Professors Denied by UAE Claim Communications with NYU Administrators Suggested Anti-Shia Discrimination Was the Cause

In recent months, new details have emerged in the latest NYU Abu Dhabi controversy. Last fall, NYU professors Mohamad Bazzi and Arang Keshavarzian revealed that Emirati authorities had denied their visa and security clearance applications.

(Image via NYU on Flickr)

In 2011, NYU Journalism professor Mohamad Bazzi was preparing to teach a course at NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) during the 2012 January term. In June of that year, Bazzi said he was contacted by an administrator who expressed concern that he would be denied security clearance by UAE authorities because Bazzi identified himself as Shia on his application. NYU Local has learned that at a Faculty Committee on NYU’s Global Network meeting in November, Bazzi named then-senior vice provost for Global Faculty Development Ron Robin as the administrator.

“Ron Robin emailed me in June and said ‘Let’s have a phone conversation.’ He said, ‘Let’s chat about an issue that has cropped up regarding Abu Dhabi,’” Bazzi said of the 2011 discussion on a call with Local last week.

“He said he was worried [that] if my application went through the normal channels and normal process, it would land on the desk of, I’m paraphrasing him, some Emirati official, some UAE official, and it would be rejected out of hand because I had listed myself as Shia,” he recalled.

In December 2016, NYU Middle Eastern Studies professor Arang Keshavarzian was also readying to teach at NYUAD. In an email exchange from early that month obtained by Local on Monday, Keshavarzian asked an NYUAD official, whose name on the email was redacted, if it would be a good idea to mark “None” in lieu of his nominal religion and sect on the application. In addition, Keshavarzian, who is Shia, asked the administrator whether he was aware of other cases involving Shia applicants; Keshavarzian told the administrator he asked because he wanted to know if they had been cleared by Emirati authorities. The NYUAD official delivered a brief response the following day. “One question: sometimes people’s last names makes their religious identity clear. Is that the case with yours?” he asked.

“They acknowledged that [my sect] was going to be a problem,” Keshavarzian told Local of his correspondence with the NYUAD official.

In fall 2017, Lebanese-born Bazzi and Iranian-born Keshavarzian each announced that their visas and security clearances had been denied by the UAE after applying to teach for a semester at NYUAD. Bazzi, who was slated to teach at the campus last fall, came forward in a Sept. 26 New York Times op-ed. Keshavarzian’s situation was publicized in an early October letter drafted by the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors directed to NYU President Andrew Hamilton, two NYUAD administrators and two NYU Board of Trustees members. Keshavarzian was set to teach in Abu Dhabi during the spring of this year.

In October, the Faculty Committee on NYU’s Global Network invited Keshavarzian and Bazzi to a Nov. 14 meeting to learn more about their circumstances. The committee issued a statement regarding the situation on Dec. 20, which called upon university leaders to address it further, but stopped short of characterizing the denials as sectarian discrimination.

“While the two professors denied security clearance are both of Shi’a background, there is no official confirmation that this (or any other potential factor) motivated the denial,” they stated.

While Bazzi did not receive an “official confirmation” of what caused the denial, Bazzi said he deduced from communicating with Robin that “this issue had come up” and, more specifically, “there was going to be a problem to get security clearance applicants approval who list themselves as Shia.”

Robin, who is now president of the University of Haifa in Israel, did not respond to requests for comment.

Asked why he thinks the committee did not come to the conclusion that he and Keshavarzian were denied because of their sect, Bazzi said that he has pondered the question, but had yet to think of a satisfying answer.

“It comes up a lot with people who read my piece,” Bazzi continued, referring to his New York Times op-ed. “‘How do you know?’ they ask me. Well, one of the main reasons I know is because these top NYU Abu Dhabi administrators told me. They told me they were worried about it in 2011. So that’s how I know.”

Bazzi said he didn’t think the committee “focused enough on that fact,” a fact of which he informed the committee during the November meeting.

Bazzi and Keshavarzian are not the only NYU faculty members who claim that NYU administrators saw certain religious affiliations as obstacles in the university’s UAE campus. As Washington Square News reported last November, several Jewish and atheist NYUAD Academic Fellows were advised by NYU’s Human Resources Department not to accurately disclose their religions on the application forms. Instead, they were told to pick from a list of “acceptable religions.”

Yet despite the numerous examples of NYU administrators acting in ways that suggested certain religious affiliations hindered faculty members’ ability to receive clearance from Emirati authorities, the committee did not come to a conclusion on why Bazzi and Keshavarzian were rejected. Furthermore, the committee wrote that academic freedom at the campus was up to par and they were not aware of any “obstacles to freedom in the classroom or in the area of research.”

Still, the group asked university leaders to address the matter again after having already done so in the fall, shortly before the Journalism Department broke ties with the campus. “The Committee would like to ask the university leadership to publicly and unequivocally reaffirm its commitment to the global mobility and academic freedom of all of its members across the various portals…” the statement read.

