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Innocents Abroad? Liberal Educators in Illiberal Societies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2015

Jim Sleeper
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It might seem an American Dream come true: About 100 Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors, ten at a time, are managing five laboratories stocked with “totally state-of-the-art equipment” in a gleaming new tower on the National University of Singapore campus. As the New York Times reports, the campus houses the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and other projects, involving “world-class universities from Britain, China, France, Germany, Israel and Switzerland.” The MIT professors and their forty PhD and postdoctoral researchers are designing “myriad innovations”: driverless cars that would respond to “killer app” sensors throughout Singapore; stingray-like robots that will collect ocean-bottom data to fight noxious algae; and technologies that will track infectious diseases, energy consumption, and other movements in this tightly run, wealthy city-state of 5.4 million people.

Type
Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Summer 2015 , pp. 127 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Jane A. Peterson, “M.I.T. Settles In for Long Haul in Singapore,” New York Times, November 16, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/world/asia/mit-settles-in-for-long-haul-in-singapore.html?_r=1.

2 Ibid.

3 Santayana, George, “Materialism and Idealism in American Life,” in Henfrey, Norman, ed., Selected Critical Writings of George Santayana Vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 58Google Scholar.

4 This information provided by the State University of New York at Albany's Cross-Border Education Research Team C-BERT, www.globalhighered.org/branchcampuses.php.

5 Ibid.

6 Email exchange with the author.

7 Orville Schell, “China Strikes Back,” New York Review of Books, October 23, 2014, p. 6.

8 See Oliver Staley, “Duke to NYU Missteps Abroad Lead Colleges to Reassess Expansion,” Bloomberg Business, October 4, 2013, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-04/duke-to-nyu-missteps-abroad-lead-colleges-to-reassess-expansion.

9 Carl Schreck, “FBI Wary of Possible Russian Spies Lurking in High-Tech Sector,” Voice of America News, May 20, 2014, www.voanews.com/content/fbi-wary-of-possible-russian-spies-lurking-in-high-tech-sector/1918528.html.

10 Interview with author, February 5, 2015.

11 Shane Harris, “The Social Laboratory,” Foreign Policy, July 29, 2014, foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/29/the-social-laboratory/.

12 “Report: Launching the Qatar National Research Fund,” Rand-Qatar Policy Institute (2012), www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/technical_reports/2012/RAND_TR722.pdf.

13 Waleed al-Shobakky, “Brave New World: Gulf Seeks Bold Science Initiatives,” Sci Dev Net, July 2, 2008, www.scidev.net/global/capacity-building/feature/brave-new-world-gulf-seeks-bold-science-initiative.html.

14 “The Debate Over Confucius Institutes,” ChinaFile, June 23, 2014, www.chinafile.com/conversation/debate-over-confucius-institutes.

15 Alan Finder, “At One University, Tobacco Money Is a Secret,” New York Times, May 22, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/us/22tobacco.html?pagewanted=all.

16 Email exchange with the author.

17 Elizabeth Redden, “Global Ambitions,” Inside Higher Ed, March 11, 2013, www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/11/nyu-establishes-campuses-and-sites-around-globe.

18 Amy Stambach, “Cross Border Higher Education: Two Models,” International Higher Education, no. 66 (Winter 2012).

19 Ambassador Chan Heng Chee, “Democracy, Globalisation and Competitiveness in Singapore” (talk at the Yale Law School, New Haven, Conn., March 8, 2012), www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/News_&_Events/Singaporeambassadortalk.pdf. See also Jim Sleeper, “Yale Has Gone to Singapore, But Can It Come Back?” Huffington Post, July 4, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sleeper/yale-has-gone-to-singapor_b_1476532.html.

20 Rajah, Jothie, Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore (New York: Cambridge Studies in Law and Society, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Isaac Stone Fish, “A Different Kind of Freedom,” Newsweek, January 27, 2010, www.newsweek.com/different-kind-freedom-216470.

22 Bertil Andersson's Nanyang Technical University caused an international outcry by refusing to tenure Cherian George, a Stanford-trained media studies professor whose sophisticated analyses of press freedom had been cited by apologists for the Singapore regime as proof that dissent is possible. Andersson insisted the decision was “not political,” but George has had to find a new position at Hong Kong Baptist University. See Jess C. Scott, “Singapore: Academic Freedom?” The Real Singapore, February 21, 2014, http://therealsingapore.com/content/singapore-academic-freedom.

