Universities Appease China, Ignore Human Rights Abuses

Long the vanguard of liberal change, the American university now leads the appeasement of a hardened authoritarian China. The interest in promoting a broader community of scholars has given way to a toxic combination of business interests, the inability of college leaders to recognize their failure in influencing Chinese education, and their unwillingness to see the reality of a new China.

Both China and the United States need universities to engage in solutions based upon the values of universities rather than catering to authoritarianism.

American universities and professors jealously guard their independence, seeing themselves as defenders of liberal values and social change. A tenure system built upon the defense of free speech and controversy promotes the exploration of radical ideas and critical thinking skills seen as vital for everything from an informed electorate to higher-order job skills.

Historically, the academy writ large has been at the forefront of human rights and social change. Universities provide a fertile environment to push for social change, from racial integration to campaigns for human rights. With a reasonable record of pushing change, universities like to consider themselves defenders of liberal values.

Early after the opening of China, American universities worked to build bridges between a Cold War-focused country and a reforming communist stalwart. Major elite universities trained early reformers that helped China join the World Trade Organization—yet, now, they have educated the daughter of authoritarian Party chairman Xi Jinping. Universities began with the noblest of intentions but, as China changed, evolved into institutions that defend educating the children of elite rulers who direct concentration camps.

The shift of universities from defenders of human rights to protectors of authoritarian Party elites stems from a noxious cocktail of self-righteousness, hubris, and money.

Universities—believing in their mission to spread liberalism—fail to grasp the fundamental problems they face when dealing with China. Defensive at any critique of their many degrees, university leaders and professors lack the same interest in holding the powerful to account. To professors and universities, activism is a virtue in America, but a vice in China.

Attempts to hold China accountable are met with immediate charges of racism rather than any careful consideration of how to meet the challenges of academic freedom and activity in the face of an emboldened authoritarian China.

At the peak of hubris, professors refuse to acknowledge the historical failure of their principled ideals to cause change in China or the need to adopt policies of engagement. Ezra Vogel, the longtime China studies professor at Harvard, illustrated the willful blindness of academia when he decried the shift in tone of US-China relations and called for engagement to improve relations. He failed to even mention Hong Kong or Xinjiang, his Harvard colleague arrested for illegal dealings with China, or the failure of previous engagement with China.

The refusal throughout higher education to acknowledge the evolution of China into a racial, oppressive authoritarian state shows that it is divorced from reality. China monitors students in the classroom (in China and abroad). The preferred policies of high-ranking professors and college presidents have not worked.

Complicating the picture of hubris and self-righteousness, money from China dominates any discussion of university policies and behavior. Chinese students in the United States comprise roughly 30 percent of all foreign students—370,000 in 2019, up from 98,000 in 2009. Notably, Chinese students pay full tuition, making them much more attractive compared to domestic students who get financial aid or in-state tuition for public universities.

American universities bent over backward to serve this growing lucrative market. Universities adopted mass student admission from China—helped by education consultants who housed students in Chinese-speaking dorms, fed them Chinese food with a Chinese cook, and delivered the China Daily to their room. In the process, however, they willfully ignored the risks of dealing with an expansionist authoritarian state and the tradeoffs it required.

United States professors accepted unreported positions at Chinese universities and shared advanced federally funded data with an adversarial government. Universities also accepted constraints on academic freedom, allowing the Chinese Ministry of Education to appoint Chinese Communist Party-approved employees at language programs to ensure sensitive topics were not discussed. Even policies to block graduate students connected to the People’s Liberation Army became a point of contention for universities despite posing a clear, undeniable security risk.

Universities rescinded invitations to speakers that might anger the Chinese government or student body to keep high-margin customers happy.

College leaders and professors engaged in significant behavior to challenge the U.S. government on policies like international student visas and other policies that favored China. Conversely, they also chose to remain silent when China cracked down on speech in their universities, the Hong Kong National Security Law, and ethnic genocide in Xinjiang.

