In 1958, Soviet intellectuals Alexander Yakovlev and Oleg Kalugin arrived at Columbia University as Fulbright scholars for a year of graduate studies. They weren’t defectors. They were loyal Party apparatchiks, sent to study how America’s “propaganda machine” worked so they could better defend socialism back home.
Instead, they encountered something far more dangerous to totalitarianism than propaganda: freedom. They saw professors challenging their government without fear. They saw students protesting wars and presidents without vanishing into gulags. They saw newspapers printing every side of every debate, and a system that wore criticism like a badge of honor.
They didn’t defect. They went home quietly, outwardly loyal, and climbed the ranks of the Soviet system. Kalugin became the youngest officer ever promoted to Major General in the KGB. Yakovlev rose to become a member of the Politburo and head of the CPSU’s propaganda department.
I teach at Columbia University today. A different era, a different struggle, with the same fundamental test: whether we trust freedom to compete.
At Columbia, Yakovlev was particularly struck by his studies of FDR and the New Deal. He saw how Roosevelt had responded to the Great Depression not by abandoning capitalism, but “saving capitalism when it was on its knees,” by adding elements of socialism. Yakovlev concluded that the survival of socialism, too, required reform: adding openness, adding democracy, adding truth. Without glasnost, and without bringing the people into the conversation, there could be no hope of renewal.
Beyond the classroom, Yakovlev found an intellectual environment unlike anything he had experienced. Professors didn’t simply preach patriotic slogans; they assigned readings critical of American foreign policy and encouraged real debate in class. Yakovlev later recalled, astonished, that professors had given him books that criticized American policies and insisted that even foreign students be free to argue and disagree. In Soviet universities, such behavior would have been unthinkable.
Traveling across America, Yakovlev expected to find the grinding poverty and hopelessness he knew from the USSR’s struggling kolkhozes. Yet when he visited an Iowa farm, he was stunned to find something very different: independence, prosperity, and dignity. He would later admit, with some astonishment, “It was there [on an American farm] that I finally and for the rest of my life understood that Stalin’s collectivization in my country was the greatest crime against the Russian people, destroying the peasantry.” Turns out American farmers didn’t need a Five-Year Plan to figure out how to grow corn.
Yakovlev did not fall blindly in love with America. He remained a Soviet patriot for decades, openly critical of the US system. But he saw something, and he could not unsee it. Years later, when Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power, Yakovlev became the architect of glasnost and perestroika, reforms that opened cracks in the Soviet system until the whole structure collapsed.
Kalugin, too, was changed by his time in America. Reflecting later, he described academic exchanges as:
“A wonderful educational opportunity for Soviet youngsters, but also a political tool. It was a Trojan horse for the Soviet Union. It brought in ideas that ultimately were subversive to the system. They played a tremendous role in the erosion of the Soviet system. They kept infecting more and more people over the years.”
Today, foreign students at Columbia are learning that the First Amendment might come with an asterisk they never saw in the brochures – “valid only when your opinions don’t make anyone uncomfortable.”
The Fourth Amendment seems to have an asterisk too, as students like Mahmoud Khalil have been arrested without warrants, held in what amounts to an American gulag, and now face deportation – not for violence, but for daring to dissent – the very kind of dissent we once criticized the Soviet Union for suppressing.
Today, as a professor at Columbia, I can’t help but notice the irony.
The new excuse for deportations: foreign protesters might cause “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” If we’d used that logic in 1958, we might have kicked Yakovlev out and doomed ourselves to another half-century of Cold War.
Now that’s what I’d call a real foreign policy consequence.
Not long ago, I organized an academic exchange program between Columbia University and North Korean universities, funded through Columbia’s Global Centers initiative. That program was shut down after the United States banned almost all travel and contact with the DPRK. Programs like these that create space for understanding, engagement, and trust-building are precisely what we should be expanding, not eliminating.
Instead of standing proudly for the marketplace of ideas, we are shrinking from it. Freedom of speech was something we once championed globally as a fundamental human right. Now we act like only Americans are entitled to free speech – foreigners are only allowed to say things we want to hear.
If we no longer believe our ideas can survive open competition, maybe the real threat isn’t foreign students. Maybe it’s our own self-doubt.
I’ve taught in North Korea, Libya, Venezuela, and China – places with very different political traditions from our own. And here’s what I learned: the passport doesn’t matter. The ideology doesn’t matter. People are people. Give them a taste of open debate, real friendship, and a free library, and they never forget it. You can’t always see the change immediately. Sometimes it takes decades.
Yakovlev went home. Kalugin went home. Outwardly loyal. Inwardly changed. I came home changed too. Working with scientists, students, and teachers in places like the DPRK taught me humility. It showed me that even in societies very different from ours, people build systems of community, dignity, and resilience that have lessons for all of us. It deepened my understanding of freedom, not as something granted by governments, but as something lived between human beings.
Exchange isn’t a one-way street. It changes both sides, often in ways neither expects. That’s why we must not only welcome foreign students here, we must actively send our own students abroad, not to spread democracy, and certainly not to preach about it, but to listen, to experience, and to learn about the world as it is, not as described in propaganda tracts.
We shouldn’t fear students from China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, or anywhere else. We should welcome them and trust that freedom, not fear, will be what they carry home.
As Reagan reminded us, real strength doesn’t hide behind walls. It leaves the door unlocked and dares the world to walk in. “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. In my mind, it was a tall proud city… teeming with people of all kinds… And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here,” he said
You don’t win a race by banning the other runners. You win by running faster.
You don’t win a debate by silencing the other side. You win by being more persuasive.
And you don’t strengthen freedom by locking the doors of that shining city. You strengthen it by keeping those doors open.
We don’t change hearts by shielding young Americans from reality. We change them by letting them confront it and trusting that freedom needs no protection from truth.
Somewhere on Columbia’s campus, more Yakovlevs are in the making – quiet in classrooms, questioning in labs, whispering in protests.
If we trust them enough to stay, if we trust freedom enough to compete, the seeds we plant today may change the world again.
But if foreign students today are afraid to speak, afraid to debate, afraid even to stay on campus, what seeds will they carry home?
Yakovlev didn’t change because someone lectured him into it.
He changed because he saw what freedom looked like, and because he could question it freely, in Columbia’s libraries and classrooms and on America’s streets.
We once sowed seeds of doubt in authoritarian minds simply by letting them see who we were.
Today, it is not they who fear our freedoms.
It is we who fear their ideas.
If we silence today’s students, we ensure that future Yakovlevs will go home unchanged, not questioning tyranny, but questioning us.
The question is not whether we can survive letting them see who we are. The real question is: Can we survive if we’re too afraid to let them?
Joseph D. Terwilliger is Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where his research focuses on natural experiments in human genetic epidemiology. He is also active in science and sports diplomacy, having taught genetics at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, and accompanied Dennis Rodman on six “basketball diplomacy” trips to Asia since 2013.