23 American Association of University Professors, “An Open Letter from the AAUP to the Yale Community” (2012), www.aaup.org/news/2012/open-letter-aaup-yale-community.

24 Peterson, “M.I.T. Settles In for Long Haul in Singapore.”

25 Seyla Benhabib, “What's at Stake at Yale-NUS?” Yale Daily News, April 4, 2012, yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/04/04/benhabib-whats-at-stake-at-yale-nus/.

26 “Presidential Statements Regarding Yale-NUS College: Statement by Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis,” July 19, 2012, news.yale.edu/2012/07/19/presidential-statements-regarding-yale-nus-college.

27 See Professor Mark R. Cohen's moving account “What I Learned Teaching Arabs About Judaism in Abu Dhabi,” The Jewish Daily Forward, February 8, 2015, forward.com/articles/214236/what-i-learned-teaching-arabs-about-judaism-in-abu/?utm_content=DailyNewsletter_TopArea_Position-2_Headline&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=The%20Forward%20Today%20%28Monday-Friday%29&utm_campaign=Saturday-and-Sunday_Daily_Newsletter%202015-02-08.

28 Ava Kofman and Tapley Stephenson, “Yale Values to be Tested in Singapore,” Yale Daily News, March 29, 2012, yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/03/29/yale-values-to-be-tested-in-singapore/.

29 American Association of University Professors, “An Open Letter.”

30 See “China Says No Room for ‘Western Values’ in University Education,” Guardian, January 30, 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/30/china-says-no-room-for-western-values-in-university-education; and William Ide, “China's Western Values Debate Heats Up Online,” Voice of America, February 4, 2015, www.voanews.com/content/china-western-values-debate-heats-up-online/2628748.html.

31 “The Debate Over Confucius Institutes,” ChinaFile.

32 Testimony of Perry Link, Chancellorial Chair at the University of California, Riverside, at the hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 113th Cong. 2 (2014) on “Is Academic Freedom Threatened by China's Influence on American Universities?,” docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20141204/102778/HHRG-113-FA16-Wstate-LinkP-20141204.pdf.

33 “The Debate Over Confucius Institutes,” ChinaFile.

34 Elizabeth Redden, “Has China Failed a Key Test?” Inside Higher Ed, October 21, 2013, www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/21/peking-u-professor-fired-whats-seen-test-case-academic-freedom.

35 John Sexton, “Global Network University Reflection,” New York University, December 21, 2010, www.nyu.edu/about/leadership-university-administration/office-of-the-president/redirect/speeches-statements/global-network-university-reflection.html.

36 Stephanie Saul, “N.Y.U. Professor is Barred by United Arab Emirates,” New York Times, March 16, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/nyregion/nyu-professor-is-barred-from-the-united-arab-emirates.html?_r=0.

37 Jim Dwyer, “Murky Inquiry Targets Critic of N.Y.U. Role in Abu Dhabi, and a Reporter” New York Times, March 26, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/nyregion/investigator-for-mystery-client-targets-critic-of-nyu-role-in-abu-dhabi.html.

38 Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, homepage, www.sais-jhu.edu/graduate-studies/campuses/nanjing-china#about.

39 Daniel Golden and Oliver Staley, “China Halts U.S. Academic Freedom at Classroom Door for Colleges,” Bloomberg Business, November 28, 2011, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-28/china-halts-u-s-college-freedom-at-class-door.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Elizabeth Redden, “Has China Failed a Key Test?,” Inside Higher Ed, October 21, 2013, www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/21/peking-u-professor-fired-whats-seen-test-case-academic-freedom.

43 Ibid.

44 Staley, “Duke to NYU Missteps Abroad Lead Colleges to Reassess Expansion.”

45 Tamar Lewin, “U.S. Colleges Finding Ideals Tested Abroad,” New York Times, December 11, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/education/american-colleges-finding-ideals-are-tested-abroad.html?_r=0.

46 Ibid.

47 “The Bloomberg Fallout: Where Does Journalism in China Go from here?” ChinaFile, March 26, 2014, www.chinafile.com/conversation/bloomberg-fallout-where-does-journalism-china-go-here.

48 Eric Gershon, “Report Details Fresh Take on the Liberal Arts,” Yale News, April 8, 2013, news.yale.edu/2013/04/08/report-details-fresh-take-liberal-arts.