MCLC: AAUP criticizes Confucius Institutes

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42 at cornell.edu>
Subject: AAUP criticizes Confucius Institutes
***********************************************************

AAUP (American Association of University Professors) criticizes
Confucius Institutes:

"On Partnerships with Foreign Governments: The Case of Confucius
Institutes"
See:

http://www.aaup.org/report/partnerships-foreign-governments-case-confucius-
Institutes

http://www.aaup.org/file/Confucius_Institutes.pdf

. . . and also this:

http://chronicle.com/article/AAUP-Rebukes-Colleges-for/147153/
The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 15, 2014

AAUP Rebukes Colleges for Chinese Institutes, and Censures Northeastern
Ill.
By Peter Schmidt
Washington

The American Association of University Professors on Saturday urged
colleges that operate Chinese language and culture centers financed by
the People’s Republic of China to either scrap the partnerships or
renegotiate them to promote transparency and protect academic freedom.

In a statement approved last week by the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic
Freedom and Tenure and released here on Saturday at the association’s
annual conference, the AAUP argues that many colleges in the United
States and Canada have sacrificed their integrity and jeopardized
academic freedom by giving the Chinese government considerable say over
the centers, which are known as Confucius Institutes.

As things now stand, the statement said, the Confucius Institutes in
place at about 90 North American colleges "function as an arm of the
Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom." It said the
agreements that establish them feature "nondisclosure clauses and
unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the
government of China."

In other business on Saturday, the AAUP censured Northeastern Illinois
University for violating due process and academic freedom in denying
tenure to a linguistics professor who had criticized its administration.

The association also moved, however, to let back into its good graces
two colleges that had previously run afoul of it—the University of
Northern Iowa and Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge—in response
to efforts by the universities’ administrations to deal with the AAUP's
concerns.

The association’s decision to caution colleges on Confucius Institutes
comes six months after the group’s Canadian counterpart, the Canadian
Association of University Teachers, urged colleges there to stop hosting
such centers.

Confucius Institutes, which began popping up at American colleges in
2004, have been touted by their host institutions as a means for them to
provide far more instruction in Chinese language and culture than they
would otherwise. Such colleges generally maintain that, although the
centers are financed by a Chinese agency, Hanban, they have not led to
any interference by the Chinese government in their host colleges’ affairs.

Some faculty groups at colleges have opposed such partnerships, however,
arguing that the institutes involve the Chinese government in the
affairs of colleges in ways that threaten shared governance and academic
freedom.

The statement presented on Saturday to the more than 200 AAUP members on
hand for the group’s 100th annual conference sided with the Confucius
Institutes’ critics. It accused North American colleges of permitting
the institutes "to advance a state agenda in the recruitment and control
of academic staff, in the choice of curriculum, and in the restriction
of debate." It urged colleges to scrap their agreements to host the
institutes unless the agreements can be renegotiated to be open to
scrutiny, protect the academic freedom of the institutes’ teachers, and
give colleges unilateral control over all academic matters.

"More generally, these conditions should apply to any partnerships or
collaborations with foreign governments or foreign government-related
agencies," the statement said. It added, however, that Committee A was
not concerned about cultural programs, such as those financed by the
British Council or L’Alliance Française, that are not located on college
campuses.

Presidents’ Decisions

The members on hand for the AAUP meeting voted unanimously to censure
Northeastern Illinois University in response to that institution’s 2012
denial of tenure to John P. Boyle, an assistant professor of linguistics
who had been critical of the university’s administration.

Mr. Boyle’s tenure bid was overwhelmingly supported by faculty
representatives and his department’s acting chair, but was rejected the
university’s president, Sharon K. Hahs, who approved the 15 other tenure
requests before her that year. The university’s administration has
denied retaliating against Mr. Boyle, but the censure motion presented
to AAUP members on Saturday accused Ms. Hahs of refusing to provide the
association’s investigators with an adequate explanation for her decision.

