Yale promised that the newly hired faculty at Yale-N.U.S. would “rethink liberal education from the ground up” in a campus built and financed by Singapore — an authoritarian city-state with severe restrictions on freedom of speech.

“We must look at ‘liberal’ in the sense of broad, rather than free,” Kay Kuok, a businesswoman who leads the Yale-N.U.S. governing board, told the government-controlled Straits Times. “It’s freedom of thought; I’m not necessarily saying freedom of expression.”

Mr. Levin promised that students would be free to form associations “as long as they are not intolerant of racial or religious groups.” But the Singapore campus’s president, Pericles Lewis, said they would not be free to form explicitly political associations, much less stage protests of government policies, even on campus.

“In a host environment where free speech is constrained if not proscribed, faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education, to the extent it can exist in such situations, will suffer,” the American Association of University Professors warned last year in a letter criticizing the Singapore venture. The letter posed 16 questions that Yale hasn’t answered; it won’t even disclose to its faculty the full terms of the Singapore deal.

Reporters Without Borders this year ranked Singapore No. 149 out of 179 in press freedom — down from No. 135 last year. Faculty members at the Claremont Colleges, in California, and University of Warwick, in Britain, cited concerns about academic freedom when they rebuffed Singapore’s offers to fund liberal arts colleges there — before Yale accepted.

Academic freedom isn’t the only ideal at risk. In 2009, when the University of Wisconsin at Madison was invited by the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan to help create a biotechnology program, the Americans proposed instead to design a school for the humanities and social sciences, one inspired by “the Wisconsin Idea,” a progressive vision of labor rights and open government. Something very different was built: a $2 billion university, run by a consortium that includes the University of Wisconsin, and named for the autocratic president Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, who has a representative on the board of trustees. Human Rights Watch and other groups have documented extensive labor rights violations in the United Arab Emirates, where migrant workers, who make up more than 70 percent of Abu Dhabi’s residents but enjoy few legal protections, are still building the N.Y.U. campus on Saadiyat Island, a luxury tourist and residential site.

When authoritarian regimes buy American universities’ prestige and talent, they “shortcut a process that took centuries to create,” Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, recently wrote in the South China Morning Post.