I don’t have much to add to our editorial on NYU and Chen Guangcheng, and I’m certainly no expert on China. So I won’t hazard a guess as to whether NYU sent Chen away for organizational and financial reasons, or caved in to pressure from China. Chen himself, and the New York Post’s sources, say the impetus came from Peking; according to Chen, NYU began restricting his activities a few months after he arrived — just as the university was obtaining final approval to start up its Shanghai campus. On the other hand, Jerome Cohen, the NYU law professor who arranged Chen’s exit from China, says NYU is blameless and Chen was never meant to stay longer than a year.

In NYU’s defense, within the world of academia, such things as office space, faculty slots, administrative control, teaching loads, and (of course) money and who gets to spend it, all have overwhelming importance. When professors get together, bureaucratic and financial details like these are all they talk about. So it’s quite conceivable that NYU meant to give Chen help getting started in America but had no wish to jump through all the hoops that would have been necessary to establish something longer-term. (In particular, Chen was living in NYU housing, and anyone who has looked into the Greenwich Village housing market knows how priceless NYU apartments are.) For what it’s worth, Inside Higher Ed, in a generally balanced article on the controversy, says that “scholar rescue fellowships . . . are typically one to two years in duration.”

On the other hand, extorting concessions as the price of doing business in China would not be at all uncharacteristic for the Chinese — though as the Washington Post writes, paraphrasing Cohen: “It would be very odd for the Chinese government to grant its permission for Chen to leave the country and then try to pressure NYU to push him off of its campus: If China can live with Chen taking his family to U.S. soil, surely it can accept his status at New York University law school.”

Maybe the Chinese always assumed that Chen would soon leave NYU, or maybe something happened after he arrived to make them take a tougher line. Specifically, in January of this year, Chen was awarded the Lantos Human Rights Prize, named for the late Representative Tom Lantos, a tireless advocate for human rights and freedom. The first Lantos Prize was awarded in 2009 to the Dalai Lama, and the Chinese responded with one of their tantrums — pressuring foreign leaders (including President Obama) into refusing to meet with him, blacklisting at least one university, and even forcing a later White House visit to be as brief and unceremonious as possible:

If the Chinese could make the United States send such a distinguished guest out through the service entrance, they probably didn’t need to do more than raise an eyebrow to make NYU decide against extending Chen’s stay.