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The American Association of University Professors defines academic freedom as…

“the freedom of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss the issues in his or her academic field, and to teach or publish findings without interference from political figures, boards of trustees, donors, or other entities. Academic freedom also protects the right of a faculty member to speak freely when participating in institutional governance, as well as to speak freely as a citizen.” 

I have spent a good chunk of my career defending the First Amendment, and have also worked on higher education issues. This has led me to see a lot of overlap between free speech and academic freedom, which is why I believe we need to curb the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and other adversarial regimes (Iran, Russia, Syria, etc.) in our colleges and universities. 

This might seem paradoxical. How does limiting influence from such nations (which may be financial support, curricula, or personnel, all of which easily involve forms of speech) uphold academic freedom and free speech principles? 

It’s a legitimate question, but there are good answers that explain why, for example, curbing CCP influence on college campuses is different than a lot of other limits on speech.

Consider a basic obligation of a college or university – or any nonprofit, for that matter – to avoid becoming essentially a public relations operation for one of its donors. 

I saw this firsthand nearly two decades ago when I worked on health care policy and read a bi-weekly email newsletter on health policy in Europe. Every two weeks I received a smorgasbord of information on a broad range of issues – at first. Then, over the space of about three months, it shifted from maybe one or two articles (out of roughly twenty in each issue) about drug prices to nearly every article being about drug prices. 

I later learned that a donor with an interest in European drug prices had become its chief financial supporter. I characterize what had happened as “donor capture,” where an organization has set aside its institutional integrity and mission in order to please its donor by simply saying whatever the donor wants it to.

Donor capture is a real thing, though as a general matter I don’t think the government should be stepping in to prevent it (it’s usually self-correcting – that newsletter stopped publication about six months later, as apparently it had burned its credibility and lost most of its subscribers, including me).

But there are exceptions to a government “hands off” approach, particularly when it comes to foreign policy and national defense. Limiting or even prohibiting funding from the CCP and other adversarial regimes is not just warranted but I believe required in order to protect academic freedom at colleges or universities.

Consider the so-called Confucius Institutes that were established on many college campuses beginning about two decades ago. These institutes taught both for-credit and non-credit classes in Chinese language and culture, but unlike (as best I can tell) every other academic college and university program in the country that teach undergraduate and graduate students, the staff of the Confucius Institutes were mostly hired and paid by the Office of Chinese Languages Council International (“Hanban”), part of the Chinese government’s Department of Education.

Hiring and paying professors is just the start of the problem for academic freedom. As an alarming report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) explains, the grant agreements between colleges and the Hanban “requires Confucius Institutes to adhere to Chinese law, including speech codes.” This sharply restricts what can be taught about subjects such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or Taiwan, among other “off limits” topics.

Needless to say, imposing limits on what topics can be discussed and which points of view are allowed is wholly contrary to the idea of academic freedom, and should have no place anywhere at an American college or university. Any claim that prohibiting Confucius Institutes is an attack on academic freedom has it exactly backwards – it is these institutes, with orders from the Chinese Communist Party to clamp down on discussion of sensitive topics, that represent a serious attack on academic freedom. State legislatures should find and use all appropriate means to remove these blights on academic freedom from their public college and university systems.