Universities engage in a self-righteous lack of reflection, believing that the surge in donations and contract work from China and Hong Kong—which grew from $140 million in 2014 to $495 million in 2019—plays no role in their decision to remain silent.

The willingness to plead ignorance is staggering. A recent report highlights when the University of Pennsylvania reported a $3 million donation from a Hong Kong shell company with no visible business that was owned by a Chinese national linked to high-level corruption scandals. When asked about the donation, Penn at first claimed it was linked to another donor even though no link could be found. When asked for documentation or evidence of this claim, they refused to answer additional questions from reporters.

If Penn were a financial firm accepting a significant new client while knowingly accepting potential corrupt proceeds or using a front company as the official client, it would result in significant legal penalties. This behavior by elite universities, tasked with educating the business and political leaders of tomorrow, is highly disturbing.

Other top universities like Duke and New York University understand they are trading their silence for a growing market. The supposedly principled nature of the work on critical inquiry and free thinking makes this an untenable tradeoff for universities.

One cannot stand on virtue as the foundation of your business while trading it for market access and remain virtuous. Universities reduce liberal education to a valueless transaction when they collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party.

China has changed. Chairman Xi Jinping has led the harshest crackdown on speech in China and universities since Chairman Mao. Student monitors report on professors and China arrests foreign academics after inviting them for lectures. American universities cannot remain silent in the face of this assault—yet, to date, only Cornell University has modified exchange and university relationships with Chinese universities.

Universities are entirely right to stand on principle against racial profiling or injustice. They are entirely wrong to remain silent on China with its accompanying risks and threats.

Unfortunately, staunch opposition to any restrictive policy removes their voice and input from reasoned debate and policy formation. I have been a staunch advocate of engagement with China and other emerging market communist countries, but that does not mean ignoring the risks and challenges. By denying valid threats like Chinese military infiltration in science labs, universities seem out of touch and welcome more extreme voices to design important policies.

China in 2020 presents a variety of challenges. We cannot turn our back on Chinese students, many of whom seek freedom, but neither should universities be blind to the risks. Universities should not pursue engagement at all costs. Instead, they should pursue principled engagement that predicates any cooperation with China on values like the discussion of democracy, Chinese history, and the ability to criticize the Great Leader.

Engagement without principles is not worthy of the great mission before American universities.

Again, China has changed. Universities have a mission and must change the rules of engagement. The current strategy of appeasement will only make college leaders complicit in providing cover for an authoritarian state. For extra revenue, they’ll offer prestige and a valueless education.

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If Teachers Won’t Teach, Follow Ronald Reagan’s Example and Fire Them

When 13,000 air traffic controllers walked off the job in August 1981, President Ronald Reagan had this to say: “Tell them when the strike’s over, they don’t have any jobs.” The media, not yet fully familiar with the seriousness with which Reagan intended to govern, scoffed at the president’s threat. But it was not a bluff. Two days later, when more than 11,000 controllers refused to come back, Reagan fired them all. It was a powerful move, and demonstrated to the entire country that essential public employees serve the public, not union bosses. America’s public school teachers should be reminded of this fact.

With thousands of teachers across the country currently protesting a return to the classroom because of COVID fears, Reagan’s example is particularly relevant. Like air traffic controllers, teachers sign employment contracts. While air traffic controllers contract with the federal government and teachers with local school districts, the principle is the same: perform the duties for which you were hired, or be fired.

Teachers who refuse to teach in the setting for which they were hired – the classroom – need to stop acting like scared bunnies and grow up. If they truly are “essential” workers, as they remind us repeatedly, then they need to start behaving like other essential employees and get back to work.

Many businesses, unfortunately, have been forced by the government to shut down wholly or in part in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, and this is having a devastating effect on our national economy. Amidst this devastation, public schools in virtually every jurisdiction across the country ended the school year early after COVID hit our shores in March.

Unlike commercial businesses, however, the prolonged closure of schools has ramifications far beyond the economic. Moreover, educating children is a process that cannot be switched on and off like a production line; the damage to young minds that are allowed to lie fallow month after month, or which are presented with “virtual” learning in place of human-to-human interface, creates learning voids not easily replenished.

