In 2020, a Purdue student used Zoom to plan a peaceful vigil commemorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Within days, Chinese police showed up at his parents’ door and threatened them. How did Beijing find out about a Zoom call in Indiana?
American universities are built on a commitment to open inquiry — the idea that you can say what you think even if someone powerful doesn’t want you to. But they also host hundreds of thousands of students from authoritarian countries and take billions from authoritarian governments. The signs of that tension are everywhere.
It’s a pattern that repeats: from canceled events for the Dalai Lama to postponed lectures by dissidents. And this trend isn’t limited to China. Qatar is now the single largest foreign funder of American higher education, and Northwestern’s contract for its Doha campus requires the university to abide by Qatari law — which criminalizes criticizing the government.
America has built a higher education system that is the envy of the world. But if our universities are so hungry for foreign money that they’ll trade away the values that made them great to get it, they undermine their entire reason for existing.