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 […]
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 […]
1. As of 5 pm, 1518 academics have declared that they will not engage with the University of Illinois until it reinstates Steven Salaita. I have the specific details below. But first I wanted to highlight a report that came out yesterday. 2. The indefatigable Phan Nguyen has posted a monumental analysis of Salaita’s tweets and Cary Nelson’s treatment of those tweets. If I didn’t hate the phrase “game-changer” so much, I’d say this is a game-changer. Nguyen shows that Salaita actually has a long history of not only denouncing anti-Semitism in general but also confronting specific instances of it on Twitter. Such as when the rapper Macklemore wore a disguise that was anti-Semitic. Among other statements, Salaita tweeted these […]
In his latest interview on the Salaita Affair with Huffington Post, Cary Nelson returns repeatedly to the claim that Salaita is “obsessive” and “obsessive-compulsive” on the topic of Israel and Palestine. Given, as Nelson acknowledges in the interview (indeed, insists on it), that Israel/Palestine is one of Salaita’s areas of academic research, it’s a strange charge to level at a scholar. Imagine any of the following statements: That Einstein fellow: He’s obsessive on this relativity question. Firehire him! That Arendt gal: She’s obsessive-compulsive about the problem of evil. Keeps coming back to it. Dehire her! That Nelson fellow: He’s obsessive about the Salaita fellow. He even says he’s been following Salaita’s tweets for months. Firehire him! Anyone worth her salt […]
1. Yesterday, University of Nevada professor Gautam Premnath called the University of Illinois to protest the hirefire of Steven Salaita. A giggly employee in the Chancellor’s office told Premnath that Salaita was “dehired.” 2.Within 24 hours, nearly 8000 people have signed a petition calling on the University of Illinois to reinstate Salata. You should too. While you’re at it, please make sure to email the chancellor, Phyllis Wise, at at pmwise@illinois.edu. Please cc Robert Warrior of the American Indian Studies department (rwarrior@illinois.edu) and the department itself: ais@illinois.edu. 3. This morning, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a fuller report on the Salaita affair. Among the new facts revealed: First, it was a tenured position that Salaita was offered. Second, the […]
Until two weeks ago, Steven Salaita was heading to a job at the University of Illinois as a professor of American Indian Studies. He had already resigned from his position at Virginia Tech; everything seemed sewn up. Now the chancellor of the University of Illinois has overturned Salaita’s appointment and rescinded the offer. Because of Israel. The sources familiar with the university’s decision say that concern grew over the tone of his comments on Twitter about Israel’s policies in Gaza…. For instance, there is this tweet: “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised? #Gaza.” Or this one: “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are […]
In the annals of moral casuistry, you’d be hard pressed to find a better example of the perils of moral reasoning than this defense, brought to you by The New Republic, of the slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza: We can say that there is a principle worth fighting and dying for: Civilians cannot be used to make just wars impossible and morality will not be used as a tool to disarm. And once we have that principle, the proportionality calculation changes. The deaths of innocents are not simply outweighed by Israelis’ right to live without daily rockets and terrorists tunneling into a kibbutz playground; but by the defense of a world in which terrorists cannot use morality to achieve […]
1. One benefit of the carnage in Gaza is that it has given people who’ve never said a word about the carnage in Syria an impetus to say a word about the carnage in Syria. 2. On Friday night, there was a fundraiser for “Friends of the IDF” at a synagogue on the Upper West Side. On Shabbat. Which means cessation, stopping. 3. “It’s all but inevitable…that civilians will die.” A law professor defends Israel’s actions in Gaza. 4. Next time someone tells you that an academic boycott is a bad idea because Israeli universities are bastions of dissent against the Israeli state: Tel Aviv University is giving students who serve in the attack on Gaza one year of free […]
So the pro-Israel forces are in a tizzy again about a violation of campus propriety. It seems that the Students for Justice in Palestine group at NYU distributed fliers across two dormitories informing the students that they had to evacuate their dorms because the buildings were going to be demolished within three days. The obvious point being to model what it feels like to be a Palestinian, who is routinely subjected to such notices. Which is exactly what the flier said. And just in case there was any confusion, the good folks at SJP took pains to write across the bottom of the flier: THIS IS NOT A REAL EVICTION NOTICE. This is intended to draw attention to the reality […]
From the Haggadah: And they did us evil, those Egyptians. They made us seem malevolent, as it is written: Behold, the nation of the children of Israel has become too many and too massive for us. Let us find a solution for this before they further multiply. Two points. First, the evil that the Egyptians did to the Jews was to construe them as malevolent, as wicked. Second, their wickedness consisted in becoming a massive nation within a nation. The Egyptians understood the wickedness of the Jews, in other words, by virtue of the demographic challenge they posed to the Egyptian nation. I’m not big on readings of the Haggadah that seek to extract contemporary political instruction from the text. […]
When I was a kid, there was probably no actor more reviled among Jews than Vanessa Redgrave. This was the late 1970s, and Redgrave was an outspoken defender of the Palestinians and a critic of Israel. It all came to a head in 1978 at the Academy Awards (this is why I’m thinking about her tonight). Redgrave was up for an award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Julia, a film my family refused to see (boycotts run deep with me, I guess). The Jewish Defense League was out in force that night. Apparently there had been a major campaign to deny Redgrave the Oscar on the grounds that she supported a Palestinian state. She got it anyway. […]
