BY HANK REICHMAN

Yesterday, John Wilson posted a comment on my post “Standing with Professional Ethics” that merits a longer response than is appropriate for a simple comment.  I also want to use this opportunity to reply to another response to my post, which came from an AAUP leader via private email, and to make a few additional points.

First, here is the text of John’s comment:

I agree with Hank Reichman on most of this, and the general view that Cheney-Lippold is wrong, but definitely should not be investigated or punished for his stand (as Cary Nelson wrongly argues).  It’s very important to provide a space between what is morally wrong and what is punishable.  But I don’t think students have a right to a recommendation.  Professors can discriminate politically against students, and choose not to write a recommendation if they disagree with a student’s views (for example, many might support refusing to write a recommendation for a Holocaust denier or a white supremacist, and I suspect Nelson might refuse to recommend a radical BDS supporter, since he considered such political views relevant to faculty hiring in the Salaita case).  However, Cheney-Lippold did not discriminate against the student.  And professors (as in this case) can discriminate against the institutions where they are asked to send a recommendation.  If a professor refused to write recommendations to send to a university in apartheid South Africa, because they discriminated against black people and it would be bad for the student to be part of a racist institution, I would criticize that decision, but I think most people would agree.  I think almost everyone has someone or something they would think justifies refusing a recommendation, but they’re rarely ever asked to act on it.  I think they ought to be challenged about these academic boycotts, but let’s not imagine that this is an unusual position to hold.

First of all, the claim that “Cheney-Lippold did not discriminate against the student” but “against the institution” to which she was applying is, I think, a distinction without a real difference.  By refusing to write a recommendation to a specific institution the professor is, intentions aside, responding to a choice made by the student.  Hence, inevitably, the decision to not recommend to a specific institution is necessarily a decision to treat the student who wishes to study at that institution differently.

However, that’s not Wilson’s main point, which I take to be that “It’s very important to provide a space between what is morally wrong and what is punishable.  But I don’t think students have a right to a recommendation.”  Similarly the AAUP leader wrote me that “a faculty member has a right to not write a recommendation for a student for any reason, including political reasons. . . .  my bottom line is there is no right of a student to get a letter of recommendation and this does not violate the academic freedom of the student.”

I actually essentially agree with this position, but, like Wilson, I don’t think it invalidates my argument that Cheney-Lippold’s action was a violation of professional ethics and that it threatened to some degree the student’s academic freedom.  One may well have a legitimate right to take a particular action, but that does not necessarily mean that action might not violate some norm of ethical or professional behavior.  In this case, even if Cheney-Lippold was within his rights, I still maintain that his action was professionally unethical by the standards of the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics. 

Wilson’s point does, however, offer a stronger rationale for the argument that Cheney-Lippold should not be subject to disciplinary action than I offered in my post.  Faculty members do have the right to decline a request for a recommendation, although I would hasten to add that a blanket refusal to write any such letters would be, in my opinion, deeply problematic.  Moreover, in any individual case the faculty member has no obligation to explain the refusal.  In fact, I’m certain that many faculty members have declined to write on behalf of a student simply because they believe the student is not fully qualified, but have not provided that reason out of consideration of the student’s feelings or not to curtail the student’s ambition.  This is totally acceptable.  Hence, it would be the height of absurdity to take a position that had Cheney-Lippold simply said, “sorry, I decline,” he would have been fine, but that he should be punished for his forthrightness.

My post was intended as a response to the previous post by Cheney-Lippold’s supporters and not as a general consideration of the ethical and academic freedom issues surrounding letters of recommendation.  Were I to craft such a general consideration, my starting point would be that, as Wilson and the AAUP leader have said, faculty members do have the right to refuse to write a recommendation (although not for any reason; a refusal, for instance, to write letters for any member of a specific ethnic group could even be illegal, and rightly so), but that they should take into consideration standards of professional ethics and strive not to make decisions that would effectively discriminate against a student for that student’s views or personal choices.  This is not only a matter of ethics but of student rights.  As the 1967 Joint Statement on the Rights and Freedoms of Students states, “Student performance should be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards.”

In addition, as Joerg Tiede reminded me this morning, the AAUP’s statement on Freedom and Responsibility declares: “most faculty members face no insoluble conflicts between the claims of politics, social action, and conscience, on the one hand, and the claims and expectations of their students, colleagues, and institutions, on the other.  If such conflicts become acute, and attention to obligations as a citizen and moral agent precludes an instructor from fulfilling substantial academic obligations, the instructor cannot escape the responsibility of that choice . . .”

Two additional points are worth making.  First, the argument so far on both sides has been largely, and appropriately, on issues of principle.  But there is a politically pragmatic point to be made as well.  Today the idea that college and university faculties are dominated by “politically correct” leftist professors who impose their political views on students is widely held.  This is, of course, a false and insidious caricature of academia, but sadly it has gained far more traction than it deserves.  Hence I worry that actions like that of Cheney-Lippold, if not challenged by others in the profession, will only feed this falsehood.  The BDS movement has more support in the academy than in society as a whole, but even in academia it remains very much a minority viewpoint.  Its supporters may see actions like Cheney-Lippold’s as courageous and principled — and they may be right — but many others will see this as yet another example of a dangerous injection of radical politics into what should be politically neutral academic work.  This is one reason why I thought that Cheney-Lippold’s claim that many departments have endorsed BDS was more than just a careless error.  In short, while faculty members should always act on principle, the practical impact of their actions also merits consideration.

My second point was raised to me last night by a recent Ph.D at Berkeley who read my post and noted that from his perspective, recently out of graduate school, the most bothersome thing about Cheney-Lippold’s message was its opening line: “I am very sorry, but I only scanned your email a couple weeks ago and missed out on a key detail.”  He noted that this reminded him of multiple times when professors had responded to his inquiries and those of others belatedly, often far too late, and too often without even acknowledging that this could have a negative impact.  He’s right.  This may well be the only time that Cheney-Lippold was tardy in a reply, but that tardiness is not irrelevant to an argument made by his supporters: that “this student has the option of asking others to write for her.”  Maybe it was too late to ask others.  Whatever one may think of Cheney-Lippold’s action, this case should also remind us that students, graduate and undergraduate, are entitled to prompt responses to their inquiries and requests.