\n<\/p>\n
Relying on international student tuition fees has provided authoritarian countries such as China with a \u201cpowerful lever\u201d to use against U.S. universities, an academic has warned.<\/p>\n
With the U.S. having long depended on overseas students, the Trump administration is making the issue worse, according to Sarah McLaughlin, a senior scholar on global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. <\/p>\n
\u201cWith all these funding cuts, it is going to force universities to have to look elsewhere for funding\u00a0\u2026 and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a grand mystery [that] they might consider looking to expand ties to improve funding,\u201d she told Times Higher Education<\/em>.<\/p>\n In her new book, Authoritarians in the Academy<\/em>: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threatens Free Speech <\/em>(Johns Hopkins University Press), McLaughlin examines how foreign authoritarian influence is undermining freedom and integrity within U.S. universities, including focusing on the \u201cborderless censorship\u201d of countries like China, which has been accused of pressuring students from afar.<\/p>\n McLaughlin said Beijing was increasingly relying on emotional arguments about universities\u2019 responsibility to avoid offending China as a way of shutting down discussions around the sovereignty of Hong Kong or Taiwan.<\/p>\n The book warns that colleges are recruiting international students without worrying about their \u201cbasic expressive rights.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe unfortunate thing about international students here in the U.S. is that the more universities want and need them to fill up space in the university to provide much-needed tuition dollars, the greater incentive there is for them to ignore those students\u2019 rights and concerns,\u201d said McLaughlin.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you really need that funding source, you might not want to engage in any activity that\u2019s going to threaten it.\u201d<\/p>\n As a result, China and other well-populated authoritarian countries have a \u201cpowerful lever\u00a0\u2026 to pull against noncompliant universities\u201d\u2014the power to deny universities millions of dollars in tuition payments.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you put together the presence of international students, the funding, the relationships, the ties on the whole, those countries have gained more than the U.S. has, but that\u2019s only because universities have allowed this issue to go unchallenged,\u201d said McLaughlin.<\/p>\n \u201cI want international students to continue to be a major force in American higher education, but not without real understanding of the specific free speech issues and cultural concerns that come with those students.\u201d<\/p>\n The book compares higher education to Hollywood\u2014both industries that once thought they had the power to liberalize China, which have now become dependent on and changed by participation in the Chinese market.<\/p>\n \u201cOutside of maybe providing VPN access, I don\u2019t think American universities have brought any new kinds of freedoms within China, but I do think they have brought in really worrying incentives into their own operations to maintain those partnerships,\u201d McLaughlin continued. <\/p>\n \u201cAt its core, I think they have prioritized the reputation of being a global institution and the money that comes with it more than anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n While China is the \u201clead story\u201d when it comes to censorship from abroad, McLaughlin said universities were also guilty of expanding into the Gulf states without understanding the pressures this will put on their values.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the same kind of thing that we\u2019ve seen with FIFA, with the Olympics. It\u2019s pretty basic stuff: Whenever you have a global industry that chooses to expand, it\u2019s going to face these pressures, and it\u2019s just a greater concern when the one doing that is higher education.\u201d<\/p>\n McLaughlin warns that higher education\u2019s \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d expansion into such countries as the United Arab Emirates is the fastest way to normalize behavior like the abuse of British researcher Matthew Hedges, who was tortured in prison in the U.A.E. after being accused of spying for the U.K. government. (He was later pardoned.)<\/p>\n \u201c[Gulf states] are trying to entice these global institutions that are highly respected to their country because of the patina of respectability that it gives,\u201d McLaughlin said. \u201cIf universities think that what they\u2019re doing there is worth perhaps giving that PR hit to those countries, then so be it.\u201d<\/p>\n While there is no \u201csilver bullet\u201d to fix the problems, McLaughlin said all institutions should offer their international students explainers on what their rights are and anonymous reporting lines on transnational repression and ensure their overseas partnerships are not \u201crubber-stamping\u201d rights violations.<\/p>\n And if U.S. higher education survives its own domestic problems, she said this creates an opportunity for universities to \u201creimagine\u201d how they deal with authoritarian censorship abroad.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want them to do the right thing and fight back against the Trump administration just to allow similar threats from foreign governments to go unchallenged,\u201d she said. \u201cI hope that this can be taken as an opportunity for universities to really reject authoritarianism from every source.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Relying on international student tuition fees has provided authoritarian countries such as China with a \u201cpowerful lever\u201d to use against U.S. universities, an academic has warned. With the U.S. having long depended on overseas students, the Trump administration is making the issue worse, according to Sarah McLaughlin, a senior scholar on global expression at the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17064,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[10250,3630,258,10249,500,1113,393],"class_list":{"0":"post-17063","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-autocratic","9":"tag-fees","10":"tag-foreign","11":"tag-lever","12":"tag-nations","13":"tag-powerful","14":"tag-student"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}