Public Discourse and Public Policy on Foreign Interference in Higher Education

• In Event: Foreign Interference in Higher Education

Proposal

In recent years, news media have increased reporting about alleged foreign interference in universities around the world and the flurry of policy responses that have followed. This article maps the international landscape of foreign interference in higher education. We distinguish interference from influence. Foreign influence is a recognized fact of international relations (Kauppi & Viotti, 2019). Nations routinely attempt to advance their own interests by changing the political, economic, or social policies, practices, and attitudes of other nations (Meierding & Sigman, 2021). They influence through coercion, inducements, persuasion, and attraction (Nye, 2004). This perspective on influence is also well trod territory in the literature on international and comparative education where scholars use frameworks like colonialism (Clarke, 2021), hegemony (Lo, 2011), and global governance (Buckner, 2019), among others, to examine the ways that non-native ideas about education take root. Interference differs from influence in degree. It is, in the words of security analyst Katherine Mansted (2021), the “most pernicious” kind of foreign influence (7).
There is a disconnect between the public and scholarly discourses on foreign interference in higher education. As our findings demonstrate, topics like academic espionage and campus propaganda pervade the English-language media landscape but receive scant attention in the scholarship of international and comparative education or higher education. Espionage is largely unaddressed in these fields’ journals (Allen & Bista, 2022; Lee & Haupt, 2020, Yemini, 2019). Foreign propaganda is addressed more often, but still only in passing (Rohde, 2013; Salomon & ket, 2007; Selvik, 2021; Suspitsyna & Shalka, 2019; Takayama, 2018; Tsvetkova, 2008; Wilson, 2021). Still, the onset of a new era of geopolitics may rejuvenate scholarly interest in international education’s vulnerabilities to malign actors (Lee, 2021). Because the scholarship on the internationalization of higher education has not sufficiently addressed foreign interference and related concepts like academic espionage or campus propaganda, constructs from international relations and security studies inform our analysis.
We bring together the concepts of sharp power and right-wing authoritarianism to inform a discourse analysis and comparative policy analysis of a data set of 161 news articles and related media sources spanning a 30-month period of 2019-2021. Our findings highlight how government actors within the United States and Australia are driving the international English-language discourse about Chinese foreign interference in a polarized media environment. We observe well-founded fears of China’s exploitation of international students and research collaborations to the detriment of national security. At the same time, a resurgent worldwide authoritarian movement is also exploiting these concerns to augment long-standing assaults on higher education.
This study serves as an important first step of bringing a comprehensive approach to cataloging, categorizing, and analyzing cases of foreign interference in higher education that surface in public discourse. Continued effort is required to determine how best to identify and measure foreign interference and the consequences of various policy responses. Foreign interference in higher education—actual and perceived—merits urgency and diligence from scholars and policymakers.

Author

• Kyle Long, Northwestern University