Communications of the ACM
Turing Reaction
Credit: iStockPhoto.com
The cover photo of the June 2021 edition of Communications of the ACM depicts Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho, winners of ACM's 2020 Turing Award, and editorial content in the issue celebrates this selection. As ACM and Communications are well aware, for many Iranian members of the computing community, Ullman is the face of discrimination in academia. For more than 15 years, Ullman maintained a Web page that denigrates Iranian students using demeaning and derogatory language and told them they are not welcome in the computing community because of political reasons. The text is so clear and direct that it is hard not to see it as violating ACM's Policy Against Harassment, but of course it was "just" published on Ullman's page for more than a decade rather than being delivered at an ACM event, so in ACM's eyes it does not count.
For context: shortly after the award announcement, a public letter1 signed by more than 1,200 individuals from academia and industry including over 450 ACM members condemned the decision and shared details of Ullman's discriminatory correspondence over the years. On April 19, ACM officially confirmed receiving the letter and published a response,2 in which they did not even recognize the victims and that any harm was done. In parallel to publishing celebratory content about the winners, ACM's Executive Committee (EC), upon the request of Communications Editor-in-Chief to intervene, decided to reject an Op-Ed submitted by myself and five colleagues in which we criticized ACM leadership's, in our opinion, weak and inadequate response to the "CS for inclusion" letter and proposed concrete steps to be taken to help the cause.
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