Brian Leiter calls attention to this important story at Inside Higer Ed:
Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at the New York City campus and president of N.Y.U.’s American Association of University Professors chapter, was prohibited by U.A.E. authorities from boarding an Abu Dhabi-bound plane at New York’s Kennedy International Airport on Saturday due to stated “security reasons” (the media relations office at the U.A.E. embassy declined to comment on the incident). Ross had been planning to continue his research on migrant labor issues in the Emirates over his spring vacation. He was not planning to stop by the N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi campus while there.
I'll follow the story as it unfolds with a great deal of interest. (I have written on NYUAD before [here].) I hope the NYU faculty Stateside and in Abu Dhabi will find a way to protest this effectively. I conclude by repeating parts of what I have said before (with modest edits):
Universities frequently recycle other people's dirty money to noble ends. College campuses everywhere have buildings and prizes named after colonial plunderers, slave-traders, etc. But it does make a difference when universities themselves become actively involved in the network of shady business practices of others. It's not just because one might actually facilitate and entrench a system of crony capitalism (and political exploitation), but such involvement has a tendency to pollute all that are involved. Incentives matter, and participating in crony capitalism in dictatorships generates a pattern of small acts of self-censorship that eventually we often do not even notice about ourselves. Universities should be cautious about generating situations in which they put their faculty at risk of such circumstances.
Even so, I disagree with those that claim that universities ought not opening "campuses in countries that lack the civic foundation of liberal education, the right to speak freely and to protest peaceably the actions of authorities." This has the causal nexus in the wrong direction; universities can sometimes help generate the proper civic foundations. Even if their causal power is limited, they can provide some hope and shelter in dark surroundings. Leaving aside the order of explanation, it just seems perverse to deny citizens access to a fine education because they live under (soft-)dictatorship. But part of a true education involves being an institutional exemplar of integrity and this also requires some courage.
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