It’s not this bad everywhere. In many countries, college students still crave the truth, and they tolerate heterodox ideas. They’re still curious about the nerdy enthusiasms of neurodiverse faculty. And in many universities around the world, faculty still feel free to teach the truth as they see it, and to share ideas, facts, and findings that some students may find uncomfortable.

Take China, for example. The Western stereotype is that China is the land of totalitarian mind control, so its universities must be wastelands of intellectual conformity compared to American universities, right? In my experience, the opposite is true.

Usually I teach psychology at a large American state university. But during the height of the Covid pandemic (2021-2022), I ended up teaching three online classes for Chinese University of Hong Kong - Shenzhen (CUHK-SZ). This is a new, selective, English-language university in Shenzhen, a prosperous little town of 18 million people that became the tech center of China.

I encountered a remarkable level of academic freedom and tolerance.

True, there are some political taboos in Chinese universities. Each department has a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) political officer monitoring course content for any overt criticism of the CCP or President Xi Jinping, or for promoting unacceptable views about Tibet, Taiwan, or Tiananmen Square. Everybody knows what those specific taboos are and the few lines not to cross.

But beyond that, I encountered a remarkable level of academic freedom and tolerance. I really tried to push the limits, to see how the Chinese students and administrators would respond. Apart from my online lectures, we had lively discussion forums every week where students advocated for their views, critiqued the lectures and assigned readings, debated each other, and shared links to articles, videos, memes, and news items.

In my educational psychology course, we discussed behavior genetics versus the Blank Slate theory, the heritability of educational achievement, the coddling and hothousing of kids, and IQ testing and the imperial Chinese civil service exams. Students were smart, active, engaged, and open-minded. There were no complaints, and there was no censorship. I got zero blowback from students, colleagues, administrators, or CCP political officers.

In my decision-making class, we discussed genetic influences on risk-taking, game theory in warfare, stereotype accuracy, virtue signaling, food choice and obesity, Chinese mating markets and online dating, pronatalism versus demographic collapse, sperm donor selection, geopolitical conflict and warfare, AI safety and regulation, and existential risks to humanity. Again, students were open-minded. No complaints, no censorship.

In my edgiest class in China, on evolutionary psychology, we talked openly and fearlessly about sex differences, race differences, sexual anatomy, ovulatory cycles, monogamy versus polyamory, gay and lesbian sex, and the origins of aggression and rape. We also explored little tangents about pregnancy, breast-feeding, tattoos, gun violence, penis size, deepfake porn, sapiosexuality, incels, lap dancers, casual sex, nonbinary gender identities, BDSM, cloning, birth defects, child abuse, Hanfu ethnonationalism, status hierarchies among imperial consorts, Chinese stigmas about mental illness, and the coddling of the American mind. I really tried to push their buttons. But, again, the students were relentlessly open-minded. No complaints, no censorship.

They seemed intellectually and socially fearless, both with me and with each other.

In the sexual domain, the Chinese undergrads were fairly naïve by American standards. Their high school sex education didn’t cover much about gender feminism, trans issues, nonbinary identities, or pronouns. They simply knew how the SRY gene on the Y chromosome orchestrates sexual differentiation, and when luteinizing hormone versus progesterone peaks in women’s ovulatory cycles. They weren’t very sexually experienced; in anonymous class polls, many reported they’d never romantically kissed anyone, about half had never had a boyfriend or girlfriend, and most had never had sex.

Yet, if I mentioned polyamory, which most Chinese students had never heard of, they ran off and used their VPNs to Google it, read the latest empirical research on it, and watch videos by poly activists. Then they’d avidly discuss polyamory’s pros and cons in class discussion forums. Likewise, if I mentioned BDSM or hentai porn, the Chinese students would go down various rabbit holes and end up in discussion forums debating the neuropsychology of thuddy floggers versus stingy whips, or analyzing futanari furries as sexual superstimuli. Their takes were usually not sophisticated, and often had a giggly adolescent vibe. But they seemed intellectually and socially fearless, both with me and with each other.

In an American classroom, most of these topics would have led at least a few undergraduates to complain to my department head and my dean. They might have organized a group letter denouncing me, or a class boycott. Or just quietly given me the lowest possible ratings on their student evaluations of my classes.

In China, no such problems. The Chinese students just accepted my nerdy enthusiasms—and my Aspy neurodiversity in general—as educational resources to be treasured, rather than as problems to be reported. They lacked the pseudo-earnest, conformist, virtue-signaling mindset of American undergrads. They didn’t have the cultural programming to think that they had any right to censor their professor—or to censor each other. Beyond avoiding direct criticism of the CCP, pretty much everything else was fair game. There was no tacit code of silence.

What explains these differences between Chinese and American universities and the relative censoriousness of their students, faculty, and administrators? It might be tempting to attribute the differences to ‘Culture’—but the usual stereotype goes in the wrong direction. China has (allegedly) been a conformist, collectivist society for millennia, while America has (allegedly) been a free-thinking, individualist society for centuries.

