Steven Salaita spoke today at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to the YMCA, where the event was held, some 400 students, faculty, staff, and supporters turned up. Salaita opened with a statement. Here are some excerpts: My name is Steven Salaita. I am a professor with an accomplished scholarly record; I have been a fair and devoted teacher to hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students; I have been a valued and open-minded colleague to numerous faculty across disciplines and universities. My ideas and my identity are far more substantive and complex than the recent characterizations based on a selected handful of my Twitter posts. … Two weeks before my start date, and without any warning, I received a summary […]
Tomorrow is Steven Salaita’s day. Just so that he—and the rest of the world—will know how many of us in academe are standing with him, there are now 5098 scholars boycotting the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until the University reinstates Salaita. Here’s the breakdown: General, non-discipline-specific, boycott statement: 1819* Philosophy: 567 Political Science: 306 Sociology: 292 History: 93* Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies: 78 Communications: 105 Rhetoric/Composition: 63 English: 360 Contingent academic workers: 295 Anthropology: 177 Women’s/Gender/Feminist Studies: 54* Library and Information Science: 180 Natural sciences: 34 Graduate students: 675 *These are numbers I have had to pull from older reports; they could be higher.
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 […]
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 […]
In another bombshell, UI trustee James D. Montgomery tells Ali Abunimah, well, I’ll just quote from Ali’s piece: A trustee of the University of Illinois has added to public criticism over the decision to fire Palestinian American professor and Israel critic Steven Salaita. “I think it would have been far better had it been dealt with differently and had it been done with more consultation with faculty,” James D. Montgomery told The Electronic Intifada today. He also acknowledged the “adverse” impact that a growing boycott was having on the university’s ability to function. Montgomery, a prominent Chicago attorney, echoed the regrets expressed by Chancellor Phyllis Wise over her own role in the affair. Montgomery was careful, however, to say that […]
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 […]
Over the weekend, I got a really nice shout-out in the New York Times Book Review from the historian Rick Perlstein. In fact, you guys, my readers and commenters, also got a really nice shout out. And who today are the best writers on American politics? There are two, and they both are bloggers. One, Corey Robin of Brooklyn College, is also a political theorist; his book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” provides the most convincing account about what right-wing habits of mind are ultimately all about. His humane and erudite blog — and its spirited commenters — deepen that conversation. A favorite theme is the emptiness of right-wing notions of “freedom” that actually leave […]
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 […]
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 […]
Away all weekend and offline, but came home to this breaking news: the Executive Committee of the University of Illinois Trustees is meeting, right now (Monday, 2:30 pm), to discuss the following: In closed session, the Executive Committee will consider University employment or appointment-related matters, and pending, probable or imminent litigation against, affecting, or on behalf of the University. I have no idea if this meeting had been previously scheduled or not. And I have no idea if this is in reference to Steven Salaita’s case. You’ll recall that Wise or some other administrator had said that the Trustees weren’t scheduled to meet until September, when they would have been expected to vote on Salaita’s appointment. This would suggest this […]
One of the sillier claims defenders of the University of Illinois are making is that the University never hired Salaita because the Board of Trustees never approved of his hire. Yet, as one astute commenter points out here, when the University was first confronted with Salaita’s tweets in the local News-Gazette, on July 22, before Inside Higher Ed made the story national, the university had this to say in defense of Salaita (if you can’t read the quote from the News-Gazette, you can read it in the Inside Higher Ed piece): “Faculty have a wide range of scholarly and political views, and we recognize the freedom-of-speech rights of all of our employees,” Kaler said in response to the tweets. The rights of […]
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 the last 24 hours, sociologists and scholars of composition and rhetoric have organized two new statements of refusal regarding the Steven Salaita affair. 1. The sociology statement reads as follows: Dear Chancellor Wise: We are members of Sociology departments from around the world who write, regretfully, to inform you that we will not engage with the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign as speakers, or as participants in conferences or other events at Illinois, until you rescind the decision to block Professor Steven Salaita’s appointment to the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Many prominent academics have written eloquently about the chilling effect your decision will have on the free expression of […]