the frog can definitively say the water 
has suddenly become too hot, there 
is usually no single, objective point 
where a system becomes too illiberal 
to be considered a real democracy. For 
instance, although America has free 
and fair elections, it also has several 
hugely unrepresentative political insti-
tutions and a rash of voter restrictions. 
These limitations obviously don’t make 
America a totalitarian dictatorship à 
la North Korea, but they do certainly 
make it less democratic than it could be.

With that in mind, Americans must 

confront the fact that the country’s 
metaphorical pot of water is heating. 
For decades, American democracy 
has — according to Daniel Ziblatt and 
Steven Levitsky, the authors of “How 
Democracies Die” — survived through 
mutual toleration and political forbear-
ance. 

5

Thursday, May 27, 2021

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Op-Ed: GEO’s fight for the right to boycott

Op-Ed: It can happen here

OPINION

ZACK BLUMBERG | SENIOR OPINION EDITOR

O

n Thursday, April 22, repre-
sentatives from the Graduate 
Employees’ Organization met 

with University of Michigan admin-
istrators to discuss an issue of free 
speech on campus — the right to exer-
cise freedom of conscience through 
the refusal of letters of recommenda-
tion. The discussion revealed the Uni-
versity’s current policy, or “governing 
principle,” for what it is: an attack on 
academic freedom designed not to 
protect students or faculty, but only to 
shield the University from controversy 
and liability.

This right has been under attack 

at the University of Michigan since 
2018 when, in separate incidents, two 
instructors — Professor John Cheney-
Lippold and a graduate student 
instructor — declined requests for rec-
ommendations from students wishing 
to study in Israel. Writing these letters 
would have gone against the academic 
boycott of Israel in support of Palestin-
ian human rights, and both instructors 
declined them for that reason. Even 

though 
Cheney-Lippold, 
associate 

professor of American Culture, was 
exercising his constitutional right to 
free speech, U-M leaders nevertheless 
issued severe sanctions, including the 
loss of his upcoming sabbatical and a 
denial of a merit-based raise for one 
year. The graduate student instructor 
received a formal letter of admonish-
ment from her department chair with 
implied threats of dismissal from the 
graduate program if such behavior 
were to happen again. What’s more, 
University President Mark Schlis-
sel and then-Provost Martin Phil-
bert issued a public statement that 
denounced both instructors.

The punishment meted out to Pro-

fessor Cheney-Lippold and the public 
statement from the most powerful 
U-M leaders was meant to warn cam-
pus faculty of the price for academic 
freedom, and potentially had a chilling 
effect on those who might otherwise 
speak out if they did not feel threatened. 
But the University wanted to make 
sure this wouldn’t happen again, so 

they convened a so-called Blue Ribbon 
Panel to devise a principle that would 
govern letters of recommendation.

The resulting policy is a strident 

attack on free speech. It doesn’t pro-
hibit instructors from denying letters 
of recommendation for political or eth-
ical reasons, but only from vocalizing 
those reasons. This did not sit well with 
GEO members, who voted overwhelm-
ingly to oppose the policy in our 2020 
contract negotiations. Much has been 
written about “the Palestine exception 
to free speech,” which describes the 
way norms of freedom of expression 
are so often bent to exclude those who 
would speak out for justice in Palestine. 
Despite the ongoing assault on Pales-
tinian lives and human rights, however, 
our problem with the University’s poli-
cy on letters of recommendation is not 
just about Palestine. More and more, 
instructors are starting to see letters 
of recommendation as an important 
site of political opposition and learning. 
There is a growing movement among 
mathematicians to refuse to write let-

ters for privacy-violating surveillance 
organizations, like the National Securi-
ty Agency. There is also the longstand-
ing trend of declining recommendation 
requests for Teach for America appli-
cants. We can think of a whole host of 
objectionable organizations — Exxon-
Mobil, Raytheon, U.S. Immigration 
and Customs Enforcement or Marjorie 
Taylor-Greene’s congressional office 
— to which an instructor may want to 
vocally refuse to write letters of rec-
ommendation. Being able to voice the 
reason for denying a letter of recom-
mendation is a critical component of 
any boycott, and GEO is proud to stand 
against this indefensible policy.

