NYU China in ‘cloud of fear’
Shanghai campus mum on HK protests
School is back in session for NYU students in Shanghai, but one subject that won’t be on the syllabus is pro-democracy protests sweeping Hong Kong.
“Everyone is under a bit of a cloud of fear,” one faculty member who teaches at NYU’s sprawling 600,000-square-oot Shanghai campus told The Post. “We don’t walk around trembling like rodents, but there is a general idea that there are certain topics you don’t discuss.
“Most of us are on guard about what we say even when we talk about the weather,” the faculty member continued, adding that student protests at the Shanghai campus would be unthinkable.
“It would draw a lot of negative attention. It is everything that NYU Shanghai doesn’t want,” the staffer said. “We all learn over time how to self-censor.”
Since classes began on Sept. 2, both the Facebook and Twitter account for NYU Shanghai have made no mention of the protests making international headlines.
The only known official airing of the subject was a panel organized by senior professor Jian Chen. He told The Post the panel was “off the record” and refused to disclose what was discussed.
NYU in Shanghai opened to much fanfare in August 2013. The project is a joint venture with Shanghai’s East China Normal University, but the Chinese Communist Party looms over it.
In addition to familiar topics in the NYU curriculum like “Central Problems in Philosophy” or “Multivariable Calculus,” Chinese students who attend the school are required to take classes like “Mao Zedong Thought,” “Introduction to the Communist Party of China” and courses in political education mandated at other Chinese universities.
Yet in a 2018 policy handbook, former NYU-Shanghai Dean of Students Charlene Visconti trumpeted the school’s commitment to liberal values.
“The university is a community where the means of seeking to establish truth are open discussion and free discourse. It thrives on debate and dissent, which must be protected as a matter of academic freedom,” she said.
The incoming class of 2023 is comprised of 434 students, of whom 220 come from China and 126 from the US. The total student body is about 1,300.
Rebecca Karl, who teaches on modern China at NYU’s Washington Square campus, told The Post, “I do not trust my university to do the right thing” if students or faculty in Shanghai spoke out for Hong Kong. “I am not confident they would actually make a real stand here. They have too much at stake.”
In May NYU broke ground on a 1.2 million-square foot expansion of the Shanghai campus that will make room for about 4,000 more graduate and undergraduate students, according to a press release.
Karl says she has been blacklisted from teaching at the NYU Shanghai campus. She also said she has faced pressure from multiple fellow professors in New York not to organize a panel on the Hong Kong protests this semester out of concern that it would “hurt the feelings of my colleagues in Shanghai.”
“I am still going to go forward,” Karl said.
The overall response on the Village campus has been muted. “We believe our goals as a cultural organization are best served by remaining politically neutral,” NYU’s Hong Kong student association said.
NYU spokesman John Beckman said the Hong Kong panel in Shanghai was “well attended by students and faculty,” but conceded that the school could not necessarily protect protesting students who run afoul of the Communist party.
“Our students . . . understand that when they are outside a university setting, a university doesn’t have any special authority to immunize its students from harm or jeopardy,” he said.