International students should have freedom of speech, too – The Dallas Morning News

This op-ed is part of an occasional series published by The Dallas Morning News Opinion section on human rights and human freedom. Find the full series here.

Lets suppose that a subset of American college students say, Blacks or Hispanics reported they were scared to speak in class. There would be a national outcry about inequity and systemic racism, followed by demands for an investigation. Then university officials and politicians would rightfully vow to protect and value all American students, regardless of race or ethnicity.

But if students from another country are afraid to speak up, nobody seems to care.

Witness last Mondays pledge by the Departments of State and Education to increase international student exchanges, which plummeted amid the pandemic and the restrictive policies of the Trump administration. As the departments joint statement correctly noted, students who come here from other nations contribute immensely to innovation, economic development and cross-cultural understanding.

Yet international students have also faced threats to their free speech at American universities, which went unmentioned in the statement and in most news accounts of it. Im glad were going to bring more students from other countries to the United States. But they wont be able to learn as much or teach the rest of us if they have to bite their tongues when they get here.

Thats what has been happening in recent years, especially among students from China. Their government has made it clear that it will monitor them in the United States and punish speech that strays from the party line. So Chinese students have to watch what they say, if they know whats good for them.

In 2019, a 20-year-old University of Minnesota student was arrested upon his return to his hometown in China and sentenced to six months in jail. His crime? Posting 40 tweets while studying in Minnesota that mocked President Xi Jinping. The tweets featured images of Winnie the Pooh, a censored character in China, because of satirical memes comparing him to Xi, as well as pictures of a cartoon villain resembling the president.

His imprisonment drew rebukes from several members of the Senate, including Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Ben Sasse, R-Neb. But the Biden administration has been mostly silent about the students fate and about threats to other Chinese nationals studying in the United States.

Ditto for leaders in higher education, who would be the first to speak out if an American racial minority were blocked from full participation in our classrooms. But I havent heard a single major university president decry the muzzling of international students here. Well happily take their tuition dollars, but we wont defend their free speech.

In a series of interviews early last year with Voice of America, Chinese students reported self-censoring in class during discussions of Tibet, Hong Kong and anything else deemed sensitive by their government. They feared that other Chinese students would report what they said to authorities back home, limiting their job opportunities as well as subjecting them to criminal penalties.

Meanwhile, American professors who teach China-related courses suspected that Chinese intelligence agents were monitoring their classes. Significantly, almost all of the Chinese students and American faculty interviewed by Voice of America asked to remain unnamed. The students feared harassment at home, while the professors worried that China might deny them visas to perform research there.

Threats to Chinese students have likely stepped up since China imposed a new national security law upon Hong Kong last summer. Barring sedition and colluding with foreign forces, the law allows China to pursue violators no matter where they live.

In response, some professors of China-focused courses in America have added warning labels about politically sensitive topics covered in their classes. At Princeton, students in a Chinese politics course placed codes instead of names on their work to protect their identities.

And Harvard Business School said it might excuse Chinese students from class participation requirements when China-related topics arose. There is no way I can say to my students, You can say whatever you want [and] you are totally safe here, HBS professor Meg Rithmire told The Wall Street Journal.

In the era of Black Lives Matter and campaigns to dismantle racism, we should insist that international students enjoy the same rights as anyone else in our classrooms. Whether you can speak your mind at an American university shouldnt depend on the color of your passport, any more than on the color of your skin.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the co-author (with Signe Wilkinson) of Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn, which was published in April by City of Light Press. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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International students should have freedom of speech, too - The Dallas Morning News