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NY Times, Nov. 8 2017
N.Y.U. Journalism Faculty Boycotts Abu Dhabi Campus
By SARAH MASLIN NIR
Journalism professors at New York University are refusing to teach at
the school’s Abu Dhabi campus, after officials in the United Arab
Emirates denied a faculty member a visa to teach there. That denial is a
risk to academic freedom and the university’s administration has failed
to speak out forcefully enough, the journalism faculty said.
Mohamad Bazzi, a journalism professor, is one of at least two N.Y.U.
faculty members whose visas have been rejected this year by the United
Arab Emirates, which have given no reason for the denial. But Professor
Bazzi, who was born in Lebanon, and Arang Keshavarzian, a professor of
Middle Eastern politics whose visa application was also denied, believe
it may be in part because they are Shiite Muslims, an affiliation they
were asked to disclose on their applications.
Abu Dhabi, the largest of the emirates, is ruled by a royal family from
the Sunni Muslim tradition, and it has a troubling history when it comes
to academic freedom and human rights.
A group describing itself as a majority of the Arthur L. Carter
Journalism Institute’s faculty wrote to the university president, Andrew
D. Hamilton, on Nov. 2. In the letter, the group said, “We have not been
given an explanation for the denial of these visas, but if it was for
reasons of religious affiliation, or because of our colleagues’ writing
and research, it would represent a significant threat to academic
freedom on that campus.”
The university’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study joined in,
urging staff in a letter to essentially boycott the campus in the United
Arab Emirates until there was a resolution.
On Monday, Mr. Hamilton responded, saying the university would establish
a more transparent process for dealing with visa denials, and urged the
faculties to rethink the boycott. “The call to refrain from engagement
is misplaced, not because the issue is not serious, but because it
misses the mark, punishing students and faculty at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi over
a visa decision in which they had no hand and with which they disagree,”
Mr. Hamilton wrote.
But the response stopped short of criticizing Emirati authorities, the
kind of condemnation N.Y.U. has been swift to issue in cases in which
other regimes have appeared to target individuals, Professor
Keshavarzian said. Much of the academic outcry stems from what is seen
as a double standard in the school’s strong public stances in recent
months about the Trump administration’s decisions on Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and its travel bans.
“This project was created in the name of liberal education, of global
outreach, of cosmopolitanism,” Professor Keshavarzian said. “This campus
is developing a reputation that there are very real limits on who can
teach and study at this university and what can be potentially said on
this campus.”
He added, “It suggests that there is a truly dysfunctional relationship,
antithetical to the principles that N.Y.U. lauds and very publicly
speaks out upon.”
Between the academic years 2009-10 and 2015-16, 863 professors submitted
applications for visas, and 10 were rejected, according to data compiled
by the university and shared with The New York Times. During the same
period, 2,874 other people associated with the university applied for
visas, including members of the support staff, researchers and one
student; 95 applications were rejected.
By comparison, since the 2013-14 academic year, just one faculty member
out of 254 bound for N.Y.U.’s Shanghai campus has been denied a work visa.
It is the Emirati government, not the university, that oversees who gets
work visas. The construction of the campus, which opened in 2010, was
wholly funded by the government of Abu Dhabi, which also pays for many
students’ scholarships.
When the Abu Dhabi campus was announced in 2007, N.Y.U.’s president at
the time, John Sexton, pledged that it would be “built with academic
quality and practices conforming to the same standards as those at
N.Y.U.’s Washington Square campus, including our standards of academic
freedom.”
In his letter, Mr. Hamilton addressed the issue. “I understand, too,
that faculty are concerned that the nature of our relationship with our
Abu Dhabi partners may have led us to respond differently to the visa
denials than we did to changes in U.S. immigration policy,” he wrote. He
went on to suggest that the visas were not denied because the country
was trying to exclude certain groups, but for reasons specific to the
people who were rejected. There are faculty members and students who are
Shiite, Sunni, Jewish and Christian at the campus, the president wrote.
Alya El Hosseiny, an Egyptian doctoral student, was awarded a research
fellowship from N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi institute for 2016 but was denied a
visa by the government. She was active in the Arab Spring revolts and is
still linked on social media to people in prison in Egypt, she said. She
speculated that those factors contributed to her denial. In 2011, as
waves of discontent spread into the United Arab Emirates, the government
cracked down on reformers, jailing protesters and successfully
maintaining its power.
“I think that preventing scholars from doing their work is completely
unfair, completely unjust. And it stands directly in opposition to
academic freedom,” Ms. El Hosseiny, 28, said on the telephone from
Cairo, where she is completing her fellowship.
Follow Sarah Maslin Nir on Twitter: @sarahmaslinnir
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