What Chinese, Singaporean universities can teach us about academic freedom
For some time now, it’s been an article of faith for liberals that a freer culture, and a more generous stance on academic freedom in general, is not just worthwhile in itself, but is also of demonstrable practical use.
An academic culture that encourages freedom of thought in the humanities and social sciences, the argument goes, can spread ideas and ways of thinking that will then shape the hard sciences too, encouraging a wider community of creativity that leads to scientific breakthroughs. The top-down nature of authoritarian society, in this argument, prevents the kind of real innovation that a free university system with full protections for academic freedom could provide.
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The theory is neat. To liberals, it is highly attractive. But the publication last month of the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) rankings of top universities gives pause for thought. At the top were clustered the usual suspects – five US institutions, with MIT at number 1 and Stanford sitting just ahead of Harvard, four British ones including Oxford and Cambridge, and Switzerland’s ETH Zurich making up the top ten.
But go just below that super-elite, and some interesting results emerge. At 12 and 13 are the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University, also in Singapore. At 24 is Tsinghua University, the MIT of China. At 39 is Peking University; at 43, Fudan University in Shanghai.
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You can cut the numbers and data in a number of ways. The QS survey uses a variety of factors, including academic reputation (which can be somewhat circular – people assume a university is great, and so rank it as being great when questioned in the survey), but also numbers of international faculty and students, and research citations per faculty member. Even more recently, the rival Times Higher Education (THE) international rankings have come out, but the message is a similar one: National University of Singapore at 24, Peking University at 29, Tsinghua at 35.