Liberal Education in Authoritarian Places 自由心智教育來到中國/新加坡還能自由嗎？

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自由心智教育來到中國還能自由嗎？

吉姆·斯立珀 2013年09月04日

Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis

位於阿拉伯聯合酋長國阿布扎比的紐約大學分校，該校開辦於2010年。

紐約大學(New York University)位於上海的新「門戶」分校開課了，這是美國大學向海外出口教學和聲望的最新嘗試。

不過，首批295名學生並沒有真正的校園，他們當中有一半是中國人，還有一半來自美國和其他國家。一棟規劃15層的教學樓正在施工。授課會在紐約大學的合資夥伴，華東師範大學進行。有一個恰當的比喻：這是一個不十分真實的校園，實行的是一種不十分真實的人文教育。

2011年4月，在華盛頓舉行的中美「人文交流」會議上， 時任美國國務卿希拉里·羅德姆·克林頓(Hillary Rodham Clinton)對紐約大學校長約翰·塞克斯頓(John Sexton)大加讚賞，稱讚他「擁有的視野，能讓他在國際舞台拓展紐約大學的地位、同時維護學校的卓越聲望和教學自由」。

不過，塞克斯頓意指的「自由」似乎具有彈性。那一年晚些時 候，他對彭博新聞社(Bloomberg News)說，「在區分學術自由權利和政治言論自由權利方面，我毫無問題。這是兩件不同的事情。」這種陳述出自一名憲法學者之口讓人震驚。和紐約大學於 2010年在阿布扎比開設的獨立分校引發的爭議一樣，上海分校對塞克斯頓在國內迎來日漸低落的人氣，起到了促進作用，該校最大的人文和科學學院在今年3月 對他投下了「不信任」票。這兩所海外分校主要是由外國補貼資助的。

塞克斯頓似乎對約翰·霍普金斯大學(Johns Hopkins University)的經歷一無所知，該校的高級國際問題研究院(School of Advanced International Studies)在中國南京擁有一所長期的中心，該中心在政治討論方面面臨限制：一部和1989年的天安門民運事件有關的紀錄片在校內公映時被叫停，一名 美國學生被禁止在校外分發他創建的期刊，上面刊登了同學們的文章。

外交官們有充足的理由鼓勵與重要的戰略國家之間的教育合作。在美國，高等教育面臨巨大的壓力——奧巴馬總統通過評級使學校收費更合理、更可靠的計劃就是一個例子——所以，情不自禁地往生源迅速增長（或者生源豐富）的國家進行擴張，以此來籌集資金的想法是可以理解的。

然而，如果把目光越過外交官們音量漸高的空話，你會發現， 在全球各地奔波的校長和董事會成員，正在定義他們對人文教育涵義的預期，就像企業以另一種眼光，看待他們在海外對勞動力和環境的卑劣作為一樣。當然，這其 中的不同在於，大學的使命是質疑這種安排，而不是促成這種安排。

我不反對在富裕國家、威權國家、或二者兼具的國家開展法 律、商業、醫學和技術培訓方面的合作性研究項目。在這些國家，有許多學生想要開拓他們的社會和政治視野、以及職業技能。可是，把能和言論自由一分為二的質 詢自由擺在他們面前，往最好聽的說，是天真幼稚，往最難聽的說，是犬儒主義。

也許沒有哪個例子能比我任教的耶魯大學(Yale)更充分 地體現這種犬儒主義。該校和新加坡國立大學(National University of Singapore)合資創建一所新的本科學院的決定，引發了理乍得·C·萊文(Richard C. Levin)長達20年的校長生涯里最為激烈的一次爭議，他在今年夏天退休時，還頂着耶魯大學校長的身份，一年前的這個時候，一項非約束性的院系決議對該 項目提出了嚴肅的質疑。

耶魯承諾，在由新加坡建設並出資的校園裡，耶魯大學-新加坡國立大學合資學院新僱傭的教職員工，將會「重新思考自下而上的人文教育」。新加坡是一個嚴格限制言論自由的威權制城邦國家。

「我們理解的『自由』必須是更廣意義上的自由，而不是絕對的自由，」耶魯-新加坡國立大學管理委員會負責人、女商人郭凱(Kay Kuok)對政府控制的海峽時報(Straits Times)表示。「是思想自由；我指的並不一定是表達自由。」

萊文承諾稱，學生將能夠自由組建社團，「前提是不排斥種族或宗教群體。」但其新加坡校區校長伯里克利·劉易斯(Pericles Lewis)卻稱稱，學生不能自由成立有明顯政治意味的協會，更不能抗議政府政策，即便是在校園內。

