"What to Do about Professors Who Refuse to Offer Recommendations to Students Who Want to Study in Israel"

I have an essay on Slate about Prof. John Cheney-Lippold, at the University of Michigan, who rescinded his offer of a study-abroad recommendation to a student who wanted to attend Tel Aviv University.  Here is the gist:

Cheney-Lippold is well within his own rights to boycott Israel, but he is quite wrong to insist that solidarity with the BDS movement privileges him to withhold a reference from a qualified student. The Tel Aviv program is officially approved by the University of Michigan, and Cheney-Lippold is not entitled to impede a student’s access to it, just as he could not bar nonboycotting students from his courses, decline to grade their papers, or refuse to call on them in class. Every instructor has a professional responsibility to treat their students impartially, without regard to personal politics. In a letter to the campus community, President Mark Schlissel and provost Martin Filbert stated unambiguously that “faculty members’ personal political beliefs cannot interfere with their obligations to our students with regard to letter-writing and all other modes of academic support.” Withholding students’ recommendations would “violate their academic freedom and betray our university’s educational mission.”

Instructors planning to withhold references should be required to announce their intentions in advance, naming the countries for which they will not provide recommendations and thus providing fair notice before students decide to enroll in their classes. The University of Michigan sponsors programs in authoritarian countries where minorities are oppressed and academic freedom is compromised or unknown—including China, Russia, and Hungary—and it will be revealing to see whether Israel is singled out for discriminatory treatment. Those who impose political limits on references should not be allowed to teach required courses, or courses for which there is only one available section.

You can read the entire piece here.

Comments

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Easy. Send them to the Saudi Consulate in Turkey.