How to Honor the Settlement Between UIUC and Steven Salaita
There’s a lot of Friday morning quarterbacking going on about whether Steven Salaita should have accepted his settlement or not. I can’t tell you how distasteful I find this conversation: people who never bore the sacrifices Steven has borne—and who, as far as I can tell, would never bear those sacrifices—are now lecturing him to play the part of the sacrificial lamb, to essentially do the work that they have not done so that they can continue not doing the work that they have not done. Such calls strain the bounds of political decency.
I was going to issue a pissy edict, something along the lines of: Before you criticize Steven Salaita for not being the martyr you want him to be, get yourself on a search committee—if you’re an academic, particularly an academic in a literature department—and hire him. You’ll kill two birds with one stone: maybe you’ll get him a job, and if you do, you’ll get to experience a small portion of the hurricane that he and has family (and the American Indian Studies Department at UIUC) have suffered through this past year.
But that’s just me being emotional.
Luckily, Lida Maxwell, a political theorist at Trinity who always seems to have the right words for the right occasion, had this to say on my Facebook wall:
When Dreyfus was granted a pardon by the French President in 1899, he had to admit guilt in order to be set free. Many Dreyfusards criticized him, but Emile Zola wrote in an open letter to Alfred’s wife, Lucie, “No matter how much I as a citizen may be in mourning, no matter how much painful indignation, how much rebellion and anxiety just souls may continue to feel, I share with you this exquisite, tearful moment when you hold the resurrected man in your arms. He has been raised from the dead! He has emerged from the tomb, live and free. Surely this is a great day, a day of victory and celebration.” In other words, we should be upset as citizens about a wrong that has not been fully righted, but we should also recognize that one individual (or one family) alone should not bear the burden of the fact that the wrong has not been righted.
Perfect.