Corey Robin's Blog, page 78

A Palestine Picture Book

My wife just dug out a few of her grandparents’ books from storage. They were refugees from Nazi Germany who came to the US in the mid-1930s. One of the books is an original edition of A Palestine Picture Book, published by Schocken in 1947, featuring photographs by Jakob Rosner for the Jewish National Fund. The photographs are stunning, but it’s the text that caught my attention.

From the Preface:

It is barely forty years since the large-scale Jewish colonization of Palestine was begun. Despite natural and political handicaps, Jewish colonization, once begun, continued.”

From chapter 1:

Long a barren waste, it has been transformed by Jewish settlers into a place of fertile fields and green gardens in a generation’s time….

Orange plantations now cover thousands of acres of the once water-starved coastal plain in dramatic contrast with the parched tracts of soil where colonization has not yet begun….

Buried beneath these dunes is the ancient city of Caesarea, the port of Herod the Great, a prey to the shifting sands that the modern settler must continually combat in order to preserve his trees and fields.

From chapter 2:

On its [the Galilee] western shore is the city of Tiberias, which Joseph ha-Nasi, Duke of Naxos, rebuilt in the sixteenth century above the ruins of the ancient city with the intention of inviting colonists all over the world to settle there….

From Lake Chinnereth the Jordan flows through a wide valley studded with new and thriving Jewish settlements…

The Jordan sweeps past Kfar Ruppin, southernmost settlements in the Jordan Valley….

From chapter 3:

Tel Aviv. In twenty-five years its all-Jewish population has reached a figure of more than 200,000.

From chapter 4:

…they have devoted their life and labor to the one aim of developing their settlements into strong and efficient units. Many of the new agricultural colonies are either…

…and landscaped prospects of the permanent settlement….All collective settlements…The fully developed settlements…the collective settlements…Some settlements…especially settlements…A number of settlements…brought upon a settlement…fathers and mothers of the young settlers, left Europe to join the settlements…When a settlement is founded…in every settlement…reproduces the work of the settlement…

From chapter 5:

Even in modern Jerusalem the colorful Jewish tradition lives on—in this colony of Bokharan Jews, for example, who came from the Russo-Persian border…

The book, a gorgeous propaganda of image and word, is rife with references to colonization, settlement, settlers, and ethnic homogeneity. In a completely unapologetic, almost naive way. Indeed, the preface claims that Rosner “has deliberately avoided the controversial issues that at times tend to overshadow, in the eyes of the outside world, the patient and inspired labor that goes forward daily in Jewish Palestine.” Colonization and settlement, in other words, are part of the uncontroversial vocabulary of Zionism ca. 1947.

Yet, call Israel a colonial project today, say that it is and has always been a settler society, and you’ll be branded an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.

Chancellor Wise Speaks

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 the academic voices in the university, even the academic voices on her own team. As she heads toward her August 2 decision to dehire Salaita, she is only speaking to and consulting with donors, alums, PR people, and development types.”

The campus newspaper report goes on:

“Because of the timing of this issue … I felt it was more humanitarian to let him know that he is unlikely to be appointed as soon as possible,’ Wise said.

Humanitarian? Methinks that word does not mean what she thinks it means. Or perhaps it does? #SamanthaPowerTime

And then there’s this:

Looking forward, Wise plans to create seminars to discuss academic freedom…

Ah, yes, the seminar on academic freedom. Here’s a thought, Chancellor Wise: rather than holding seminars on academic freedom, practice it.

Update (noon)

Chancellor Wise is now quoted in a local newspaper as saying “there have been some errors in the process. People are on campus and working before their appointments are approved by the board. We need to correct that.” So even she now concedes that there’s something funky about thinking you haven’t officially hired someone when they’re working and getting paid by the university. Let’s hope she keeps talking: every day she gives more ammunition to our side.

If you haven’t written to the Board of Trustees, please do so now. Here, again, are the email addresses (note: last three are not trustees). I recommend emailing them individually if you can.

Christopher G. Kennedy, Chair, University of Illinois Board of Trustees: chris@northbankandwells.com

Robert A. Easter, President: reaster@uillinois.edu

Hannah Cave, Trustee: hcave2@illinois.edu

Ricardo Estrada, Trustee: estradar@metrofamily.org

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Trustee: patrick.fitzgerald@skadden.com

Lucas N. Frye, Trustee: lnfrye2@illinois.edu

Karen Hasara, Trustee: hasgot28@aol.com

Patricia Brown Holmes, Trustee: pholmes@schiffhardin.com

Timothy N. Koritz, Trustee: timothy.koritz@gmail.com or tkoritz@gmail.com

Danielle M. Leibowitz, Trustee: dleibo2@uic.edu

Edward L. McMillan, Trustee: mcmillaned@sbcglobal.net or mcmillaned@msn.com

James D. Montgomery, Trustee: james@jdmlaw.com

Pamela B. Strobel, Trustee: pbstrobel@comcast.net

Thomas R. Bearrows, University Counsel: bearrows@uillinois.edu

Susan M. Kies, Secretary of the Board of Trustees and the University: kies@uillinois.edu

Lester H. McKeever, Jr., Treasurer, Board of Trustees: lmckeever@wpmck.com

 

More Votes of No Confidence, a Weird Ad, and a Declaration of a Non-Emergency

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 speech, and shared governance, as well as for established protocols for hiring, tenure, and promotion. The faculty of LLS therefore declares that we have no confidence in the leadership of the current Chancellor, President, and Board of Trustees.

That means that six departments have now voted no confidence, two of them fairly large departments, representing a significant number of faculty in the humanities. Word is that we should be expecting at least four more votes of no confidence by the end of the week, for a total of ten.