Noting that Mr. Boyle was one of four linguistics professors who had
been seen as leading a successful faculty movement to vote no confidence
in Ms. Hahs and her provost, and that the other three linguistics
professors had been tenured, the censure motion argued that Mr. Boyle
"found himself paying the price" for the group’s opposition to the
administration.

In other actions related to academic freedom, Henry F. Reichman, the
chairman of Committee A, read a statement from the panel announcing that
it had closed an investigation of the University of Northern Iowa, which
had come under AAUP scrutiny over its efforts to shed faculty members in
2012. The statement said that the committee was closing the file because
the university’s new leadership had remedied problems identified by the
association and that the Iowa Board of Regents had reached an adequate
settlement with faculty members who left their jobs.

A report issued by an AAUP investigative committee in December 2012
accused the university’s administration of unduly pressuring faculty
members to resign as part of a cost-cutting effort. The administration
had used a dishonest academic-program-review process, with little
faculty involvement, to give faculty members the impression they faced
layoffs if they did not accept buyout offers or agree to retire over two
years, the report alleged.

The AAUP had been on track to censure the University of Northern Iowa at
its meeting last year, but the association ended up recommending that
its members postpone such an action after concluding that the
university’s new president, William N. Ruud, was working in earnest to
deal with concerns raised in the AAUP’s investigative report. In
updating Committee A last month, the university’s AAUP chapter confirmed
that the university’s administration had continued to work with faculty
leaders to restore good relations and shared governance.

Almost There

The AAUP considered removing from its list of censured colleges
Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, which it had censured in 2012
for allegedly violating the due-process and academic-freedom rights of
two faculty members. Instead, the association members on hand for
Saturday’s meeting overwhelmingly passed a resolution from Committee A
delegating to that panel the task of deciding when Louisiana State
should come off the censure list.

The 2012 censure vote had been in response to Louisiana State’s
treatment of Ivor van Heerden, a nontenured hurricane researcher who
clashed with his supervisors and lost his job in 2009 after criticizing
the levees that failed to protect New Orleans from flooding after
Hurricane Katrina, and Dominique G. Homberger, a tenured biology
professor who was suspended from teaching a course in 2010 following
complaints that she had graded students too harshly.

The resolution offered by Committee A on Saturday said F. King
Alexander, who took over as chancellor of the Baton Rouge campus and
president of the Louisiana State University system last year, had
demonstrated that Louisiana State had adopted policies to shore up due
process and academic freedom and to prevent a recurrence of the events
that led to the censure vote.

The resolution added, however, that it was too early to tell whether the
university would be able to comply with a Committee A request that it
significantly reduce the share of Louisiana State faculty members
employed on a contingent basis. Asserting that the committee’s
reluctance to remove Louisiana State from the censure list too hastily
was matched by a reluctance to keep an institution that had taken
positive steps on the censure list for another whole year, the
resolution called for the association’s members to let the committee
decide at its meeting in November whether to remove censure then or
bring up the question against next June.

Organizing Concerns
In matters unrelated to academic freedom, the AAUP confronted unrest
among some members who are part-time instructors as it took up a
proposal to increase, from $46 to $75, how much its national office will
annually charge new collective-bargaining units for each of their
members who is an adjunct faculty member or graduate student.

Howard J. Bunsis, chairman of the American Association of University
Professors’ Collective Bargaining Congress and an accounting professor
at Eastern Michigan University, told the crowd that the AAUP was
charging its collective-bargaining units less per such members than
other unions that organize them, and needed to charge more to make
organizing new bargaining units cost effective.

Some adjunct faculty members protested, however, that the increase would
make joining the AAUP too expensive for adjuncts, hurting the AAUP’s
efforts to compete with other unions in organizing non-tenure-track
faculty members. They said the association should find some other way to
finance such organizing efforts.

The members on hand for the meeting ended up approving the increase by a
vote of 93 to 13.

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