We recently reported that more than 130 faculty members at Wellesley College  signed an open letter urging the college to reconsider its institutional partnership with Peking University if a professor of economics there is fired for his outspoken advocacy of democracy and individual freedom.

The Chinese school has just fired Xia Yeliang, and now Wellesley and other American colleges have  are now responding to that dismissal.

In an e-mail message to Wellesley College students and professors, President H. Kim Bottomly said she hopes the college’s partnership with Peking University can continue despite its controversial dismissal of Professor Xia Yeliang, and that she is supportive of efforts to bring Xia to campus as a visiting scholar. More than 130 Wellesley faculty members have signed a letter objecting to the termination of Xia “based solely on his political and philosophical views” and saying that they would urge the Wellesley administration to reconsider the college’s institutional partnership with Peking in the event that Xia was fired — as he ultimately was on Friday.

Xia’s termination, widely viewed as a response to his criticism of the Chinese government, has morphed into a test case regarding what Western universities will and will not tolerate in their overseas partners: even the editorial board for The New York Times has entered the fray, urging American and British universities that collaborate with Peking to put pressure on the university to reinstate Xia. The political climate in China has tightened in recent months, as evidenced most vividly by the arrest of more than 55 activists since February and increased controls on social media and online expression. A government memo from April identified seven “subversive currents” that are not to be spoken of, including “universal values” like human rights, press freedom, judicial independence, economic neoliberalism, and historic mistakes of the Communist Party.

Against this backdrop, Bottomly’s e-mail well illustrates the tensions that Western college administrators must navigate in collaborating with universities in China and other countries that don’t share American-style values of free speech and academic freedom. And leaders of other American colleges with ties to Peking are either saying nothing so far or — with one exception — saying they won’t judge the university’s decision, given that it has claimed it was acting for legitimate academic reasons….

“While the circumstances of Professor Xia’s non-renewal are very clearly in dispute, the fact that he is an outspoken advocate for academic freedom and human rights is not in dispute,” wrote Bottomly, who said that the college is willing to grant a request by Wellesley’s Freedom Project to host Xia as a visiting scholar – to be paid for by a grant from an outside foundation.