Yuan Guiren, China’s minister of education, recently announced a crackdown on the use of foreign textbooks in universities. He issued a stern warning against permitting “Western values” to penetrate Chinese classrooms, instead urging professors to extol Marxist theory and strengthen party loyalty among their pupils. The statement highlights China’s growing intolerance of dissenting views and establishes a dangerous precedent for the future of academic freedom.

Under China’s President Xi Jinping, the range of repressive laws and policies has dramatically increased. Textbook censorship is merely the latest development in a movement by the Chinese government to stifle open discussion within university walls. In 2013, an economist at Peking University in Beijing was laid off for espousing free speech and other democratic values. He is one of several scholars who have faced persecution for their political beliefs. In the Chinese province of Guizhou, education officials intend to install surveillance cameras in classrooms to ensure that teachers do not criticize the government in front of their students. The product of these initiatives is an education system that is optimized neither for teaching nor for learning.

The new restrictions are an insult to the spirit of higher education. A university setting should nurture debate on a wide spectrum of ideological thought. Only then can students develop analytic and independent thinking skills, one of the most invaluable products of schooling. By narrowing the scope of intellectual exposure for its students, China demonstrates a preference for indoctrination over education.

The push to curtail foreign textbooks comes in the midst of pro-democracy student protests in Hong Kong. In this context, Guiren’s call may well be motivated by fear as it becomes increasingly apparent that Chinese youth is attracted to democracy even outside of Hong Kong. Eliminating the diffusion of democratic ideas in the classroom is a means of maintaining control over the younger generation. In the resulting academic atmosphere, scholarship comes second to ideology.

Students will be bombarded with Marxist values at the expense of an objective understanding of history, political science and economics. It is important to consider the implications of this crackdown for NYU Shanghai. Because NYU Shanghai has legally independent status, its students enjoy a greater degree of academic freedom than most university students in the country. However, the fact that NYU Shanghai is largely subsidized by the local government begs the question of whether the university is truly independent from China’s political reality. Either way, the gap between the Western values NYU champions and Guiran’s condemnation of free expression and intellectual exploration is certainly growing wider. As China continues to tighten its grip on universities, it is imperative that NYU Shanghai remains firmly independent from the local government and committed to its core principles — including intellectual freedom.

Email Zahra Haque at [email protected].