The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has disciplined a professor who retracted his offer to write a letter of recommendation for a student who wished to study in Israel, The Detroit News reported Tuesday evening.
John Cheney-Lippold, an associate professor in the department of American culture, found himself at the center of a firestorm last month, when he told the student, Abigail Ingber, that he could not recommend her to study for a semester at Tel Aviv University. In that message, which circulated widely after it was posted on social media, Cheney-Lippold wrote that “many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine.”
The university quickly separated itself from the professor’s remarks, noting that none of its departments supports the academic boycott of Israel proposed by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS.
And documents obtained by the News reveal that the institution went a step further: It told Cheney-Lippold that he would not receive a merit raise this academic year, and that he would not be permitted to take a planned sabbatical in January. Nor will the professor, who is tenured, be allowed to take sabbaticals for the next two years.
The disciplinary measures were conveyed to Cheney-Lippold in a sharply worded letter this month from Elizabeth Cole, interim dean of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. “In the future, a student’s merit should be your primary guide for determining how and whether to provide a letter of recommendation,” Cole wrote. “You are not to use student requests for recommendations as a platform to discuss your personal political beliefs.”
Cole also chastised the professor for discussing the BDS movement in two courses, appearing to suggest that the university endorsed the movement, and for discussing Ingber, a student, in news-media interviews, according to the News. Cheney-Lippold did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.
The Michigan professor is just one of many professors who have found common cause with the BDS movement, observing an academic boycott of Israel largely through small gestures. But while many scholars have expressed support for Cheney-Lippold’s academic freedom, many others have argued that the professor unfairly applied a political litmus test to a student. Read more about the workings of the boycott here.
Brock Read is an assistant managing editor at The Chronicle. He directs a team of editors and reporters who cover policy, research, labor, and academic trends, among other things. Follow him on Twitter @bhread, or drop him a line at brock.read@chronicle.com.
Correction (10/9/2018, 12:22 p.m.): This article originally misspelled the student’s first name. She is Abigail Ingber, not Abigal. The error has been corrected.
