UCL is harming itself by pandering to China

We have suspected for some time that UK universities were supping with the devil when they relied on legions of foreign, especially Chinese, students to balance the books. Last week the mask slipped spectacularly at University College London.

Some months ago a Chinese student complained of ‘horrible provocation’ when Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor dealing with human behaviours, asked a seminar class of whom about a quarter were Chinese, to criticise statistics suggesting that China had one of the world’s biggest modern slavery problems. The case escalated. She was leant on to lay off China in favour of, say, India so that Chinese students would not feel ‘singled out’. She refused, citing academic freedom. The result was all too predictable. Her course went to someone else, and she is now subject to a formal complaint of anti-Chinese bias (not unrelated, one suspects, to previous episodes when two Chinese students she had caught cheating red-handed were sent down).