「在一個言論自由受到限制而非禁止的東道主國環境內，學校 教職工會進行自我審查，而能在這樣的情況下在一定程度上存在的真正的通識教育會遭遇阻礙，」去年在一封批評耶魯-新加坡國立大學學院的信中，美國大學教授 協會(American Association of University Professors)警告道。信中提出了耶魯沒回答的16個問題；後者甚至沒有向教職工披露新加坡項目的協議的完整內容。

按照無國界記者(Reporters Without Borders)今年的排名，新加坡的新聞自由程度在179個國家中排在第149名——比去年的第135名有所下降。位於加利福尼亞州的克萊蒙特學院聯盟 (Claremont Colleges)及位於英國的華威大學(University of Warwick)在拒絕新加坡提出出資在該國建立文理學院的提議時，便提到了對學術自由的擔憂——之後，耶魯接受了同樣的提議。

學術自由並非受到威脅的唯一理念。2009年，威斯康星大 學麥迪遜分校(University of Wisconsin at Madison)收到中亞國家哈薩克斯坦的邀請，請其幫忙建立一個生物科技教育項目，美方沒有接受這個邀請，反而提出設計一個人文和社會科學學院，而這正 是受到倡導勞動權利和開放政府的「威斯康星思想」的啟發。最後，一個十分不同的項目得以建立：一所耗資20億美元的大學，它由一個包括麥迪遜大學在內的聯 盟運行，以獨裁總統努爾蘇丹·納扎爾巴耶夫(Nursultan A. Nazarbayev)的名字命名，後者在校董會有自己的代表。人權觀察組織(Human Rights Watch)和其他組織紀錄了發生在阿拉伯聯合酋長國的廣泛侵犯勞工權利事件，那裡的移民工占阿布扎比居民人口的70%多，但卻享有極少法律保護，而他們 仍在奢華的旅遊和居住點薩迪亞特島修建紐約大學的校區。

當獨裁政權用金錢買來美國大學的聲望和人才，他們是「用捷徑走完一個需經過數百年發展的過程，」哈佛學院(Harvard College)前院長哈里·R·劉易斯(Harry R. Lewis)最近在《南華早報》(South Morning Post)上寫道。

大學爭相瘋狂擴張，反映出的更多是其根本性弱點，而不是貪 婪的、帝國主義擴張，即大學不僅受到財務和市場的壓力，還在教育目的和任務上出現偏差。大學校長認可了這樣一個錯誤的前提，即法里德·扎卡里亞 (Fareed Zakaria)及馬凱碩(Kishore Mahbubani)等思想者所贊同的觀點：實現經濟自由化的國家也會實現政治自由化。大學需要在教學方法上、甚至是政治層面上恢復一種「傳教式」的、尋 找自由的方式處理與東道主國家關係。或者它們應該學習哥倫比亞大學(Columbia University)和其他大學的模式，建立學校的印記少得多的學習中心而不是全面發展的校區。

最好的情況下，通識教育培養了未來的公民領袖質疑而不是單 純服務於權力和利益集中的價值觀和技能。拋棄這種理念的大學則也在自毀聲譽，成為通識教育質量下降的註腳；把自己變成服務於置共和政體和道德準則於不顧的 全球管理類勞動大軍的職業發展中心；也讓它們在國內外頒發的學位證書的價值不斷下降。

作者是耶魯大學政治學講師、《自由的種族主義》(Liberal Racism)的作者。

翻譯：張薇、谷菁璐

Opinion

Liberal Education in Authoritarian Places

By JIM SLEEPER September 04, 2013

 

CLASSES are beginning at New York University’s new “portal” campus in Shanghai — the latest attempt by an American university to export its teaching and prestige abroad.

But there is no actual campus yet for the inaugural cohort of 295 students, half of whom are Chinese, and half from the United States and other countries. A planned 15-story academic building is still under construction. Classes are being held at East China Normal University, N.Y.U.’s partner in this joint venture. It’s an apt metaphor: a not-quite-real campus for a not-quite-real liberal education.

In April 2011, at a conference in Washington on “people-to-people exchange” between the United States and China, Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state, praised N.Y.U.’s president, John Sexton, for his “vision to expand his university internationally while maintaining its reputation for excellence and academic freedom.”

But his meaning of “freedom” seems elastic. “I have no trouble distinguishing between rights of academic freedom and rights of political expression,” he told Bloomberg News later that year. “These are two different things.” This was a startling statement, coming from a scholar of constitutional law. And along with the controversy over a stand-alone campus that N.Y.U. opened in Abu Dhabi in 2010, it contributed to Mr. Sexton’s rising unpopularity back home: the arts and science faculty, N.Y.U.’s largest, voted “no confidence” in him in March. Both overseas campuses were financed primarily with foreign subsidies.

