Authoritarian threats to campus speech come from both abroad and at home

In 2015, a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School named Teng Biao scheduled a public event with another Chinese dissident that coincided with the visit by Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, to China. The law school’s vice dean for international legal studies convinced Teng to cancel the panel to avoid “embarrassing” the school and undermining its programs in China.

In 2018, the debating union at Georgetown University’s Qatar campus planned to discuss whether “major religions should portray God as a woman.” Accused of “insulting God,” the university canceled the event because it “failed to follow the appropriate approval processes and created a risk to safety and security.” Administrators noted that the school encouraged “civil dialogue that respects the laws of Qatar,” presumably including prohibitions of blasphemy.

On March 25, masked federal agents surrounded and handcuffed Rumeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University and a Fulbright scholar from Turkey, on a street near her home outside Boston. They forced her into an unmarked car and shipped her to a detention center in Louisiana. Her apparent offense was co-authoring a pro-Palestinian opinion piece in a student newspaper. The federal judge who ordered her release declared that Öztürk’s detention risked chilling “the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.”

These three incidents reflect a disturbing trend in which university administrators seek to accommodate authoritarian regimes eager to silence critics, and the Trump administration works to suppress campus protests and criticism of its policies.

In her new book “Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech,” Sara McLaughlin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, paints a portrait of “censors without borders” policing speech, while complicit universities, eager to profit from global partnerships and tuition-paying international students, turn a blind eye or, worse, self-censor to avoid alienating China and other authoritarian states.

McLaughlin does a commendable job of calling attention to threats to freedom of expression across the globe, though, in our view, suppression of speech by foreign governments on U.S. campuses is not as pervasive a practice as she makes it appear. At least not yet.

In 2023, students at George Washington University posted artwork mocking China’s fitness to host the Olympics. When two Chinese student groups complained that the artwork “insulted China,” the university president, Mark Wrighton, declared the postings unacceptable and agreed to investigate those responsible. After a public outcry, Wrighton apologized, terminated the investigation and declared his support for “freedom of speech — even when it offends people.”

McLaughlin finds it “troubling that Wrighton’s first instinct ... was to promise censorship.” But she offers no evidence to support her assertion that the instinct to censor was “shared by many university leaders.”

Nor does she demonstrate that “sensitivity exploitation” — using the desire to create a welcoming environment for all students to suppress criticism of a foreign government — is having a widespread impact on free speech. In a recent Gallup poll, 74 percent of college students said their institution was doing an excellent or good job of protecting unfettered expression, while only 5 percent believe it is doing a poor job.

Of much greater concern is the ability of China and other authoritarian states to restrict the speech of their nationals abroad by threatening their families or, when they return home, their livelihoods or freedom. Universities “want to reap the financial and reputational rewards” of bringing international students to their campuses, McLaughlin contends, but have failed to “accept the [accompanying] responsibilities to free speech and academic freedom.”

McLaughlin suggests as well that U.S. institutions that have relationships with authoritarian foreign partners often feel pressure to self-censor because “that is how many university administrations operate: not as values-driven institutions, but as global corporations that must protect the bottom line.” Having “reached the point where brand supersedes all else, and protecting image matters more than protecting values,” they continue operating campuses in countries “conducting human rights violations their community members are not freely allowed to teach or discuss.”

These broad-brush attacks are, alas, not accompanied by practical proposals for what universities can and should do. How might leaders of campuses in the U.S. “stand by” international students when their families at home are threatened? How can they protect scholars who lose access to research materials or are denied visas for criticizing authoritarian regimes?

Should they insist that the host countries of campuses they operate abroad respect American academic norms in their entirety if the cost is sharply limiting opportunities for their faculty and students, including individuals from the countries in which they operate? Or should they warn students and faculty of the likely constraints on expression and do what they can to minimize them, recognizing that their campuses will not be able to operate as freely abroad as they would at home?

McLaughlin acknowledges that the extent of self-censorship by students, teachers and administrators “is difficult to measure.” And that universities should not “simply cut off engagement with unfree countries.” Instead, campuses established in authoritarian countries should “carefully and thoughtfully tailor engagement to limit opportunities for rights violations and interference,” advise students and faculty of the challenges they face, make clear they oppose “transnational repression” and educate students about how to protect themselves. Good advice, as far as it goes, though that is how most universities already operate.

Sadly, the greatest threats to free speech and academic freedom on American university campuses may now be home-grown. Shortly after taking office, President Trump promised to deport “all the resident aliens” who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasted in March of revoking at least 300 visas of students and others whose activities “are counter ... to our foreign policy.”

Last month, the State Department directed consular officials to screen the “entire online presence” of foreign students seeking to study in the U.S. for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States.”

Red states, eager to amplify Trump administration policies, have adopted a host of educational gag orders restricting discussion of race, gender, sexual orientation and other “divisive concepts.” Ohio, for example, limits discussion of “controversial beliefs or policies,” including “climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.” And last month, a federal judge temporarily enjoined a Mississippi anti-DEI statute for “possible widespread suppression of speech.”

As McLaughlin recognizes, the “fight against authoritarian influence” is “a problem that

cannot be ‘solved,’ only mitigated.” Given the Trump administration’s approach to higher education, mitigation efforts should probably begin on American soil and with our own government.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. David Wippman is emeritus president of Hamilton College.