College Insurrection recently covered the story of NYU selling out a Chinese dissident over a lucrative deal with China.

Now Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post weighs in.

Yale, NYU sacrifice academic freedom

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng claims he is being booted from his apartment and his fellowship at New York University this month because of NYU’s kowtowing to the Chinese government. The school protests mightily, claiming that it has lavished resources on Chen and never intended for his fellowship — granted after he sought refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing — to last for more than a year.

Here’s what’s not in dispute: NYU, as part of the most ambitious international expansion program of any U.S. university, is about to open a satellite campus in Shanghai that is being heavily subsidized by the city government. Chinese authorities haven’t hesitated in the past to punish universities and blacklist professors who cross its political red lines. And NYU already has a record of appeasing the authorities in Abu Dhabi, the site of another satellite campus.

The university is at the forefront of an exploding trend: the expansion of U.S. universities, think tanks and other cultural institutions not just to London and Paris, but to unfree countries whose governments are spending billions of dollars to buy U.S. teaching, U.S. prestige — and, perhaps, U.S. intellectual freedom. China is one of them: In addition to NYU, it is partnering with Duke to build a satellite campus, hosts smaller programs from schools including Harvard, Yale and Princeton and sent 193,000 of its own students to U.S. universities last year.

In September a joint venture between Yale and Singapore will open on a campus built and paid for by that autocracy. Then there are the Persian Gulf states. The United Arab Emirates hosts branches of Paris’s Sorbonne and the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in addition to NYU.