Mr. Sexton seemed oblivious to the experiences of Johns Hopkins University, whose School of Advanced International Studies has a longstanding center in Nanjing, China, that has faced restrictions on political discussion: the halting of an on-campus public screening of a documentary about the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 and a ban on off-campus distribution of a journal started by an American student with articles by classmates.

Diplomats have good reason to encourage educational collaborations with strategically vital nations. And higher education is under great strain in the United States — witness President Obama’s plans to make colleges more affordable and accountable by rating them — so the temptation to raise money by expanding into rapidly growing (or resource rich) countries is understandable.

But if you look past their soaring rhetoric, you’ll see globe-trotting university presidents and trustees who are defining down their expectations of what a liberal education means, much as corporations do when they look the other way at shoddy labor and environmental practices abroad. The difference, of course, is that a university’s mission is to question such arrangements, not to facilitate them.

I’m no opponent of collaborative research programs in law, business, medicine and technical training in countries that are wealthy or authoritarian or both. Many students in those countries may want to broaden their social and political horizons as well as their career skills. But pretending that freedom of inquiry can be separated from freedom of expression is naïve at best, cynical at worst.

There is perhaps no better example of such cynicism than at Yale, where I teach. Its decision to create a new undergraduate college in a joint venture with the National University of Singapore touched off one of the strongest controversies in the 20-year presidency of Richard C. Levin, who retired this summer as Yale’s president — a year after a nonbinding faculty resolution expressed grave reservations about the project.

Yale promised that the newly hired faculty at Yale-N.U.S. would “rethink liberal education from the ground up” in a campus built and financed by Singapore — an authoritarian city-state with severe restrictions on freedom of speech.

“We must look at ‘liberal’ in the sense of broad, rather than free,” Kay Kuok, a businesswoman who leads the Yale-N.U.S. governing board, told the government-controlled Straits Times. “It’s freedom of thought; I’m not necessarily saying freedom of expression.”

Mr. Levin promised that students would be free to form associations “as long as they are not intolerant of racial or religious groups.” But the Singapore campus’s president, Pericles Lewis, said they would not be free to form explicitly political associations, much less stage protests of government policies, even on campus.

“In a host environment where free speech is constrained if not proscribed, faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education, to the extent it can exist in such situations, will suffer,” the American Association of University Professors warned last year in a letter criticizing the Singapore venture. The letter posed 16 questions that Yale hasn’t answered; it won’t even disclose to its faculty the full terms of the Singapore deal.

Reporters Without Borders this year ranked Singapore No. 149 out of 179 in press freedom — down from No. 135 last year. Faculty members at the Claremont Colleges, in California, and University of Warwick, in Britain, cited concerns about academic freedom when they rebuffed Singapore’s offers to fund liberal arts colleges there — before Yale accepted.

Academic freedom isn’t the only ideal at risk. In 2009, when the University of Wisconsin at Madison was invited by the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan to help create a biotechnology program, the Americans proposed instead to design a school for the humanities and social sciences, one inspired by “the Wisconsin Idea,” a progressive vision of labor rights and open government. Something very different was built: a $2 billion university, run by a consortium that includes the University of Wisconsin, and named for the autocratic president Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, who has a representative on the board of trustees. Human Rights Watch and other groups have documented extensive labor rights violations in the United Arab Emirates, where migrant workers, who make up more than 70 percent of Abu Dhabi’s residents but enjoy few legal protections, are still building the N.Y.U. campus on Saadiyat Island, a luxury tourist and residential site.

When authoritarian regimes buy American universities’ prestige and talent, they “shortcut a process that took centuries to create,” Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, recently wrote in the South China Morning Post.

Universities’ mad scramble to expand reflects not so much grasping, imperialistic overreach as fundamental weakness: not only financial and market pressures, but also a drift in purpose and mission. University presidents have bought into an incorrect premise, espoused by thinkers like Fareed Zakaria and Kishore Mahbubani, that countries that liberalize economically will also liberalize politically. Universities need to recover a more “missionary,” freedom-seeking approach to their host countries, pedagogically and even politically. Or they should follow the model of Columbia and other universities that have created learning centers with much lighter footprints, not full-fledged campuses.

At its best, a liberal education imbues future citizen-leaders with the values and skills that are necessary to question, not merely serve, concentrations of power and profit. Universities that abandon this ideal are lending their good names to the decline of liberal education; turning themselves into career-networking centers for a global managerial work force that answers to no republican polity or moral code; and cheapening the value of the diplomas they hand out, at home and abroad.

A lecturer in political science at Yale and the author of “Liberal Racism.”