Additionally, the group called on Hamilton to “confirm his rejection of any designation of the two faculty members as a ‘security risk.”

More broadly, the committee stated that “restrictions to both academic freedom and global mobility … have not been sufficiently discussed among all members of the NYU community.”

The faculty members also said that the circumstance involving Keshavarzian and Bazzi proved the “need for greater transparency and clarity about the opportunities and limits in the operation of the university’s global network.”

To that end, the statement included a list of recommendations on application and information dissemination protocol with the aim of improving the university’s handling of applications processes, as well as the university’s global network writ large.

Last week, roughly one month after the committee released its statement, Hamilton responded to the committee.

“First, please allow me to extend my gratitude to the committee for your thoughtful statement on mobility in NYU’s global network,” he wrote. “NYU strongly believes academic freedom and free movement of people and ideas —within NYU’s global network and beyond — are indeed, as the committee states, key to our goals of ‘international scholarly collaboration, learning, and advancement of knowledge.’”

In the response, Hamilton also complied with the committee’s request that he reiterate that the two professors do not pose security threats.

While Hamilton’s letter signified that he was receptive to the committee’s judgements on what had transpired, Bazzi and Keshavarzian thought the committee’s statement failed to grapple with the key issues at play.

“I think the statement was comprehensive in some ways, in providing a lot of background, but it ignored the two central questions, which are religious discrimination and the threats to academic freedom,” said Bazzi.

Keshavarzian said he was struck that the statement included the positive aspects of NYUAD. The statement, for example, called NYUAD a “remarkable success story.”

According to Keshavarzian, these acclaims did not reflect the conversation between the professors and committee. “There was nothing NYU Abu Dhabi-specific in the discussion in our meeting,” he said. “There’s a real disconnect.”

During the meeting, Keshavarzian said the committee members were “shocked” and “appalled” when they told their story. “They were very sympathetic to us. They kept being taken aback by the lack of response from the administration,” said Keshavarzian.

“It’s kind of defending NYU Abu Dhabi,” he said of the committee’s written response.

Now, Keshavarzian would like the committee to request an analysis from NYUAD’s Human Resources, which collects information on applicants’ religions and sects, to determine whether or not there has been a pattern of discrimination preventing professors, administrators and students of certain backgrounds from working and studying at NYUAD.

Moreover, Keshavarzian questioned why the Faculty Committee on NYU’s Global Network, formed in 2013 and tasked with “assess[ing] the academic state of NYU’s global network,” was not alerted of their visa denials by someone within the university. Instead, they learned of Bazzi’s circumstance from the New York Times op-ed.

On Saturday, Faculty Committee on NYU’s Global Network co-Chair Eliot Borenstein confirmed he first learned of the situation from Bazzi’s op-ed. Borenstein said he began the process of organizing the meeting on the matter when he spoke with Bazzi at a gathering shortly after he read of Bazzi’s story in the New York Times. He also said the committee had requested the information on sect and religion from NYUAD’s Human Resources Department.

On Tuesday, NYUAD Executive Director of Public Affairs Kate Chandler confirmed that the request had been made. “We have recently received the committee’s request and are working with colleagues in New York to address it,” Chandler wrote in an email. “As we have shared previously, NYUAD Human Resources only collects information that is required to complete forms for securing visas for members of the NYUAD community, which includes religion of the applicant.” Chandler did not address questions regarding the frequency that prospective NYUAD faculty had been discriminated against based on their religious affiliations.

Asked about the professors’ assertion that the statement was too equivocal on the cause of the UAE’s rejections, Borenstein wrote, “even though sectarian discrimination is a reasonable assumption, we cannot prove it.”

He added, “There are people of Shi’a background working, teaching, and studying at NYU-AD.”

Borenstein also explained why the statement differentiated between academic freedom and freedom of movement. “We did not mean to suggest that limits on mobility have no impact on academic freedom. Rather, we were trying to be more clear and precise than simply invoking ‘academic freedom’ as a broad concept that has no particulars to it,” Borenstein wrote.

He went on to say that the ability to access a campus and academic freedom are categorically distinct. “[E]ach violation of academic freedom is different,” he stated.

And on the criticism that the committee was slow to act, Borenstein said that, in the future, he “want[s] to ensure that news of such incidents reach our committee immediately.”

Borenstein, of course, signed his committee’s statement, along with the vast majority of its over 30 members. Four professors on the committee, however, did not. Two were traveling when the statement was released, so their names were not initially included as signees, and another did not respond when asked why her name was not listed below the statement.

Committee member and Physics professor Matthew Kleban told Local that he had reservations with the statement and opted not to endorse it. “I thought it came across as a little bit too much as if we’re apologists for NYUAD,” he said. “I think it’s clearly a serious problem for NYU’s global network that NYU faculty from one portal cannot travel to another.”

Similarly, Kleban did not approve of the statement’s differentiation between academic freedom within the classroom and what the committee labeled “global mobility.”

“I think this is an artificial distinction,” he said. “If you’re not allowed to go there, you can’t say anything in the classroom.”