Persona Non Grata

After a New York University professor who has written critically of migrant labor issues in the United Arab Emirates was blocked from boarding a plane to Abu Dhabi, some are asking what the implications are for N.Y.U.’s branch campus there.

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.

“If someone with my kind of profile and especially my official position within an A.A.U.P. chapter can be treated this way, what is the value of the protections that are promised for less high-profile faculty in Abu Dhabi?” asked Ross, who has been critical of N.Y.U.'s campus there.

“My passage to and from the U.A.E. is supposed to be protected and we’ve been told by our administration that they have agreements with our Abu Dhabi partners about protecting academic freedoms and now it turns out that they really don’t have that kind of influence,” he said. “They don’t really have any say, ultimately, if the state decides to override those protections."

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ross’s case is the fact that the prestige of the N.Y.U. campus -- a collaboration between the university and U.A.E. government officials -- failed to grant Ross the needed protection to do research in the country. The university maintains that its Abu Dhabi campus “enjoys full academic freedom as it exists at N.Y.U. New York.” 

“I had thought the government would have a little more deference and respect for an N.Y.U. professor,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, who, as the executive director for Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, has also been refused entry into the U.A.E. But she said, “If this is the kind of position that the U.A.E. is going to take against critics of the government, then I think N.Y.U. professors have a lot to worry about.”

“It shouldn’t be up to the U.A.E. to decide which views of N.Y.U. professors are acceptable and which views are not,” Whitson said.

A university spokesman, John Beckman, e-mailed a statement saying that the university “supports the free movement of people and ideas” and that in five years of operating a campus in Abu Dhabi, “our faculty and students have experienced zero infringements on their academic freedom, even when conducting classes about sensitive topics -- labor, politics or what have you.”

“But it is also the case that regardless of where N.Y.U. or any other university operates, it is the government that controls visa and immigration policy, and not the university," the statement said. 

Beckman declined to answer follow-up questions on Tuesday.

“While we do not have full information, it is concerning that a New York University sociologist, Professor Andrew Ross, has been prevented from entering the United Arab Emirates, particularly since his scholarly work has included research on U.A.E. labor practices,” said Ann Marie Mauro, the chair of N.Y.U.’s Full-Time Non-Tenure-Track/Contract Faculty Senators Council. She said via e-mail that the council “would like to see this situation resolved as quickly as possible, and has asked the university administration to keep us updated regarding this issue. The council has urged the administration to continue its work with our U.A.E. partners to enable all N.Y.U. community members to travel freely to and from our N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi campus.”

N.Y.U.’s campus in Abu Dhabi has been a subject of controversy, with concerns about the university’s rapid global expansion being one of the factors at play in a faculty vote of no-confidence in President John Sexton’s leadership in 2013. (Sexton is retiring as president in 2016.) In addition to persistent questions about the rhetoric versus the reality when it comes to issues of academic freedom in the emirates, a New York Times investigation last year into the harsh working conditions faced by the migrant laborers who built N.Y.U.’s campus in Abu Dhabi fueled yet further concerns (and as the Times reported Monday, one of the journalists who co-authored that investigative piece, Sean O’Driscoll, has since been expelled from the U.A.E.). 

Other Western professors have also been barred from the United Arab Emirates. Matt Duffy, who as a former journalism professor at the Abu Dhabi-based (and American-accredited) Zayed University attempted to delicately promote press freedoms, had his visa revoked in 2012. In 2013, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East studies scholar affiliated with the London School of Economics and Political Science, was briefly detained and turned back upon arriving at the airport in Dubai with plans to give a presentation at a conference jointly sponsored by LSE and the American University of Sharjah. LSE called off the conference. U.A.E. authorities released a statement saying that Ulrichsen had been barred from the country in light of his views on the political situation in Bahrain, the subject of his planned conference talk. 

“The threshold of tolerance for criticism [on the part of Persian Gulf governments] is very low, and that’s clashing with the rising interest in the gulf from academics around the world, so you’re going to have points where the low tolerance clashes with rising interest,” said Ulrichsen, who is a visiting scholar at the University of Washington at Seattle’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

 “Any academic working on the gulf right now, we have to walk a tightrope between balancing our academic integrity and maintaining at least some form of access to the countries we study.”