BY HANK REICHMAN

Regular readers of this blog will recall how last year New York University Professor Andrew Ross was stopped from boarding a flight to Abu Dhabi, where NYU has a campus and where Ross had intended to conduct research.  Ross, a vocal critic of the human-rights record of the United Arab Emirates, was told by an airline representative that he had been barred “for security reasons.”  In a statement issued soon thereafter, the AAUP expressed concern about the move and urged “the administration of NYU to make every effort to get the ban on Professor Ross lifted and, should such efforts fail, to work with its faculty to reconsider its role in the emirate.”

The AAUP’s 2009 statement “On Conditions of Employment at Overseas Campuses,” formulated jointly with the Canadian Association of University Teachers, acknowledged that the “expansion of higher education opportunities is a welcome feature of today’s more internationally integrated world.” However, the statement warned that “as the U.S. and Canadian presence in higher education grows in countries marked by authoritarian rule, basic principles of academic freedom, collegial governance, and nondiscrimination are less likely to be observed. 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.”

Responding to the ban, Ross himself wrote:

The outcome of the ban suggests that the NYU administration has not adequately secured the right of its faculty to travel and conduct research in the UAE. The shortcomings of NYU’s agreements with its Emirati partner appears to have left the UAE authorities with a free hand to decide that some kinds of scholarly research are unacceptable, and to many of my colleagues at least, this is a violation of academic freedom. Since my research was on migrant labor rights in the UAE-–a topic of direct relevance to NYU’s physical presence in Abu Dhabi–-the ban compounds the injury. Scholars working on human trafficking and forced labor are rarely welcomed by local authorities, and so field research carries inherent risks, but when that research concerns, in part, the construction of a university campus bearing the employer’s name, then any retribution for conducting it seems to be a particularly serious matter.

To my knowledge Professor Ross remains unable to conduct his research in the Emirates.  And now a similar thing can be said of a former NYU student, now a graduate student at Georgetown University, who seeks to complete similar research in nearby Qatar.  In an op-ed in the New York Times, Kristina Bogos writes:

On May 19, I awoke to an email from an unfamiliar sender, “Wahedk87,” with the subject line “Planned visit to Qatar.” The email warned me that “the U.A.E. authorities have informed their counterparts in Qatar regarding your planned visit” and accused me of conducting a “dirty mission” to “gather some confidential information.”

In college at New York University, in 2013, I had spent a semester of study abroad in the United Arab Emirates; I am now a master’s candidate at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and at the time of Wahedk87’s email I was a week away from traveling to Qatar. My “dirty mission” was my thesis research, and the “confidential information” I sought was about the labor conditions of migrant workers in the capital, Doha. . . .

When I landed in Qatar in June, Wahedk87’s threat became clear. I was denied entry and detained at the airport in Doha. Qatari immigration officers informed me that my name appeared on a “blacklist” maintained by member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council because I had “made trouble” in the U.A.E. Later, Emirati officials told the State Department that they had placed me on the blacklist for unspecified “security-related reasons.”

“Security-related reasons.”  The same phrase used to explain Ross’s travel ban.

In 2013, while studying at New York University Abu Dhabi, Bogos had condemned the treatment of migrant workers who were building NYU’s new campus, a stance also taken by Ross.  Unlike Ross, however, Bogos “was eventually allowed into Qatar on a tourist visa, but I remained under surveillance, at times followed by officers I was told were from state security.  In August, the Qatari government rejected my application for a student visa to study at Georgetown Qatar this fall.”

Bogos calls Georgetown’s response “troubling.”  The school’s administration claimed to take academic freedom very seriously, even as the university expands “to work in increasingly difficult places” where “access to study and residence visas varies across individuals and over time.”  Bogos points out that in Ross’s case N.Y.U. said that it too supported the “free movement of people and ideas,” but that “it is the government that controls visa and immigration policy, and not the university.”  NYU also offered the somewhat self-serving argument that its “presence in these nations and societies brings more freedom of ideas, not less.”

“These responses seem uninformed or disingenuous,” Bogos writes.

Both Qatar and the U.A.E. use sophisticated internet attack tools to execute what Human Rights Watch recently called a “systematic and well-funded assault on free speech to subvert the potentially transformative impact of social media and internet technology.” Generally, it is the citizens of these gulf countries, not foreign visitors, who face the worst of such repression.

An Emirati professor named Nasser bin Ghaith was detained with no access to his family or a lawyer for nine months, and claimed in a court hearing to have been tortured, for criticizing the government on Twitter. He has been charged under the 2012 Cybercrimes Law that prescribes up to 15 years in prison for people who post content that could “damage the reputation” of the U.A.E. leadership.

Bogos concludes: “The failure of Georgetown and N.Y.U. to call out the suppression of critical speech suggests the complicity that gulf money buys. The transactional relationships that underpin these American universities’ campuses in U.A.E. and Qatar subvert the very academic freedom they’re supposed to promote.”

In a September 1, 2015 letter to the AAUP, NYU Provost David McLaughlin responded to the Association’s concerns in the Ross case:

Confronted, as we are, by a world in which most nations have laws that are different than our own and cultures unlike our own, universities can choose either to engage these diverse societies or not. At NYU, we believe that engagement is the right course for our university, our faculty, and  our students in fulfilling our research and educational  missions  in the 21st century.  We believe the values of the liberal arts and free inquiry are hardy; they have withstood many challenges — even within our own nation — and can succeed in other settings, too. And, finally, we believe our presence in these nations and societies brings more freedom of ideas, not less.

Judging from the experiences of Ross and Bogos such lofty language is to date completely unsupported by actual experience.  NYU and Georgetown should terminate their relationships with the UAE and Qatar if those governments persist in denying entry to critical foreign scholars.