BY HANK REICHMAN

In an opinion piece posted today on The Hill, Varsha Koduvayur, a senior research analyst specializing in Gulf States issues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute, argues that the Matthew Hedges affair “should be a wake-up call for universities.”  Hedges is a British researcher who last May was arrested in Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), after completing a two-week research trip for his doctoral thesis.  He was charged with espionage and sentenced last month to life in prison, but after a campaign by his family and the British government was pardoned and released.  Nonetheless, the UAE still contends he was “100 percent” a spy.

“For American universities based in the Gulf,” Koduvayur writes, “the Hedges affair should serve as a wake-up call to reexamine their ties to such autocratic regimes.”  She reports:

Over the past few years, major Western universities have established branch campuses in the Gulf. Paris’ Sorbonne has a campus in Abu Dhabi, while Rochester Institute of Technology and Britain’s Cambridge and Manchester have branches in Dubai.  Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Texas A&M, and Virginia Commonwealth have Qatar-based campuses.

Gulf governments have been incredibly generous to many of these institutions, doling out hefty chunks of their hydrocarbons-based wealth.  In 2014, for example, among other grants, Qatar gave $59.5 million to Georgetown University and $45.3 million to Northwestern University.  In 2008, New York University opened its Abu Dhabi campus with the help of $50 million from the emirate.  According to data from The Gazelle, an NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) student newspaper, more than 99 percent of NYUAD’s revenue comes from UAE grants.  Abu Dhabi even committed to financing a chunk of NYU’s New York campus when the NYUAD deal was inked.

The only string attached to the grants these schools receive?  Academic freedom.

A former professor at Georgetown Qatar describes Doha’s limits on academic freedom as “soft censorship,” where implicit red lines on certain topics – such as sectarianism or criticisms of the emir or Islam – extend into the classroom.  Hard censorship exists too: Books can be confiscated by customs authorities or even banned.

Gulf states also use visa revocations or entry bans as punitive measures against academics critical of their regimes.  In 2013, for example, Dubai denied entry to Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a prominent academic at the London School of Economics, who had been scheduled to attend a conference at the American University of Sharjah.  In 2015, Qatar revoked the residency permit of a Georgetown Qatar professor, likely for publishing criticism of an ally of Doha.  That same year, the UAE banned from entering the country a New York University professor who had published criticism of the UAE’s migrant issues.  Last year, NYU’s journalism faculty stated it would refuse to teach at the school’s UAE branch after the federation denied entry to two of its professors.

I have written previously on this blog about such threats to academic freedom, especially at NYU (see, for examples, here, here, and here).  In 2009, the AAUP and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) issued a joint statement “On Conditions of Employment at Overseas Campuses.”  The statement declared:

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.

Consequently, it is essential that all international initiatives undertaken by U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities respect the UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel with its emphasis on academic freedom, institutional autonomy, collegial governance, nondiscrimination, and employment security.

Adds Koduvayur,

Universities must realize that they are not passive, value-neutral actors.  Their campuses confer geopolitical benefits to Gulf states by giving them robust soft power, enabling the regimes to boost their global profiles by touting the Western institutions they host.

Western universities in the Gulf must re-evaluate whether the trade-off between financial largesse and reputational risk is worth it. . . .

Unless Western governments bring strong pressure to bear on Gulf states to reform their rights records, cases like Matthew Hedges will become the norm rather than the exception.

In short, the 2009 joint AAUP-CAUT statement is more timely and important than ever.  “Participating in the movement for international education can rest on laudable educational grounds,” the statement noted.  “But those grounds will be jeopardized if hard-earned standards and protections are weakened rather than exported.”

NYU Abu Dhabi Campus Center