Yale University is partnering with the National University of Singapore and freedom of speech is off the table. Political protests and partisan student groups will be forbidden. Elizabeth Redden of Inside Higher Ed reports.

American colleges that have established branch campuses in the Middle East and Asia have regularly faced criticism for collaborating with authoritarian governments. Yet, the American colleges’ promise – either implicitly or explicitly made – is that their presence will have a liberalizing effect.

Yale University’s planned venture with the National University of Singapore was the most recent to come under fire, when Yale-NUS’s president, Pericles Lewis, told The Wall Street Journal that students wouldn’t be permitted to engage in political protests or form partisan political organizations. As is the norm with U.S. branch campuses, Yale has negotiated guarantees of academic freedom from the Singaporean government, but a tension inherent in its context is that faculty, students and staff will lack many of the political freedoms they are accustomed to in the West (For example, a 2009 Singapore law requires would-be activists to obtain a permit for any “cause-related activity,” regardless of the number of people involved.)

To some critics, Yale has struck a Faustian bargain. “Yale is betraying the spirit of the university as a center of open debate and protest by giving away the rights of its students at its new Singapore campus,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.  “Instead of defending these rights, Yale buckled when faced with Singapore’s draconian laws on demonstrations and policies restricting student groups.”