I think one key difference is that most American universities have adopted speech codes— codes that were imposed with allegedly ‘good intentions’, to ‘keep students safe’, and to deter teachers and students from ‘offending’ each other. Yet these codes have usually been so poorly written, so vague, and so euphemistic that it’s almost impossible to know what will fall afoul of them.

The speech codes are typically written by student services staff, DEI administrators, university lawyers, and/or activist adjunct faculty, rather than by tenure-stream faculty who are regularly teaching students. In principle, the speech codes are supposed to protect students from feeling offended, triggered, or marginalized by others. In practice, the speech codes end up endangering, censoring, and silencing students and faculty who might say things that a tiny minority of student activists will (pretend to) find offensive.

American speech codes impose extreme risk-aversion on American professors and students. I used to think their vagueness was a bug, but now I think it’s a feature. The vagueness deliberately chills free speech. In China, I knew that as long as I didn’t criticize “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” I could probably talk about the heritability of IQ, or sex differences in mating strategies, or polyamory, or BDSM. In America, the speech codes are never clear enough to actually know what is permitted.

I’m worried that American universities are becoming systemically biased against neurodiversity

Whereas a good professor will try to teach in a way that maximizes benefit to the majority of students, these speech codes are designed instead to minimize harm to the tiny minority of the most easily-offended students. In America, the easily-offended are cosseted. In China, they simply learn to be less offended. If dozens of Chinese students are enjoying a discussion forum about polyamory or IQ research, some might express moral disapproval of the relationship style or the research topic—but they don’t express moral disapproval of the fact that other students are discussing it or the fact that I’m teaching about it. And they certainly don’t expect the disapproval by the minority to take priority over the learning experience of the majority.

Maybe another difference is that a lot of the Chinese students at CUHK-SZ were rather, by American standards, ‘Aspy’ (with features of Asperger's syndrome, which has been dubiously lumped into the ‘autism spectrum’). They were typically in the top 2% of performers on the Gaokao (university entrance exams) and had spent their teenage years studying hard, exploring their intellectual passions. Compared to the average American college student, many were ‘neurodivergent’—nerdy, stronger on systematizing than empathizing, math-savvy, but a bit socially awkward.

As an Aspy academic, I’ve spent much of my career interested in neurodiversity, and I’m worried that American universities are becoming systemically biased against neurodiversity and against the kinds of nerdy scholars who, for centuries, sought intellectual and social refuge in universities. Instead of universities remaining Aspy-friendly and nerd-positive, they’ve institutionalizing the values and views of one particular kind of brain—an earnest, censorious, Left-leaning, hyper-empathizing, typically white, typically female administrator who thinks they know what is best for everyone else.

These code-enforcers appoint themselves mother ducks who believe they must look after their little ducklings (college students) and keep them safe from big bad wolves (sexists, racists, fascists, transphobes, Christians, whatever). They impose speech codes that might seem crystal clear to them but that are vague, arbitrary, and mysterious to most others—including neurodivergent people whose brains have always worked differently and people from other civilizations whose cultures shaped their brains differently. They pretend to value diversity, equity, and inclusion, but only on the basis of a few demographic and sexual traits (race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation). There is no DEI for neurodiversity.

If we really took neurodiversity seriously, we would recognize that brains are highly varied in terms of sex differences, sexual preferences (including kinks and relationship styles), moral intuitions, political orientations, religions, and so on. It’s not just the people who are on the autism spectrum or who have ADHD or Tourette’s who are neurodivergent. We are all neurodivergent in the sense that there is so much variation in every psychological trait that’s relevant to our current cultural debates and civilizational taboos.

And as I’ve argued elsewhere, this neurodiversity isn’t just within our culture; it’s also between cultures. It’s almost impossible for someone who is not already steeped in American culture to figure out what our speech codes mean, what our administrators are really worried about, and what could get them into trouble. We can’t expect undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty from Nigeria, Iran, Germany, or China to be able to anticipate everything that might offend American Gen Z undergrads. Or to censor themselves with 100% accuracy in every lecture, seminar, discussion forum, term paper, office hour visit, lab group meeting, or faculty meeting. No matter how many online training sessions they complete about their university’s ‘respectful campus’ or ‘sexual misconduct’ policies.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if one of my CUHK-SZ undergrads from China got into an American PhD program, and came to the U.S. They might expect to find a wonderland of free speech, open inquiry, and edgy debate. They might assume that they’d feel at least as much freedom here as they felt in the CUHK-SZ discussion forums I ran. And, in one particular domain—their ability to openly criticize our political leaders and their policies—they’d be right.

But in most other domains, in most other controversies, they’d find a much more intolerant, closed-minded, Aspy-shaming, sex-negative, censorious culture than the one that they left.

Article Image “The Torture of Prometheus” by Jean Louis Cesar Lair is under public domain.