A 58 year-old lecturer at UCL, has been banned from teaching a “provocative” course involving China to protect its commercial interests. The Telegraph has more.
Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor at University College London (UCL), told the Telegraph she had “no choice” but to blow the whistle in order to “expose” how British universities were “conceding to the censorship demands of some Chinese students”.
Ms Shipworth, 58, was also accused of being anti-Chinese after she caught out two students from China who were cheating and they were subsequently expelled. One had used a body double in an attempt to hoodwink her during a supervision.
Her head of department at UCL told her he was taking action because “in order to be commercially viable”, the university’s courses “need to retain a good reputation amongst future Chinese applicants”.
UCL has the highest number of Chinese students in the UK, making up almost a quarter of its total student population. More than 10,000 Chinese students are at the university, typically paying two to three times the fees of home-grown students – up to £40,000 a year.
Ms Shipworth, who teaches at UCL’s Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, found herself under investigation after a seminar last October examining data from the Global Slavery Index 2014. The data claimed China had the second-highest prevalence of modern slavery in the world.
She asked small groups to discuss the question: “Why are there so many slaves in China?” in order to build their data assessment skills, leaving the methodology open to criticism.
Far from being anti-Chinese, Ms Shipworth said her use of the survey was only to highlight problems with it – not least that, because China has the world’s second-largest population, it would inevitably be close to the top of a modern slavery index.
She recalled that, at the end of the seminar, one of the Chinese students “stood up and said in a fairly cross tone – I wouldn’t even describe it as angry – something along the lines of: ‘Why are you using such a horrible provocation?’”
Prof Neil Strachan, Ms Shipworth’s boss, was alerted, culminating in her being told that another academic had been asked to “take over” the research module she had taught for the past 10 years.
She was also told to “not use teaching case studies or examples that only focus on one country”, and advised against posting “educational issues about only one country” on social media.
In an email, Prof Strachan also informed Ms Shipworth that she had been accused of “being biased against students from a single country – China”.
He cited as an example of a “specific instance of bias” that, having caught out Chinese students for cheating, she was now “overly suspicious” of students cheating “and these students are all from China”.
Prof Strachan said a further complaint had said that “you used a provocative in-class exercise – investigating data quality but using the subject of slavery – that focused only on China and that made Chinese students feel demeaned”.
He went on to say that “the result of this perceived bias is that Chinese students are not having a good experience at UCL, and that the reputation and future recruitment of our courses is being damaged”. …
Ms Shipworth’s case has been taken up by the Free Speech Union, which has written to UCL’s provost to demand that all restrictions be lifted.
A Free Speech Union spokesman said: “The documents we have seen reveal an undue deference to the sensitivity of some Chinese students that is utterly incompatible with academic freedom.
“Academics and students have every right to discuss and even criticise China, even if it is inconvenient for institutions increasingly in hock to Chinese student fees, and we will defend that right.”
Worth reading in full.
You can watch a short film the FSU has made about this case here.
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