I had this to say about the settlement over at the comments section of Crooked Timber. I’m simply reprinting it here.
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Let’s review some facts.
As of August 3 of 2014, the UIUC had fired Steven Salaita and thought that was the end of the story. Phyllis Wise was the chancellor, Chris Kelly was the president of the UI system.
Steven Salaita and the rest of us who were active in this campaign — some 5000 academics across the globe, not to mention countless number of students and other supporters — put that university administration through a year of living hell. I’m never quite sure around here how many of the commenters are actually academics or not, but if you are (and even if you’re not), just imagine being the subject of daily obloquy throughout the international community of which your institution is a part. Just imagine your institution becoming a rogue state throughout the world. Just imagine your institution being thought of as a serial violator of every value that the international community of which it is a part holds dear.
We at Brooklyn College have some sense of this because for a few weeks a few years ago we were almost in exactly the same situation. I can tell you from firsthand experience: the entire institution was brought to a halt. That’s pretty much what UIUC has endured, not for a few weeks but for an entire year and then some.
How do I know this? Because virtually every professor who’s there — whether they were pro-Salaita or anti-, whether they were pro-boycott or anti- — has told me so. As have multiple reports both internal and external to that institution.
Oh, and there’s this: those two major leaders of the institution, Phyllis Wise and Chris Kelly. Where are they today? They’re gone. Wise was ushered out in a case of striking public humiliation and ignominy (remember that hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonus money she lost?), Kelly just ushered out. And not it’s not b/c anyone thought they handled anything of this particularly well.
Now, as I said in the OP, Steven didn’t get his job back, and that really does suck. Obviously that would have been the ultimate victory. But the way everyone here is acting as if the next university administrator will simply tally up the costs and make the same calculation that Wise or Kelly did, I just think that’s insane. For a few reasons.
First, there’s the year of business being ground to a halt. Even the UI’s own administrators will tell you that the public campaign took a tremendous toll on them and their administrations. If you think another university is just going to do that all over again, well, I guess we have different understandings of university administrators. I think of them as very timid and risk averse. Increasingly the bite of the pro-Israel forces is becoming less and less potent. We see this everywhere (most recently with Obama and the Iran deal). The bite of the pro-academic freedom (and yes, anti-Israel) forces is becoming stronger and stronger. I think you’re vastly underestimating how nervous university administrators are, and that a simple balance of forces calculation could lead them to bend the right way.
Second, the money. The university wound up spending over 2 million dollars on this. Here’s where our conflation of the American academy with roughly 50 or so elite universities (Ivy League and very good state universities like Michigan or Wisconsin or UIUC) gets us into trouble. You guys act as if two million dollars is chump change. I’m at a university where we’re squeezing every last dollar out of the adjunct budget in order to make up a 5.5 million dollar budget shortfall, just this year alone. The notion that a university administrator would just walk into this thinking, okay, we’ll lose two million, but what the hell, let’s do this — again, it’s ludicrous. Maybe at more elite universities, but not at the bulk of the institutions where most of us do our work.
Third, there’s us. Again, not sure how many of you are academics, but we’re acting as if we’re not actors here, people with agency. We’re the ones who pounded the shit out of UIUC this whole year. We’re the ones who made Wise and Kelly take the toll that they did. I don’t get the sense of powerlessness and passivity that I find here — and not just here but throughout the internet. I mean I get it: we all often feel this way. But we had a major impact. Again, think back to where things stood on August 3, 2014.
Did we get what we ultimately wanted? Obviously not. And I’d be a fool if I said we did. But we exacted a tremendous cost on the university. In the future we can exact even a higher cost. Or at least we should do our damn best to try.
But what we should really stop doing is acting as if we’re not a part of this story, as if they write the entire script. They don’t.
There’s a wonderful writer who often says just these things. So I’m not being original and can’t take the credit. His name is George Scialabba. You should check his stuff out.