It has begun to dawn on Americans that our vacation from history has ended, and a new Cold War is upon us. It will not be fought only in the trenches of Donbass, in the naval provocations of the South China Sea, or even in the scramble for raw materials that drives economies. It will also be fought on our college campuses.
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Unfortunately, our main adversary, communist China, realized this decades ago. It’s a contest being fought one campus at a time, one student at a time, by an adversary that has weaponized the left-wing offense-taking culture of the academy to twist once-liberal institutions into promoting the decidedly illiberal aims of China’s totalitarian government. While we in the West were enjoying the peace dividend and fighting our small wars of liberal empire, the Chinese Communist Party was gearing up for the next ideological struggle for world dominance.
That is the main takeaway from Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech. Writing about threats to free speech on campus is right in author Sarah McLaughlin’s wheelhouse — she has been doing so for FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (formerly the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) since 2014. In this book, she ties the strings together and paints a disturbing picture of an academic establishment that chooses to censor itself and its students to maintain favor and funding from foreign nations.
China is not the only bad actor in this space — the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are also singled out for well-deserved criticism. However, the PRC is the largest and most persistent of the gangs.
Inviting Chinese nationals to study at American universities began with the best of intentions. After China and the United States restored diplomatic relations in 1979, many in government and in academia thought teaching Chinese students could lead to better relations and beneficial cultural exchange. There was almost certainly an undercurrent of Cold War gamesmanship, as well: letting bright, young communists experience the freedom and prosperity of America could only weaken their system by comparison.
Many Americans held a similar attitude about freer trade with China in the late 1990s: exchanging goods and ideas would lead to greater prosperity and freedom, just as it had in the Soviet Union and its European satellite states. Under the circumstances, this was a reasonable idea, but hindsight shows that the CCP’s control of China was immune to attacks from the academy and the marketplace.
Instead, China grew prosperous and more totalitarian, and brought the war home to us academically. And it did so through systems our universities had already accepted from illiberal voices here at home: obsequious deference to people who claimed to have been offended.
The university is meant to be a special place in the world of ideas, a center for the free exchange of thoughts in service of a search for truth. That ideal has always been threatened by those who would make exceptions for thoughts that were deemed “offensive” — an inherently subjective and slippery term that is certain to be abused.
Take the story of a Hamline University professor who lost her job in 2022 after showing an image of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in a class about Islamic art. As McLaughlin notes, even the Council on American-Islamic Relations thought this was overkill, but the university was desperate to avoid giving offense.
The same playbook is employed to great effect on subjects to which the CCP is opposed. Anything on campus involving the Dalai Lama or touching on China’s conquest of Tibet will result in swift crybullying from the Chinese Embassy and the on-campus student groups that work in suspiciously close coordination with it. It results in the cancellation of speakers and events intended to introduce students to a point of view China would rather they not hear.
Chinese students with views contrary to the CCP line find that the risk of dissent is even greater, with threats to their safety and their families back home. The experience of an American university, intended to give foreign students a taste of Western freedom, becomes just an extension of the totalitarian state they left behind.
Why don’t the universities fight back? Why don’t they stand up for their core beliefs? As McLaughlin explains, the answer is money.
The intense reaction to the Trump administration’s threat to limit Chinese students’ visas to study at American schools exposed a truth already well known to McLaughlin: The schools have become utterly dependent on foreign students’ tuition dollars, especially those from China and the Middle East. With foreigners paying full tuition, colleges can grant scholarships to Americans and still maintain their ever-growing endowments. It seems like a win-win: governments and tycoons from abroad shoveling money into American schools, which mostly benefit Americans. American schools’ foreign campuses, such as Georgetown University’s Qatar campus or Cornell University’s Peking affiliate, still sweeten the deal more.
However, the colleges soon got the message that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
The threat of cutting off the flow of students and their money is enough to make colleges think twice about anything “controversial.” The risk is even more dire for those who have invested their money and reputations in foreign campuses. So, they kowtow to the CCP (and Qatar, and the rest) and, in effect, import Chinese speech policies in place of our own American values.
If that sounds a lot like what goes on at Apple, Tesla, and the NBA, it’s no coincidence. The flow of money and the growth of pusillanimous, non-academic leadership at colleges has transformed them from groves of academe into just another bunch of corporations. Academia is ideally about the pursuit of truth, but the corporate focus is baser and simpler: the avoidance of risk. Reducing the number of tenured faculty, McLaughlin notes, feeds the corporate goal of lowering costs while also reducing the number of employees free to push back against censorship.
This book thoroughly and thoughtfully explains the fall of free speech in the university, and it soon becomes clear to the reader that this tale is not dissimilar to that of other confrontations between liberal democracies and totalitarian states. Having no grounded values on human rights does not mean universities are free of suppression. It only means they are susceptible to having another system imposed upon them.
Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.