Jean O’Brien, professor of history and chair of the American Indian Studies department at the University of Minnesota, sent an email to Chris Kennedy, chair of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees and son of Bobby Kennedy, about the Salaita affair. I reproduce the exchange here, unedited. ———- Forwarded message ———- From: Chris Kennedy <chris@northbankandwells.com> Date: Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 3:27 PM Subject: Re: Steven Salaita To: Jean O’Brien <obrie002@umn.edu> You were not brief enough Christopher G. Kennedy E – chris@nbandw.com / chris@northbankandwells.com O – (312) 527-7503 C – [REDACTED] ———— On Sep 7, 2014, at 2:37 PM, “Jean O’Brien” <obrie002@umn.edu> wrote: Dear Trustee Kennedy: I will be brief: please reverse your cowardly decision to “un-hire” Steven Salaita […]

Civility is the academic flavor of the month. As we head back to school, university leaders are calling for it, and, as Ali Abunimah shows, Salaita’s critics—and defenders of Israel more generally—are especially hot on it. I have complicated feelings about civility. On the hand, it’s perfectly clear to me, as these various links, particularly Ali’s, demonstrate, that the call for civility is little more than an effort to muzzle critics, to turn vibrant campuses into intellectual morgues. On the other hand, my mother brought me up to be polite, to be considerate of other people’s feelings, to listen, to wait my turn when I speak, not to be over-bearing, not to crowd someone with my speech but to give […]

I’m noticing that some people, all hardcore defenders of Israel, including some academics, are now taking pot shots at Salaita’s work. Some flack on Twitter even called Salaita “the ersatz professor.” I won’t link to any of it; it’s just shabby and shoddy and needs no further audience. I wonder about the academics, in particular, who are dabbling in this business of drive-by assassination. On the one hand, I firmly believe we should be able to get into substantive discussions of people’s work, and should be able to evaluate what is good work and what is not, even across disciplines and fields. No one’s work is or should be immune from that kind of critique. On the other hand, I […]

The News-Gazette has a long profile of Steven Salaita. Though many of us have argued this case on the grounds of academic freedom and free speech, it’s also important to point out just how cartoonish is the portrait Salaita’s critics have drawn of him, that the substance of the man is nothing like the surface strokes his critics have painted. The victims of witch hunts like this one don’t need to be perfect and they don’t need to be angels in order for us to come to their defense. But when it comes to his students, Salaita does seem to go the extra mile, and it’s worth mentioning that. The article contains many other details I didn’t know about: not […]

In addition to possibly violating Articles 1 and 9 of the University of Illinois Statutes (see update), Chancellor Wise may have violated Article 3 as well. The Chancellor informed Prof. Steven Salaita on August 1, 2014, that she would not forward his case to the Board of Trustees. The University Statutes (Article III, Section 3) spell out how to handle such cases:  “In case a recommendation from a college is not approved by the chancellor/vice president, the dean may present the recommendation to the president, and, if not approved by the president, the dean with the consent of the Board of Trustees may present the recommendation in person before the Board of Trustees in session.” A Dean cannot exercise this statutory option if the […]

Two hundred More than 300 Three hundred and thirty-five political scientists have now joined the boycott of UIUC, including scholars from Princeton, Chicago, Oxford, Hopkins, and more. That’s good, not great (philosophy is nearing 600 signatures!) Since poli sci is my discipline, I’d like to see that improve. If you haven’t signed, please do so. If you have, get a friend or colleague (in poli sci) to do so. If you want to sign, you can do so here. (For the statement you’ll be signing and the list of signatories, see below.) With every new set of 25 signatures or so, I’ll update the list. I’ll be moderating the comments heavily here; anything tangential to the mechanics of the boycott […]

From Illinois Public Media: The chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana campus Thursday expressed regret about the way she came to a decision to withdraw a job offer to a professor who posted inflammatory comments on Twitter – a decision she said was “pretty unilateral.” Chancellor Phyllis Wise said members of the Board of Trustees told her in July that they likely would not approve the appointment of Professor Steven Salaita. A week later, Wise sent a letter to Salaita rescinding the job offer. “The judgment I made in writing him was to convey the sentiment of the Board of Trustees, it was not mine.” She said. “And I did it because I thought I was doing something humane […]

Chancellor Wise has been speaking to students at UIUC. Here’s the lede in the campus paper’s report on her comments: Looking back, Chancellor Phyllis Wise said she would have handled Steven Salaita’s case differently by being more deliberate and consulting with more people before sending him a letter on Aug. 1. Ali Abunimah has the complete transcript of Wise’s comments. Here’s what she said: I, in hindsight, wish I had been a little bit more deliberate and had consulted with more people before I made that decision Well, at least she confirms what I wrote in my Salaita Papers post: “What’s most stunning about these documents is that they show how removed and isolated Chancellor Wise is from any of […]

Tonight, the major news out of the University of Illinois is that two more departments have taken votes of no confidence in the leadership of the UIUC: the department of history (nearly unanimous, I’m told) and the department of Latino and Latina Studies. The latter’s announcement reads: The faculty of the Department of Latina/Latino Studies (LLS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign met on Wednesday, September 3, 2014 to discuss the University’s revocation of an offer of employment to Dr. Steven Salaita. We concluded that this revocation and the subsequent public statements by Chancellor Phyllis Wise, President Robert Easter, and the Board of Trustees about Dr. Salaita’s appointment demonstrate a clear disregard for the principles of academic freedom, free […]