GEO ultimately won a meeting with 

U-M administrators to discuss the 
policy and how it will be implemented. 
The discussion left us only with a clear-
er sense of how poorly thought-out 
and difficult to implement the policy 
is. While U-M administrators made 
repeated reference to fears of discrimi-
nation as justification for the policy, 
they were never able to explain how 

Teach for America applicants could 
be understood as a group that could be 
discriminated against. The argument 
that the policy was designed to pro-
tect students from discrimination fell 
apart as the administrators repeatedly 
told us that graduate student instruc-
tors could deny letters for any reason 
at all — just so long as we don’t vocal-
ize it. Indeed, the University policy as 
it stands practically gives license to 
instructors to discriminate against stu-
dents in denying letters of recommen-
dation, provided that they don’t say the 
quiet part out loud. 

Furthermore, while the University 

claims to be protecting students, the 
policy actually makes it more difficult 
for students to get letters of recom-
mendation. 

Amir Fleischmann is the Contract 

Committee Co-Chair of the Graduate 

Employees’ Organization and can be reached 

at contractchair@geo3550.org.

 

 Read more at michigandaily.com

 Read more at michigandaily.com

MADELYN VERVAECKE 
| OPINION CARTOONIST 

CAN BE REACHED AT MIVERVAE@UMICH.EDU.

I

n September 2020, Barton Gell-
man, staff writer at The Atlantic 
magazine, published an ominous 

piece titled “The Election That Could 
Break America.” In the article, Gell-
man, with the help of legal scholars 
and political scientists, broke down the 
ways in which incumbent President 
Donald Trump, aided by Republican 
loyalists, could potentially utilize the 
United States Constitution’s ambigui-
ties to subvert the results of the 2020 
election and sow chaos. Although the 
worst of Gellman’s predictions did 
not come to fruition, the election and 
its aftermath were a time of extreme 
instability which eventually culmi-
nated in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insur-
rection. As such, Gellman’s article 
provides a prescient look at the more 
mechanical aspects of a major issue 
which much of American society 
hasn’t seemed to fully internalize: the 
weakness of democracy. Ultimately, 
in order to protect democracy and its 
institutions going forward, Americans 
must first be willing to both recognize 
and confront the concerning, real pos-
sibility of democratic backsliding at 
home. 

The takeaway from both Gellman’s 

article and the 2020 election itself 
should not be that America survived its 
one potential run-in with authoritari-
anism, but rather that democracy itself 

desperately needs to be strengthened 
and protected. The Republican Party, 
now fully backing Trump and his “big 
lie” about the 2020 election, has devel-
oped an antidemocratic vengeance 
that American society, including the 
Democratic Party, is wholly unpre-
pared to contend with in the coming 
years. However, it doesn’t seem like 
Democrats in power have actually 
internalized the significance of either 
the situation itself or their unduly tepid 
response in a meaningful way.

Since reclaiming the Presidency 

and the Senate, Democrats have 
focused on passing popular bills, such 
as the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief 
bill, and worked to highlight the val-
ues of bipartisan legislation. While 
these approaches are, in and of them-
selves, both good strategies for poten-
tially winning over Republican voters, 
they miss a key point: Defeating an 
undemocratic movement purely via 
popular policies, as the Democrats 
have attempted to do thus far, is not a 
sustainable strategy. It doesn’t actu-
ally counter or limit the Republicans’ 
undemocratic approach, and therefore 
fails to secure the future of America’s 
democratic institutions (although the 
House has passed H.R. 1, it is exceed-
ingly unlikely to ever receive the neces-
sary support to pass in the Senate). 

However, the more fundamen-

tal problem is that truly protecting 
democracy and its institutions requires 
Americans to fully comprehend their 
ephemeral nature. Americans must 
recognize that the United States, like 
every other democracy on earth, is 
susceptible to backsliding, a process 
by which formerly-democratic institu-
tions slowly become increasingly less 
liberal. Unfortunately, America’s dem-
ocratic origin story (one which also 
glosses over many less inclusive parts 
of the country’s political history) can 
numb both politicians and citizens to 
the fact that democratic governance is 
not an unyielding constant, but rather 
something which must be consciously 
upheld and protected. 

Because of America’s long demo-

cratic history, it is easy to visualize 
democracy as a binary, with a simple 
divide between democratic countries 
like the United States (those with elec-
tions) and undemocratic ones (those 
without elections). However, the truth 
is that democracy is a complicated 
and nuanced system that exists along 
a continuum, and often has no clear 
or explicit boundaries. As backsliding 
across the world has recently shown, 
the erosion of democratic institutions 
is often akin to the fable of the boiling 
frog, who is slowly killed as the water 
in the pot gets continually hotter. Just 
as there is no temperature at which 

Zack Blumberg is a Senior Opinion Editor 

and can be reached at zblumber@umich.edu.

