NYU boots Chinese dissident for expansion deal in China
It seems NYU’s commitment to free speech only goes so far.
James Covert of the New York Post reports.
NYU booting blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng amid Shanghai expansion: sources
NYU isn’t letting a pesky thing like human rights stand in the way of its expansion in China.
The university has booted a blind Chinese political dissident from its campus under pressure from the Communist government as it builds a coveted branch in Shanghai, sources told The Post.
Chen Guangcheng has been at NYU since May 2012, when he made a dramatic escape from his oppressive homeland with the help of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
But school brass has told him to get out by the end of this month, the sources said.
Chen’s presence at the school didn’t sit well with the Chinese bureaucrats who signed off on the permits for NYU’s expansion there, the sources said.
“The big problem is that NYU is very compromised by the fact they are working very closely with the Chinese to establish a university,” according to one New York-based professor familiar with Chen’s situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“That’s their liability,” the source said. “Otherwise, they would be much less constrained on issues like freedom of speech.”
The outspoken Chen — whose many supporters include actor Christian Bale, who tried to visit him in China with a TV crew in 2011 — recently inflamed Chinese authorities again when he agreed to visit its archenemy Taiwan in the coming weeks, a source said.
NYU officials claim that Chen was never meant to stay there long-term and that the politics of the new Shanghai campus had nothing to do with his ouster.
NYU booting blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng amid Shanghai expansion: sources (The New York Post)
Comments
This is not the first indication of an offensive attitude towards free speech at NYU. What we really have here is another instance of the ongoing, simmering assault by NYU on basic humanistic values, all for the sake of money.
Everyone knows, or should by now know, that NYU tried to dissuade Chen from meeting members of Congress in Washington, and that the NYU interpreters who ultimately accompanied him there refused to allow him to be interviewed at Union Station. But Professor Cohen acts SO surprised. This is nothing but double-talk and academic politics as usual at this institution.
No big surprise here: countless no-confidence faculty votes demanding that the university’s president step down have been ignored. The university’s board of trustees, chaired by a well-known business lawyer, sneers at the democratic process and works to destroy the Greenwich Village neighborhood (including Edgar Allen Poe’s home) with grotesque building projects, while investing profits earned from soaring tuition costs on overseas baloney agreements with China and the United Arab Emirates. Parents should think twice about paying for their children to study in a place where such a stench of corruption floats around the hallways.
Nor is any of this surprising, for those who have followed the trial of one of our current American dissidents, an individual persecuted in New York precisely for exposing the alleged plagiarism of an NYU department chairman on the Internet. Does that grotesque “trial” represent official NYU policy? For information on the case, including the bizarre criminal court testimony of several NYU faculty officials, see the documentation at:
http://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/