Donna M. Chiera
Plan to give management control of campus outpost in Wenzhou to the Chinese government has security and ethical risks
New Jersey’s Legislature has many pressing education issues to deal with this session, but few are more urgent than the oversight of a dangerous and ill-conceived deal to hand management of Kean University’s branch campus in China over to the Chinese government.
Since 2012, the Union, New Jersey-based Kean has operated a full campus in China — the only American public university to do so. While the Chinese invested in its construction in the southeastern city of Wenzhou, Kean has maintained academic and hiring control, until now. China-based Kean professors recently learned their employment would be transferred away from the state of New Jersey — where workers enjoy the benefits of a union contract and a strong voice that would protect them from government repression — to communist bureaucrats in Beijing on July 1. If it sounds crazy, it is.
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