“Teaching” means, if anything, working with students as well as encouraging students to work with other students in a social setting for the purpose of learning essential skills and acquiring essential knowledge. “Virtual” teaching is not teaching at all; it is cinematography – nothing more than an adult (the “teacher”) speaking to a camera, with an audience of one (the “student”) at the end of the electronic transmission watching a screen. Raw information may be thus transmitted, but not true knowledge.

What many public school teachers and their union bosses at the National Education Association appear to be setting as the price for them to return to the classroom, is a guarantee that the environment will be 100% percent COVID-free at all times. Such a condition is, of course, impossible to meet and essentially allows the teachers to avoid a return to their job site for the foreseeable future.

Moreover, demanding a zero-risk premise for classroom teaching sends the message to students (and everyone else for that matter) that risk-avoidance is the highest and most desirable goal for society. This further erodes the principle on which America’s greatness heretofore has been premised – that society advances not by avoiding challenges, but by meeting and overcoming them.  

There might perhaps be somewhat more compassion for the our-way-or-the-highway posture being taken by these public school teachers had they and their union not spent decades working to ensure that public education remained the only practical option for millions of families across America. Unionized teachers continue to vilify homeschooling and oppose providing taxpaying parents any meaningful ability to choose where to send their children to be educated.

No teacher should be forced to go into the classroom against their will. However, if local government leaders properly equip them with personal protective equipment and mandate reasonable protocols within the schools to minimize the risk of COVID, and if teachers and their unions then still refuse to teach in school, it is time to “pull a Reagan” and fire them. The money saved from thinning educational bloat of protesting teachers and useless district administrators with nothing to do, can be returned to parents who are struggling to pay for alternatives to ensure their children actually have a productive school year.

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14 Parents Sue a School District Over Secretive Transgender Policy

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia last week sued the Trump administration in federal court over the president’s rollback of transgender health care.

The lawsuit, filed in New York, includes more traditionally “conservative” states such as Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

That Wisconsin’s attorney general would participate in this lawsuit is surprising, given the controversy that already exists in the state capital of Madison over one school’s district’s transgender policy. That policy is so anti-parent, it prompted a multiparent lawsuit itself.

In Doe v. Madison Metropolitan School District, 14 parents in Madison partnered with a local law firm and attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom to fight for parental rights that have been eroded by the transgender ideology seeping into every avenue of life, from health care to education.

A couple of years ago, the Madison Metropolitan School District adopted a policy that didn’t just promote transgender ideology in the schools, but created a system allowing teachers to hide information students shared about gender dysphoria, or their desire to “be” transgender, from the child’s own parents.

The policy provides a method for teachers to deceive parents about their child’s so-called gender identity.

Bear in mind, this school district is the largest one in Wisconsin: Over 25,000 students attend 52 schools. This policy could affect a lot of kids and parents, although the percentage of kids who suffer from gender dysphoria is still relatively small.

Teachers are required to fill out a “Gender Support Plan” form for any child who asks to be treated in school as transgender. The form asks questions that range from restroom use to whether the child’s family will be included in this revelation.

Even though parents have rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to review any school records about their children, they would be unable to see this life-altering Gender Support Plan.

It took some creative finagling for the school district to figure out how to get around that federal law. Under the law, it turned out, an individual teacher’s “personal” notes about a student are exempt from the parents’ right of access.

A section of the Gender Support Plan tells teachers to file the plan in the teacher’s personal confidential file, not in student records, so it remains exempt from federal law and hidden from parents.

The policy also says: “School staff shall not disclose any information that may reveal a student’s gender identity to others, including parents or guardians and other school staff unless legally required to do so.”

In the Madison school district, a child could go to school as a girl named “Lindsay,” but spend the day as a boy named “Liam.” The child could go to the restroom alongside boys, change in the locker room with boys, and be known by friends and teachers as “Liam.” But Lindsay’s parents, who gave birth to and are raising a girl named Lindsay, would have no idea.

