then–GWU president Mark S. Wrighton took the CSSA’s side. He said the posters “personally offended” him and that the university would “undertake an effort to determine who is responsible” for this “terrible event.”
As Sarah McLaughlin notes in her sobering new book, Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech, pro-China groups have largely been able to elbow their way into American universities by using the same playbook university administrators have used to suppress speech on their own campuses.
McLaughlin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), notes that criticism of the Chinese government’s authoritarian policies is often quashed on American campuses because China knows that university administrators will swallow any pill handed to them to avoid being accused of racial insensitivity.
Indeed, this was the case in the GWU poster affair. When Wrighton rightly changed course, he was blasted by a state-run Chinese publication as being unwilling to “save students from racist demonization.” Any attack on Beijing’s heinous human rights abuses became an attack on Asian students.
McLaughlin calls this effect “sensitivity exploitation”: political speech is censored as a means to shut down criticism of an authoritarian regime while being framed as an attack on the citizens of that country. As Chinese Muslim Sulaiman Gu noted to ProPublica, “American universities tend to treat these issues as issues of racism and diversity,” when in fact they are meant to intimidate students into silence.
But bullying students into ideological compliance is what American universities do best. Many of the “anti-Chinese” complaints on campus are facilitated by so-called campus “bias response teams” (BRTs), which allow students to report other students and professors to the university if they utter something in private with which the offended student disagrees. Unable to legally enforce speech codes of their own, universities have now outsourced their speech codes to the student body at large.
But the new system is even worse than the 1980s-era list of words students were forbidden from saying; when the speech code is crowdsourced to a campus of perpetually offended students, literally anything can end up being reported as a violation. (Take, for example, the University of Wisconsin–Madison professor who was reported to the administration for using the term “sacred cows” in class because, as a student noted, “in some cultures, cows are deemed to be sacred, and his employment of the term as a snarky rhetorical device demonstrates the lack of awareness or concern this person has towards future colleagues and students who might be from those countries.”)
Just as important as the attempt to limit speech on campus through peer pressure is the attempt by universities to turn their campuses into surveillance states. Students are rewarded for ratting each other out, leaving no corner of a dorm or a classroom safe.
And this heavy surveillance, of course, is a tactic the Chinese have perfected. As the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, many schools moved online, teaching classes through Zoom video rooms. Much of that instruction was monitored by the CCP, leaving students critical of the Chinese government nervous that they would be targeted. At some schools, like Princeton, students were allowed to take classes using code names and could take advantage of “blind grading” processes so their names weren’t attached to their work.
(China’s spying wasn’t limited to Chinese nationals — Chinese Americans were also being watched, with Beijing even setting up secret “police stations” in New York City. Federal prosecutors have said these secret stations existed to watch and harass Chinese expatriates.)
Many Chinese students on visas to study in America were made aware that they were being watched. If they did step out of line and criticized the CCP, they faced consequences such as being barred from returning to their home country. Furthermore, they were always aware that the Chinese government knew where their families lived: any slipup, and their mother or father could be paid a visit from a CCP official.
If it wasn’t clear that physically being in America wouldn’t keep Chinese dissidents safe, Beijing in 2020 passed a “national security law” that, among other things, criminalized “subversive” political activity not just in China but worldwide. The law outlaws anti-Chinese utterances “outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the region.” McLaughlin calls this “censors without borders.”
Of course, American universities are more than happy to facilitate this show of strength in order to police speech, given their decades spent trying to micromanage the thoughts and expression of their students. (See: Emerson College’s embarrassing efforts to ban the use of Winnie the Pooh images to mock Chinese President Xi Jinping.) But they are even more directly culpable in cases where American schools partner with schools in countries like China and Qatar to form “branch” campuses in which the host country demands rigorous speech controls.
Under these agreements, American schools such as Duke, UC Berkeley, the New York Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, and Johns Hopkins have partnered with Chinese universities to conduct research. But the branch campuses in China have had an appalling record of censoring the speech of their students and instructors.
And why would American universities fork over speech rights to a partner university in China? It all comes down to money.
“In exchange for generous funding from the Chinese government, they accede to improper Chinese government regulations, censored internet access, serious impediments to academic freedom, and the threat of stolen research and intellectual property,” Rachelle Peterson of the National Association of Scholars told me in an interview a few years ago.
McLaughlin agrees, noting that the business side of higher education now takes precedence.
“I think the greatest threats to expressive rights on campus often originate from universities’ increasing tendency to see themselves as corporations first, centers of knowledge and debate second,” McLaughlin told me when I interviewed her in 2021. “When universities think of themselves as businesses that must above all else protect their brand, it can lead to dangerous places for free expression,” she said.
If American universities were hoping to teach the world about freedom, the opposite has happened. By outsourcing their own self-censorship to students, rewarding surveillance, and bowing to foreign governments’ demands in the name of cash, weak-willed universities have ended up with Xi Jinping as their most apt pupil. Forget Ivy League ideals; the greatest student of American higher education may well be the very leader who wants to erase dissent at home and abroad.
And if that isn’t a cautionary tale, it’s at least a cruel punch line: our universities are no longer just training students — they’re training autocrats.