When people say that the ASA boycott violates academic freedom they seem to assume that academic freedom in Israel/Palestine exists. But for the boycott, goes the argument, there would be academic freedom. But as this fact sheet by the Institute for Middle East Understanding suggests, that is not the case for Palestinians. One of our most minimal definitions of any kind of freedom, academic or otherwise, is the absence of external impediments to the physical movement of our bodies. What Palestinian students and scholars routinely face is the presence of external impediments to the physical movement of their bodies. Here are some highlights: Due to Israeli restrictions imposed in cooperation with the government of Egypt, it is extremely difficult for […]
The New York Times is out today with a strong condemnation of the NYS anti-boycott bill: The New York bill is an ill-considered response to the American Studies Association resolution and would trample on academic freedoms and chill free speech and dissent. Academics are rightly concerned that it will impose a political test on faculty members seeking university support for research meetings and travel. According to the American Association of University Professors, which opposes the association boycott and the retaliatory legislation, there is already a backlash, including in Georgia where a Jewish group compiled a “political blacklist” of professors and graduate students who supported the boycott. Even more amazing, the Times manages to describe correctly a point of about the […]
About 75 Nearly 100 members of the Columbia University faculty have issued a forceful response to the New York State Legislature bill that would make it illegal for universities and colleges to use public money to fund faculty involvement in organizations like the ASA. Signatories include such noted scholars as Lila Abu-Lughod, Eric Foner, Akeel Bilgrami, Jean Cohen, Victoria de Grazia, Alice Kessler-Harris, Mae Ngai, Todd Gitlin, Judith Butler, and Patricia Williams. Signatories also include prominent opponents of the ASA boycott, who nevertheless understand the threat this bill poses. Here are some excerpts from their letter: These bills aim to punish political speech and association of academics generally, and specifically target the viewpoint expressed by that speech and association. Both […]
Last year, Eric Alterman criticized my department for co-sponsoring a panel on BDS “at which its [BDS’s] arguments would be presented without opposition or clarification from its opponents.” This year, Students for Justice in Palestine at Brooklyn College decided to give Alterman an opportunity to make good on his complaint. They invited him to debate Max Blumenthal on the question: “What would a just settlement of the Israel/Palestine issue be, and how can it be brought about?” Alterman’s response to their invitation? “No thanks.” That was it. To students at his very own college, some of whom might even be in his classes. Perhaps if the students agreed to pony up $10,000 to pay Alterman, he’d consider. It’s hard to […]
The Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh has an okay piece in The New Yorker on the death of Ariel Sharon. Shehadeh can be a wonderful writer, but this reflection of his seems flat and perfunctory. Seeing his byline, however, reminded me of one of the most affecting passages in his memoir Strangers in the House about his relationship with his father and growing up in the West Bank. Shehadeh’s family had been expelled in 1948 from Jaffa, a port city with a thriving Arab population just south of Tel Aviv. Throughout his youth, Shehadeh and his father would walk in the evenings to a hilltop near Ramallah and look out on the twinkling lights of Jaffa, far […]
Benjamin Netanyahu (2014): There’s a problem that the Palestinians are there, and I have no intention of removing them. It’s impractical and inappropriate. I don’t want a binational state, and I don’t want them as either citizens or subjects. On the other hand, I don’t want another Iranian state or Al-Qaida state. Currently, we have no solution. Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1923): The expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine is absolutely impossible in any form. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority…. … Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out […]
The speed and scale of the backlash against the ASA boycott have been formidable. But the backlash has a curious feature: it is a very elite backlash, as this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education makes clear. It is spearheaded almost entirely by university presidents (not exactly my go-to sources of moral instruction on academic freedom), government officials, and institutional actors like the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities. If you want to understand the sources of that elite backlash, particularly among university presidents, Bard College President Leon Botstein—by no means a progressive on this issue—breaks it down in that Chronicle piece. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and a boycott opponent, said calls from alumni […]
Does the American Studies Association (ASA) boycott of Israeli academic institutions violate academic freedom? According to the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Indiana University (see my comment on that university at the end of this post), and numerous other universities across the United States, the answer is yes. The question is: Why? I asked my Facebook friends that question. A bunch of people—some in favor of the ASA boycott, others opposed, others undecided—answered. I thought the discussion was worth reprinting here. Fair warning: it is a fairly narrow discussion. We were not considering the pros and cons of the boycott or where justice lies in the current Israel-Palestine conflict. We were simply trying to figure out whether and how the boycott […]
Last month, Brandeis University announced that it was severing its decade-long relationship with the Palestinian university Al Quds. Since 2003, the two universities have engaged in sustained academic exchanges, involving joint research projects, conferences, study abroad programs, and more. Brandeis severed the relationship in response both to an Islamic Jihad rally on the Al Quds campus that featured Nazi-style salutes, military-style outfits, and fake weapons, and to the failure, in Brandeis’s eyes, of the Al Quds administration to respond appropriately to that demonstration. Three Brandeis professors who have been involved in the Al Quds exchange wrote a lengthy report protesting this decision by Brandeis. In terms of actual academic exchange, this decision by Brandeis has a substantive impact. It ends […]