In the course of researching my recent essay on Cornel West's situation at Harvard -- he claimed that he was denied tenure because he supported Palestinian rights -- I came across a blog post by the University of Michigan's Juan Cole, another prominent academic who adheres to the anti-Israel BDS movement. As I mentioned in the piece, Cole credited West's claim, explaining that many pro-Israel academics and administrators are greedy and corrupt. Due to space limitations, I did not go any further into Cole's polemic, but there was an additional passage that deserves some attention. It demonstrates the way in which Israel's critics are simply untethered to accurate reporting:
By way of demonstrating the supposed corruption of pro-Israel forces on campuses, Cole wrote:
At the University of Michigan, John Cheney-Lippold was disciplined in an unprecedented way for standing for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions on Israel’s Occupation policies toward the Palestinians.
This is manifestly untrue. Prof. Cheney-Lippold was indeed disciplined -- I have no idea whether the nature of it was unprecedented at Michigan -- but it was not because he supported the BDS movement. Rather, it was because he attempted to impose his own politics on an unwilling student, and lied about it in the process. As I wrote at the time on Slate, Cheney-Lippold had initially agreed to provide a student with a reference for a university-approved study abroad program at Tel Aviv University in Israel. He was then in the midst of the tenure process, so he delayed writing the letter. He was granted tenure a few weeks later. Feeling secure, he then wrote to the student withdrawing his commitment, and falsely stating that he had only just realized that the reference was for a program in Israel, and that he could not provide it because of his support for BDS.
In other words, Cheney-Lippold intentionally disadvantaged a student, denying her the opportunity to seek another reference letter at the earliest opportunity. As set out in a letter from Interim Dean Elizabeth Cole (unrelated to Juan, afaik), Cheney-Lippold also falsely told the student that university departments supported BDS, and he later used class time to discuss his views on BDS -- unrelated to the courses' subject matter -- thus gaining a an audience for his "political opinions."
In Juan Cole's representation, Cheney-Lippold was disciplined for nothing more than "standing" for BDS, when in fact he had misled and disadvantaged a student, imposing his own politics on her education opportunities, while misrepresenting university policy and coercively subjecting other students to his political views.
There are plenty of pro-BDS professors at the University of Michigan, nearly all of whom do their jobs with complete integrity, separating their political stances from their obligations to students. As Juan Cole should surely recognize, Cheney-Lippold was disciplined because of the way he treated a student, not because he supports the BDS movement.
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