That pressure, he said, began to reveal itself less than four months after his escape from the heavily guarded house where he had been confined for 18 months after his release from prison on what legal experts say were trumped-up charges.

In the United States, many colleges have grown increasingly reliant on the tuition from the 194,000 Chinese students who enrolled at American universities last year, a 23 percent increase over the previous year. A number of universities, including Johns Hopkins, Yale and Duke, have programs or satellite campuses in China or are planning them. Mr. Chen’s statement did not include details about how he might have been pressed by N.Y.U., and he declined an interview request on Sunday. But friends said he had been quietly stewing in recent months over what he believed were the university’s efforts to stage-manage his public activism, which included an appearance in April on Capitol Hill to speak about the Chinese government’s persecution of relatives he left behind.

In August, he told friends that N.Y.U. was trying to dissuade him from traveling to Washington to meet members of Congress. As he was returning to New York that day, two N.Y.U. interpreters who were accompanying Mr. Chen refused to allow a reporter from Radio Free Asia to interview him at Union Station. The reporter, Zhang Min, said in an interview that Mr. Chen was so angry that he threatened to remain behind in Washington.

Matt Dorf, a Washington-based media strategist who was there that day and who worked closely with Mr. Chen after his arrival in the United States, offered another view of the incident, saying that one of the translators was eight months pregnant and anxious to catch the train to New York, which the group eventually missed. Writing in an e-mail, Mr. Dorf noted that Mr. Chen had hours earlier spoken to dozens of reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference and he dismissed suggestions that Mr. Chen’s ability to speak to the news media was discouraged by N.Y.U.

Mr. Beckman, the university spokesman, said in the statement on Sunday that N.Y.U. had provided “opportunities for Mr. Chen to pursue his advocacy.”

Bob Fu, president of ChinaAid, a Christian group in Texas, recounted a conversation in which Mr. Chen lamented what he perceived to be the Chinese government’s growing influence in the United States. “He felt a tremendous sadness knowing how academia was kowtowing to the Chinese government,” Mr. Fu said.