Academic freedom at British universities is at risk, an associate professor at University College London (UCL) has said, saying staff are giving in to demands from Chinese students seeking to influence British academia.

Michelle Shipworth, who teaches energy and social sciences, told Sky News the school canceled one of her modules after complaints from Chinese students.

The scholar included a slide of a data set on slavery in one of her teaching exercises, asking why there were so many slaves in the United States China.

She said she continues to dissect the numbers with students to encourage them to explore debunking the theory.

“Towards the end of the course, one of the Chinese students objected a little bit to the exercise,” Professor Shipworth said. She explained that she didn’t think much of it at first.

“My guess is that he decided to appear to be in opposition to my challenging issues.”

She described the student as “a very nationalistic Chinese student” and said UCL’s head of department got involved after other students also made complaints.

“I think this is an overreaction and I think some of my colleagues are so anxious about losing overseas student income that they are prepared to do almost anything to keep our students happy.”

The proportion is getting bigger and bigger University‘Revenue comes from international student tuition fees. In England, the economic impact of these students increased from £31.3 billion to £41.9 billion between 2018-19 and 2021-22.

With more than 10,000 students from China, University College London is reported to have the largest student body, accounting for almost a quarter of its total student body.

Professor Shipworth said it was likely that a significant number of the large number of foreign students sought to restrict academic freedom in order to protect the reputation of their governments.

“What we need to do is realize that their government’s interests may not be aligned with our interests, the interests of our university and our government,” she said.

“We just need to keep that in mind and take steps to ensure that our interests are not superseded by theirs.”

“UCL and other universities are not taking the steps they should be taking,” she added. “Other students – whether they are overseas or in the UK – also need to be able to speak out. Their academic freedom is being violated.”

Professor Shipworth, who has worked at University College London for more than a decade, cited a report by Human Rights Watch that exposed the Chinese government’s attempts to influence academic discussion in Australia, and warned that the same thing was happening to British students. , “trying to manipulate our system.”

“There may be only one or two Chinese students in a department who are very nationalistic and may feel it’s their responsibility. But they can put pressure on other Chinese students to behave in a certain way, and what’s really scary is, They then report it to the (Chinese Communist Party) if other Chinese students do not act in accordance with the demands of the nationalist Chinese students.”

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The academic warned this could have dangerous consequences for teaching and research.

“Unless you can ask people challenging questions, you’re never going to have quality research. On the teaching side, if we don’t have academic freedom, then I don’t have the academic freedom to learn from teaching research.”

A UCL spokesperson told Sky News: “We are proud to have a thriving and diverse student community, with the brightest minds from the UK and more than 150 other countries choosing to study and research here.

“We also have a long tradition of upholding free speech and are committed to upholding the rights of our staff and students to promote debate and exercise freedom of academic inquiry.

“While it would be inappropriate to comment on individual cases, the issues raised in this article are clearly concerning and we are working hard to find out exactly what happened.”