Session Abstract

The establishment of branch campuses by American universities in the Middle East and East Asia has been a controversial if increasingly common proposition. Six American schools, including Cornell, Northwestern, and Georgetown, comprise Education City in Doha, Qatar; New York University’s “Global Network” includes its eponymous home campus as well as hubs in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai; and most recently Yale has opened a college in partnership with the National University of Singapore.        

From the beginning, these operations garnered criticism – whether in their own institutions, the wider academic community, and the popular press.  Perhaps the most common charge was and continues to be that these schools operate in countries ruled or run by absolutist or totalitarian regimes, where censorship is the norm, academic and press freedom are rare, few if any guarantees of basic human rights exist, and relatively conservative social mores predominate.

What is most often missing from these discussions, sometimes most vociferously led by those who have never even visited such locales, are the first-hand accounts of those who work, conduct research, and instruct students at these campuses. This panel aims to give a forum to such voices, disperse some of the mythology about these places, and address both the real challenges and joys of teaching in these places. What is more, it aims to compare experiences, across university and regions. This panel features four historians who will examine, in keeping with the AHA’s theme of "History and the Other Disciplines," what it is truly like to teach that centerpiece of American university education, the liberal arts, in such purportedly illiberal places.