Academic Freedom, Free Expression, and China’s Quest for World-Class Universities

The Center for Public Scholarship’s Endangered Scholars Worldwide, Scholars at Risk Network and University of New Orleans Press are hosting a panel discussion of China’s higher education system, its goals and the challenges it is facing. Our discussion will reflect on the government’s stated goal to create world-class universities in China, and will ask how this can be reconciled with continuing reports of prosecutions or other pressures against individual scholars and intellectuals.

Can China become a world leader of higher education without full academic or expressive freedom? What challenges does this pose for western universities partnering with Chinese higher education, whether domestically by hosting student exchanges and Confucius Institutes, or through overseas programs or branch campuses? And what do these challenges in China mean for institutions partnering with higher education communities in other countries where academic and expressive freedom may be similarly constrained?

• Teng Biao, Chinese human rights lawyer; visiting scholar, NYU School of Law
• Jewher Ilham, author and activist for her imprisoned father, Ilham Tohti
• Carl Minzner, Professor of Law, Fordham University School oif Law
• Moderator: Jerome Cohen , faculty director, US-Asia Law Institute, NYU School of Law

A recording of the event is available below: