Australian University Vice-Chancellor Vows ‘Never Again’ to Confucius Institute

The bust of Confucius is seen in front of the Confucius Institute building on the Troy University campus, in Troy, Ala., on March 16, 2018. Kreeder13 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

ADELAIDE, Australia — As he takes up a vice-chancellorship at The University of Adelaide, Prof. Peter Høj, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland (UQ), has said that the decision to allow China to provide course funding through the Confucius Institute at UQ was a “stupid thing to do” and should never have happened.

“When you run a university there are lots of things happening in an institution with 6,000 people, most of whom are independent thinkers. As soon as we learnt about it, we said: never again,” Høj told The Australian.