The on campus pot calling the kettle black

Temple University in Philadelphia is starting a Confucius Institute (CI) for the purpose of teaching Chinese language and culture. What makes that dicey is that Hanban, a Chinese state agency chaired by the Politboro, oversees these institutes, of which 350 have spawned around the world. It would not be naïve to think that the Chinese “culture” they are interested in indoctrinating on university campuses is not the ideology of Taipei but of Beijing.

Stephen Levine, a retired professor of Chinese language, saw in hindsight his naïveté in facilitating the establishment of a CI at the University of Montana in 2007: “What I should have considered at the time, though I should have known better, was what might be called the side effects of the seemingly benign CI medicine that Beijing prescribed for the financial deficiency disease from which my institute suffered.”

Non–ivory tower translation: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” And the tunes the CIs don’t want sung to college kids are those of Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen Square. The University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University have already closed down their regretted CI programs in the name of protecting academic freedom.

But will the removal of Chinese Communist leaven ensure academic freedom in college classrooms? At a recent party I asked a young Temple student about her classes and learned that she is taking three history courses. “Tell me about them,” I probed. She answered, “Well, they’re all different but the common denominator is that Western colonialism ruined the world.” When I gently pushed back, another woman at the party spoke up peremptorily: “I don’t think we should talk about this!” That was the end of the discussion, and of the exercise of academic freedom, at least at that party.

The propaganda of the Hanban agency of Beijing is overt enough to spot and stay away from. At the 2014 conference in Portugal of the European Association for Chinese Studies, Confucius Institute operatives unabashedly deleted pages from the conference program they disliked—information on the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and on the book exhibition and donations by the Taiwan National Central Library.

But there is a softer and slier academic censorship present in the very fact that American universities have become the fiefdoms of liberalism. As some faculties refuse the cultural propaganda of Beijing, they should watch that they are not the pot that calls the kettle black.