It’s hard to tell what’s worse here, that teachers are encouraged to hide a child’s secret transgender life at school behind the backs of concerned parents, completely subverting parents’ natural and legal right to this information, or that teachers essentially are encouraged to evade federal law to make this happen.

Add the legal portion of this onto the fact that this particular school district has bought into the transgender ideology, specifically the myth that kids under 18 should transition with hormones or surgery, and you have yourself a full-blown scandal

Thankfully, 14 individual parents from eight families filed a lawsuit challenging this unethical policy.  The complaint describes the unethical and unconstitutional nature of the policy as it relates to parental rights, saying:

Parents’ rights cases have established that parents have the primary role in directing the upbringing of their children, especially in significant decisions (like health care), and that the government may not supplant parents simply because a parent’s decision is not agreeable to the child.

The parents’ rights issue at stake here is incredibly concerning. If you don’t think so, ask yourself if you could see a school district hiding personal information from you about your child related to any other issue a child might encounter at school.

Whether a minor or major injury sustained on a school playground, homework assigned but not turned in, even scuffles with other kids or complaints about lack of parental guidance at home: All of these would go straight to the school administration and be addressed with a parent immediately.

I’ve had a school nurse call and let me know my child scraped her knee on a playground even though she is fine. It’s a courtesy update to let me know what to expect when my child returns home.

Yet when it comes to transgenderism, it now has become like a precious jewel: beloved, rare, sacrosanct, and protected. Helping kids embrace or manifest a transgender-friendly persona through hormones, surgery, or changes in name and personal pronouns is the new abortion. It is too progressive to be held back, so important it must be protected, but not quite enough to be addressed with parents.

The fact that the entire Madison school district apparently has jumped aboard the transgender train, allowing kids to change their names and pronouns instead of offering them therapy for suspected gender dysphoria, is disappointing too.

Undoubtedly school administrators would act differently if a child came to them showing signs of anorexia, PTSD, abuse, or other major problems that would require therapy. Yet here, therapy isn’t even a blip on the screen.

Nothing other than steps toward social, hormonal, or medical transitions will do. The damage to children is untold.

Here’s what the parents’ complaint says about gender dysphoria, which couldn’t be more spot on:

Whether a child with gender dysphoria should socially transition to a different gender identity is a highly controversial and consequential decision, and is therefore the type of decision that falls squarely within parental decision-making authority. In fact, many mental health and psychiatric professionals believe that children with gender dysphoria should not immediately transition and that transitioning may actually do significant harm.

Plaintiffs seek an injunction to prevent the District from facilitating potentially life-altering changes to their children’s identities without Plaintiffs’ involvement while this lawsuit is pending. And an injunction will not harm the District or children in any way; it will simply require the District to do what has long been the constitutionally-protected rule for decisions of this magnitude—defer to parents.

It will be interesting to see how the 22 states that filed lawsuits over transgender health care fare against the Trump administration in federal court.

But it’s clear to me there are much larger legal problems in Wisconsin, particularly percolating within the Madison Metropolitan School District, than to spend time raging against President Donald Trump.

At least 14 parents believe the school district is actively working against them, exploiting a loophole in federal law to help their children embrace an ideology that ultimately could hurt them.

This is harmful and unacceptable. As schools determine what to do in this pandemic year, this issue couldn’t be more pressing.

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Australia: Tricky TEQSA 

Bettina Arndt

Our university regulator, TEQSA, has proved once again that they are a toothless tiger, more interested in pandering to feminist lobby groups than addressing critical governance issues vital to the welfare of much of the student body.

Last year I exposed the fact that TEQSA was responsible for the campus kangaroo courts, having issued a “guidance note” in 2018 which encouraged the universities to introduce regulations to investigate and adjudicate sexual assault. They were responding to pressure from feminist lobby groups keen to ensure more rape convictions by using a lower standard of proof to determine the guilt of accused male students. In my May newsletter I pointed out Joe Biden was a key player in forcing American universities in this direction – and our universities, under the guidance of TEQSA, have simply followed suit.