This is part 2 of a two-part post. In the last post, I read through the Salaita Papers, which were released under Illinois’s Freedom of Information Act; in this one, I canvas the other events of the day. First, last night’s report that Chancellor Wise would be forwarding Salaita’s appointment to the Trustees was wrong. Several members of the UIUC faculty met with her today. According to Michael Rothberg, chair of the English department: Together with two colleagues I just met with Chancellor Wise, at her invitation. The main message from our discussion was that there is no change in the status of the case. It seems that the students were not accurate in their impression. She doesn’t know if […]

There are many developments today in the Salaita affair, so I’m going to do this as a two-part post. Part 2 is here. This morning, the News-Gazette released 280 pages of documents obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act revealing extensive donor pressure on Chancellor Wise. As news spread in late July about a new University of Illinois faculty hire and media outlets began publishing some of his profanity-laden tweets, a number of wealthy donors threatened to stop giving money to the university, recently released documents show. The letters about professor Steven Salaita started arriving in Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s inbox July 21, and the writers did not hold back. “Having been a multiple 6 figure donor to Illinois over […]

We are getting reports out of the University of Illinois that Chancellor Wise is going to forward the Salaita appointment to the Board of Trustees for a vote on September 11. A group of Gender and Women’s Studies students reports the following: From GWS Undergraduate Stephanie Skora’s report back on meeting with Chancellor Wise on Monday, September 1, 2014: The meeting with Chancellor Wise was a success, and we have gained some valuable information and commitments from the Chancellor! We have discovered that the Chancellor HAS FORWARDED Professor Salaita’s appointment to the Board of Trustees, and they will be voting on his appointment during the Board of Trustees Meeting on September 11th, on the UIUC campus! Our immediate future organizational […]

The New York Times has weighed in with a strong piece on the Salaita affair. This is significant for two reasons. First, while we in academia and on social media or the blogosphere have been debating and pushing this story for weeks, it hasn’t really broken into the mainstream. With a few exceptions, no major newspaper has covered it. Now that the Times has, I’m hoping Salaita’s story will get even more attention, possibly from the networks as well. Second, in addition to covering the basics of the case, the piece shows just how divisive and controversial Chancellor Wise’s decision has been, and how it has isolated the University of Illinois. The decision, which raised questions about contractual loopholes and academic […]

One of the more difficult challenges in the midst of the Salaita affair is to hold onto the possibility that a university could handle the Israel-Palestine debate in ways that are worthy of a university. Virtually all sides of this debate seem to agree that, of course, Chancellor Wise was going to capitulate to the combination of outraged donors and potent constituencies. I myself have gotten so used to the cycle of call and response—administrators succumbing to donor and political pressure; massive counter-mobilization mounted by students, faculty, staff, and citizens; administrators reversing (if we’re lucky) their decision—that I sometimes forget that administrators need not toggle endlessly between powerful donors and mobilized publics. Political theorist Bonnie Honig, whose letter to Chancellor […]

Inside Higher Ed has gotten some of the preliminary documents on the back and forth between Chancellor Wise, officials at the University of Illinois (including a top person in charge of fundraising), and a high-level donor, before Wise made her initial decision to dehire Steven Salaita. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the external and internal pressure that went into this decision (though from my own experience with this issue I can only assume that that fear of external financial pressure was very very high), and as the article notes, none of these emails tells us what ultimately prompted Wise to make the decision she did. Still, it’s telling that in the days leading up to her decision, […]

In the midst of a conflict like the Salaita affair, it’s easy for individual voices to get lost. The persons involved, and their fates, get forgotten. Particulars are submerged into principles, the din in the head crowds out the distinctive sights and sounds of the case. That’s why, when I read this letter from political theorist Bonnie Honig to Chancellor Wise and the UIUC community, I knew I was hearing and seeing something different. No one that I know of has written a letter like this, which insists on remembering the specificity of not only Steven Salaita but also Phyllis Wise. Professor Honig has kindly allowed me to reprint it here. • • • • •  August 24, 2014 Dear Chancellor Wise, […]

On Friday, during that meeting of the Trustees and Chancellor Not-So-Wise, a group of UI students did a sit-in outside the meeting. After the meeting, the trustees and chancellor crept out through a different exit in order to avoid talking with the students. So in Chancellor Not-So-Wise’s abacus of civility, hotly worded tweets are a sign of a fundamental incapacity for dialogue, but sneaking out the back door in order to avoid a conversation with students reflects a healthy sense of civic engagement.  

I had always thought that it was a sacred canon of our profession that the classroom requires certain and very specific rules of engagement from us as teachers. I would never, for example, respond to libertarians in my classroom the way I respond to some libertarians on Twitter. That some people are so quick to believe that how someone acts on Twitter—or Facebook or the comments section of a blog—inevitably bleeds into how she acts in the classroom suggests that the problem lies less with Salaita and his defenders than with his critics, who seem to have a rather more precarious and shrunken sense of what it is that we do when we teach. Assuming of course that these critics […]

In a 2007 debate with David Horowitz (h/t Alan Koenig): What most upset me about the 101 Professors volume and still does — I don’t know everyone covered in that book, but a number of the people I’ve known for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, a long period of time and I am familiar with a whole range of work that they’ve produced as scholars. When I attempt to evaluate their careers, when I attempt to evaluate their contributions to higher education, I’m concerned with the whole range of things that they’ve done. What’s their life work?  Where does the main weight of their intellectual professional and moral commitments lie?  What’s the full range of things that they’ve done? That’s […]

Yesterday, Phyllis Wise, Chancellor of the UIUC, and the UI Board of Trustees reaffirmed the chancellor’s decision to dehire Steven Salaita. The basis of this decision, at least rhetorically, is this statement from Wise: What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them. We have a particular duty to our students to ensure that they live in a community of scholarship that challenges their assumptions about the world but that also respects their rights as individuals. It’s a strange and strained position, as many have noted. Particularly that tender and solicitous concern for protecting the feelings of “viewpoints […]