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.