Many of you will have seen the video of Senator Amanda Stoker grilling TEQSA bureaucrats about the appallingly unfair system that followed their careless advice. The regulations introduced by the universities contained barely a word about ensuring proper legal rights for accused young men. These students face secretive, unsupervised committees determining their guilt on the balance of probabilities with power to impose serious penalties including expulsion from the university.

But then came the Queensland Supreme Court case which determined these kangaroo courts were illegal followed by Dan Tehan’s advice at the TEQSA conference last November that universities should leave sexual assault to the criminal courts. See a summary of these developments here.
    
TEQSA shows itself to be captured - again

A few weeks ago, TEQSA produced a new 76-page document –  a “Good Practice Note” on this issue. This document, written by a group of authors who included two End Rape on Campus activists, mentions neither the Queensland Supreme Court case nor the Education Minister’s advice to TEQSA.

Instead, the TEQSA good practice note advises the universities that whilst they can’t conduct “criminal investigations” for sexual assault they can “deal with the matter under their own misconduct procedures,” providing advice about handling these investigations which neatly sidestep all the key contentious issues.

The university-imposed penalties for sexual assault are mentioned without any explanation of what laws permit universities to withhold degrees or suspend students from their studies. As Senator Stoker pointed out to TEQSA, sexual assault legislation does not include penalties which include robbing young men of degrees worth tens of thousands of dollars and many years of study. It’s notable that TEQSA fails once again to address the legality of these penalties.

The latest TEQSA document makes a token effort to address the lack of due process rights for the accused suggesting that the  nameless university administrators tasked with deciding the fate of accused students are now expected to receive appropriate training, provide evidence to the accused regarding the accusations, keep proper records and ensure their reports are procedurally fair.

But there’s no mention of the most glaring failure to provide basic rights for the accused – access to lawyers. Only three Australian universities definitively allow accused students to be advised by lawyers during their investigations.

Slap in the face for Dan Tehan

This deliberately deceptive document shows the arrogance of the university bureaucrats who feel no need to explain why they are encouraging universities to proceed with investigations deemed illegal and ignore the advice of their Minister. To proudly include End Rape on Campus activists amongst their predominantly female list of authors speaks to their sense of entitlement, their assurance that no one will question their right to prosecute these cases any way they damn well like.

As one tiny example of the subtle anti-male bias which permeates the entire document, I loved the advice on p35 regarding assistance to alleged perpetrators which suggests these young men should be referred to a Behaviour Change Counselling at the Rape and Domestic Violence Service. Hmm, the allegations have yet to be investigated and he’s sent off for behaviour change. Straight from the feminist copybook.

Time for action- can you help?

It’s a very good time to draw public attention to what’s going on here, with the universities facing a huge financial crisis and having muddied their copybooks with all manner of free speech scandals – think UNSW’s censorship over Hong Kong politics, Drew Pavlou’s suspension, and Peter Ridd’s battle with James Cook.

The Coalition has just announced legislation for their Job-ready Graduates package, which rightly focusses on improved transparency as well as sustainability in higher education.

I’ve prepared a draft letter for you to send to Coalition Senators and MPs, proposing  an amendment to the legislation instructing universities to focus on their core business rather than running illegal kangaroo courts involving expensive administrative processes but also exposing these institutions to potential lawsuits over failure to protect basic legal rights of the accused.

And given that TEQSA’s latest effort provides further evidence of the failure of the university regulator to properly advise the tertiary sector on this important issue, we are also suggesting the Education Minister institute a proper review into TEQSA’s operation, in keeping with the Coalitions’ call for greater transparency in higher education.

We need you all to step up so that we send letters to all Coalition members of parliament – as part of our ongoing campaign to alert key policy makers to this unjust system.

Bettina Arndt newsletter: newsletter@bettinaarndt.com.au