Retaining “business” vs freeing research

Sheffield Hallam University has allowed a professor to resume her work on Uyghur forced labour in China after forcing her to stop the research for eight months. Though the university vociferously denies it, it seems extremely likely that the decision was based on protecting financial ties with the Chinese government and Chinese companies.

Laura Murphy and her researchers were forced to stop working on supply chains and forced labour. Internal emails leaked to the Guardian reveal university staff weighing up the cost-benefit analysis of allowing the research vs. protecting Chinese investment in the cash-strapped university. “Attempting to retain the business [student recruitment] in China and publication of the [Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice] research are untenable bedfellows”.

This brings together two issues currently under increasing scrutiny: a panic within the British establishment about security threats posed by China, given Chinese capital’s increasing role in the world economy, and the culture war over free speech at universities, provoked most recently by debates around students protesting for the Palestinians.

It should be noted that the 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act does nothing to protect the rights of researchers to carry out such work. That bill was an attempt to stifle protest and little else.

Links

There are multiple interweaved links between China and UK Higher Education. The Chinese government provides a number of contracts directly for research; Chinese companies, particularly tech giant Huawei, are central in providing funding to university tech research, especially in the emerging AI field; and with a privatised HE market wreaking havoc across the country, universities are almost entirely dependent on tuition fees from international students, a third of whom come from China.

It is not in the interests of the working class to resolve capitalist states’ security concerns, and many Chinese students come to the West to study precisely to gain the freedom to explore the world and criticise their own government freely. But all of these interconnections have a common root: the drive to make universities depend on what they can get in fees and commercial and institutional research grants. To protect free speech and free investigation on campus and in academia, and to save the crumbling sector in the long-term, the answer is simple: tax the rich to fund free higher