The United Arab Emirates are absolute-monarchy sheikhdoms, in which media publications are censored, online comments can land an emirati in prison and dissent is silenced by abduction-like arrests. The UAE is also home to branches of foreign universities, like New York University and Paris-Sorbonne, that have set up campuses which are paid for by the UAE government. So what does it mean for those universities when the prime minister of the UAE tweets this? HH Sheikh Mohammed: We want our national universities to be main supporters for the govt. in its vision and mission. We want them to be a major executive force. But when an American university is fully funded by and operating under a government that wants colleges to be its “main supporters,” what do its guarantees of independence amount to? For Matt Duffy, an American professor who was fired from a domestic university in Abu Dhabi and kicked out of the UAE in 2012, the answer is a resounding “not much.” The sheikh’s tweet is just another confirmation of what he says every professor in the region already knows. “There is no academic freedom in the UAE,” he told Newsweek, no matter how much the government says they want to bring world-class standards of higher education to the gulf or how many “cultural free zones” the ruling families grant foreign universities. “[Professors] might say they do, but there’s no one in NYU AD who actually thinks that they have the freedom to say whatever they want,” said Duffy. “Everybody is scared about saying the wrong thing, offending the wrong student. Teaching in the UAE is like walking on eggshells all the time. My feeling is that although [NYU AD is] in a bubble, in some ways they are going to buckle under whatever the preferences of the government are.” Duffy was an outspoken critic of the government during his two years teaching journalism to women students at Zayed University. He wrote op-eds about press freedom, spoke about the UAE’s media censorship in his classes and tweeted freely. After all, Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak, UAE Minister of Higher Education at the time, had told faculty members he wanted Zayed University to “engage with the community.” Duffy’s colleagues told him his outspokenness was a bad idea, but he felt he was fulfilling his job description. “I was going out on a limb. I felt like I had a duty as an academic in a country where I was told to teach according to international standards,” he said. “I certainly wouldn’t recommend a professor do that. Not now, given my experience.” After a long list of potential tweets, columns and conferences that Duffy speculates may have crossed the line, Duffy and his wife, who also worked in education, received contract termination notices and were given notice to leave the country. He said the UAE he moved to in 2010 (the same year NYU AD opened its doors) has changed. The Arab Spring, which never reached the UAE, put the government on edge. Human Rights Watch, noting the arrest of several dozen dissidents, wrote that the UAE “intensified its campaign to silence critics of its ruling elite” in 2012. The Abu Dhabi division of the polling organization Gallup moved its offices out of the UAE that year, and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a group affiliated with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that promotes democracy, the rule of law and a social market economy, were reportedly told to cease activity in Abu Dhabi. Bin Mubarak, who Duffy once wrote “understands the freedom required for academics,” was replaced last year by his younger brother after 20 years in charge of higher education. In 2011, the UAE government detained several advocates for government reform, including Nasser bin Ghaith, an Emirati lecturer at Paris-Sorbonne-Abu Dhabi. Bin Ghaith was charged with insulting top government officials and inciting others to break the law after an online post voicing “unusually bold criticism” of the ruling sheikhs. He spent nine months in jail before being convicted and then pardoned. Sorbonne declined to make a public comment on the case at the time, and NYU, which had only begun its Abu Dhabi campus a year prior, declined as well. In both the instances of Duffy and bin Ghaith, as well as the more recent example of a London School of Economics professor who was denied entry to Dubai after “writing critically” about the UAE’s security crackdown, all punitive action was taken after the academics made some sort of public statement against the government. For Duffy, comparing the “problems with academic freedom” in the UAE to the problems in the U.S. is, at best, a joke. “We have due process in the U.S. People have to be accounted for in an independent judiciary. People [in the UAE] are abducted by security forces for months,” Duffy says. “Foreign accrediting bodies should not be accrediting these universities and pretending that we’re not in an authoritarian country and are not playing by their rules. That does disservice to the concept of academic freedom.” newsweek/nyu-expanding-abroad-cost-free-speech-238571
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 06:58:17 +0000
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