Comments from University College Dublin (UCD) president Andrew Deeks, that concerns about a controversial Chinese institute on its campus were "misguided", have been described as "worrying" by senior academics.
In a recent message to staff, Prof Deeks defended the hosting of a Chinese government-backed Confucius Institute by the south Dublin university.
The institutes, set up to promote Chinese language and culture, have been established in hundreds of universities globally.
Academics in UCD’s school of politics previously criticised the fact the institute was permitted to teach a class on Chinese politics to UCD students, given China’s human rights records.
In a weekly email to staff, Prof Deeks said he was “disappointed by some of the misguided commentary” about the institute.
The outgoing president said he had been “particularly disturbed by implicit suggestions that the political loyalties of some colleagues can be inferred from their ethnicity”.
On Wednesday, 13 senior UCD academics signed a letter criticising the comments. The letter said Prof Deeks had implied colleagues who opposed the involvement of the Beijing-linked institute in undergraduate teaching had “flouted” values of collegiality and diversity. In fact, it said, “the opposite is the case”.
The debate was “not about the ethnicity of the staff”, but instead the “independence” governing teaching provided by the institute to undergraduate students, the letter said.
‘Ill-advised’
“This is, after all, a state-funded Chinese entity under the control of the ministry of education of the People’s Republic of China,” it said.
The academics said “particularly worrying” was Prof Deeks’s interpretation of academic freedom, which implied “autocratic regimes are merely cultural variants that should be treated as such”.
The signatories of the letter included professors in the schools of politics, philosophy, English, sociology and art history.
One of the signatories, David Farrell, UCD professor of politics, described Prof Deeks's email as a "parting shot". Criticism of the university's Confucius Institute was solely related to the "inappropriateness" of it being permitted to teach a course on Chinese politics to UCD students, he said.
The activities of the institute to promote culture or language should be “ring-fenced”, and kept separate from any academic teaching, he said.
Ben Tonra, UCD politics professor, described the president's comments as "extraordinarily ill-advised" in a post on Twitter.
Several universities have severed ties with Confucius Institutes in recent years, which in some cases have been linked to controversies over academic freedom and espionage accusations.
