America’s Campuses: The Next Frontline Against Authoritarianism

When China, Qatar, and even our own federal government threaten academic freedom, we're all responsible for fighting back.

This essay was originally published by Garry Kasparov’s The Next Move and is a part of its Back to School series.

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If you’re feeling a censorial chill in the air, you’re not alone.

For years, I’ve been sounding the alarm about foreign authoritarians’ pernicious influence on higher education in America and other countries. Especially concerning are the Chinese government’s efforts, which have harmed students and academics and incentivized universities to put their core values on the backburner.

Authoritarians in the Academy, my new book out today, details how nondemocratic governments have fueled this problem for decades in the US, Europe, and elsewhere.

But now, the call is coming from inside the house, too. Over the past six months, the Trump administration has undertaken efforts, ranging from illiberal to blatantly unconstitutional, to exact punishment on students, academics, and the universities they attend.

The fight to combat authoritarianism on campus has, in many ways, grown more difficult in the United States in recent months, but that only makes it more urgent that we challenge it directly and wholly.

It will not be easy and it will not be cheap. But for institutions whose independence is so vital for the freedom of broader civil society, there is no price we can put on the core values of academic freedom and free expression.

Here’s what all of us — university leaders, students and academics, legislators, and all Americans — can do to fight back.

What can university leaders do?

University officials like to talk about free speech and an open exchange of ideas. In fall of 2023, Cornell’s then-president Martha Pollack announced a university-wide theme for the upcoming academic year would be freedom of expression.

In a statement, Pollack affirmed that “Free expression is the bedrock of democracy, just as academic freedom is the bedrock of higher education.”

It’s a strong message. But Cornell’s medical school also has a campus in Qatar and a dual degree program in China, where freedom is certainly not bedrock.

To university presidents, chancellors, administrators, and trustees: Do not let your values be just branding slogans in your brochures. Do not compromise with dictators or would-be dictators, whether the offender is a foreign actor or an American politician.

There is plenty for university leaders to reconsider when it comes to questionable global partnerships, which can chip away at values like an open exchange of ideas and freedom of speech.

What protections exist for academic freedom at their satellite campus in Qatar (where, along with Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, Georgetown, Texas A&M, and Virginia Commonwealth University all have campuses)?

Do American universities’ collaborations with the Chinese government or affiliated businesses have appropriate safeguards (Johns Hopkins, NYU, Georgia Tech, and Duke have programs in China)?

Has the university in the past self-censored at home or ignored foreign powers’ threats against its community members to protect its relationships abroad?

These are difficult questions leaders must be willing to ask themselves. As universities seek to safeguard themselves against authoritarian incursions, they must do so regardless of origin.

These days, the problem is not only one of malicious foreign influence. To protect their values, leadership should make clear to its community that if it receives an unconstitutional or illiberal directive from the federal or a state government to surveil its students or censor its faculty, like those agreed to by Columbia, the university will transparently reject it. There can be no closed-door deals that treat community members’ rights as a bargaining chip.

If university leaders truly prioritize freedom of expression, academic freedom, and the search for truth, they cannot abandon those values when confronted with foreign funding opportunities with dubious strings attached or threats from our government.

What can students and professors do?

For students and faculty, the first step is to know your rights. The easiest way to lose those rights is to be ignorant of them.

If you are facing acts of transnational repression, learn what institutional resources are available to you, whether from your university, local police, or (with the appropriate scrutiny) federal law enforcement. It’s a rare sight, but universities like Purdue have shown that it’s possible for institutions to act when student dissidents are under pressure on campus.

If your university fails to act against (or, worse, facilitates) a violation of your rights under either university policies or the First Amendment, seek out assistance or advocacy organizations to defend yourself. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, where I work, offers advocacy resources for academics experiencing these attacks.

Student journalists have an important role to play, too. The student press can serve as a watchdog on universities’ entanglements abroad, especially as local news resources wither in some parts of the country. It was student paper The Crimson, for example, that first broke the story about a Harvard law dean pressuring a Chinese human rights lawyer to cancel a campus event about human rights in China so as to not “embarrass” the university.

What can elected officials do?

Legislators and politicians, recognize and respond to the threat authoritarianism poses to civil society in America.

Our officials can make progress holding universities to their First Amendment obligations and foreign gift reporting requirements. They can also work to combat transnational repression efforts by foreign powers.

But it’s important that they approach this delicate issue the right way. The unfortunate reality is that very legitimate concerns about the role of authoritarian nations like China in domestic higher education have been used to justify illiberal or bigoted campaigns to single out students and academics for exclusion, investigation, or draconian surveillance because of their national origin.

Our elected leaders can take on foreign powers without encroaching on the expressive rights of our universities, students, citizens, and immigrants. We will not fight repressive regimes by becoming less free ourselves. Even if that method made some gains, what a pyrrhic victory it would be.

A message for all Americans

We Americans should remember why these values are worth protecting in the first place and learn what we can do in our communities to stand up for them.

Alumni should use their voices to encourage universities to craft standards that shield the rights of students and faculty against forces that wish to silence them. Voters should pressure their elected officials to pursue policies that protect higher education against authoritarianism wherever it rears its ugly head and to stand firm against efforts to silence dissent within it.

And more broadly, Americans must stop demanding protection for their own rights to speak while selling out the same rights of their political opponents. Our speech rights are a shared good: when we weaken them for one, we weaken them for all, including the dissenters and dissidents seeking space to speak freely on campuses and in classrooms. We simply will not be able to combat authoritarian threats from abroad if we fan their flames at home.

As freedom continues its dangerous nosedive across the world, we must be able to rely on our universities to stand firm against censorship and repression. That means holding our academic institutions to a higher standard, and demanding the same commitment of ourselves.

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Sarah McLaughlin is senior scholar, global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Her new book is Authoritarians in the Academy, out now from Johns Hopkins University Press.