Just a word on these votes. While it might seem from the outside to be an inconsequential, costless move by faculty, a vote of no confidence, in my experience, is a vote most professors are loathe to take. If for no other reason than that they fear retaliation from the administration: fewer lines, smaller budgets, no seat at the table. If faculty are willing to take such a vote, it means one of two things: either the administration has done something truly egregious or the faculty senses that the administration has lost control of the situation and is thus no longer in a position to exercise its usual political clout. At the UIUC, both seem to be true.

The American Comparative Literature Association has weighed in with a strong letter criticizing the UIUC decision. Its conclusion?

Given that Chancellor Wise has not only ignored numerous calls for her to reverse her decision but has also defended her action, with the strong backing of UIUC Board of Trustees Chairman Christopher Kennedy and University President Robert Easter (http://www.uillinois.edu/cms/one.aspx?portalId=1117531&pageId=1603474), we express our solidarity with UIUC departments and programs that have cast no-confidence votes in the university administration (http://www.dailyillini.com/news/article_cf55ebce-2f97-11e4-b672-0017a43b2370.html).

On a personal note, I was pleased to see that the letter was signed by the association’s president Ali Behdad. When I was a grad student writing my dissertation on the political theory of fear, I found an article of his on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (“The Eroticized Orient: Images of the Harem in Montesquieu and his Precursors”) especially useful.

That brings the number of professional associations condemning the UIUC to six.actually, seven.

Law professor Jonathan Adler, who’s a fairly conservative sort of guy, blogs at The Washington Post today:

While I think a case could be made that some of Professor Salaita’s tweets could suggest he lacks the proper temperament to be an educator (and that any such case could be refuted by, for instance, reviewing his teaching evaluations, speaking with peers, etc.), this is something the university should have examined up front — before preparing to place his appointment before the Board of Trustees. As it happens, it appears the university had no problem with anything Salaita said or did until it became controversial, suggesting it was the content of Salaita’s opinions, and not legitimate concerns about his qualifications or abilities, that prompted the university’s actions.

Newly released university documents, as summarized on Crooked Timber, suggest the university’s about face was due to pressure from wealthy donors and alumni.  If so, this demonstrates the university’s lack of commitment to principles of academic freedom.  Again, while there may have been legitimate arguments for refusing to hire Professor Salaita, kowtowing to wealthy alumni and donors who find his ideas offensive is not among them.  These revelations would also seem to undermine whatever legal defense the university has planned and will only fuel the growing academic boycotts of the university.

For a look at what the other side is doing we turn to a group of, well, I’m not sure who (more on this in a second), who took out an ad today in the local newspaper in support of Chancellor Wise. They implicitly (well, not so implicitly) accuse Salaita of “speech which incites others to violence or to harm.” They write strange statements like “She wears many hats, and must ensure that each one fits as comfortably, fairly, and well as possible.” (How does a hit fit fairly?) And they express “grave concern” about “the escalating, often incendiary and sometimes extreme rhetoric regarding Chancellor Wise’s decision.”

New Rules: no incendiary or extreme rhetoric. Like this:

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

(The author of those words, by the way, founded a university. And one of the signatories to those words was the president of a university. Autres temps.)

So who are the signatories to this advertisement? The good people of Twitter have been crowd-sourcing it. It turns out that a fair numer of the signatories are administrative staff at UIUC, or donors and boosters. And some of the signatories are affiliated with the First Busey Corporation/Busey Bank, on whose board sits…Phyllis Wise. Of the many hats. Of the 139 signatories (remember, our side has over 17,000 on a petition), only ten are academics.

But it tells you something about the state of play. Clearly their side is rattled; in the battle for public opinion, they are losing. And so feel like it’s essential to mobilize the troops, such as they are.

Lastly, all throughout the day I received a flurry of emails from men and women writing to the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. One of the strongest emails was posted on Facebook by University of Chicago professor Patchen Markell. He has kindly given me permission to reprint parts of it here:

My purpose in writing is less to urge you to approve the appointment than to offer you something that I sincerely hope will be of use to you: an account of how this situation, and your situation as decision-makers at a critical moment in the life of your institution, looks from the perspective of a deeply concerned observer who has spent a little time studying the history and politics of academic governance at other institutions and in other difficult moments.

This situation must feel like an emergency. How could it not? Chancellor Wise’s initial decision provoked criticism—and not just criticism but forceful action, in the form of petitions, appeals, statements of refusal, cancellations of appearances—on a scale and of an intensity that she surely did not anticipate. The Executive Committee’s affirmation of her decision did not quell the criticism, which only intensified when the Chancellor’s contacts with donors opposed to Salaita’s appointment were disclosed. Now you are approaching a meeting at which, one way or another, Steven Salaita’s case may appear on your agenda. And while I gather that in ordinary circumstances the Board of Trustees’ approval of appointments is routine, and doesn’t involve a fresh consideration of the appointees’ merits—that’s how it works at most schools I’m familiar with—this must feel like an exceptional situation, one of those rare moments in which big principles are at stake, and in which you therefore have no choice but to subject a controversial appointment to careful scrutiny, and to exercise your final authority with the eyes of the world upon you.

To cut to the chase, I think this is an extraordinarily dangerous way of thinking about the present situation; I think you have at least one option more than this picture suggests; and I think that the best course of action, both for principled and for pragmatic reasons, is for you not only to approve Professor Salaita’s appointment if you have (or can create) any opportunity to do so, but to treat it as a routine case, giving it no more and no less scrutiny than you would give to any other faculty appointment sent to you by the administration for your final approval.

This is the right decision for reasons of principle, not least because it affirms that judgments about the qualifications of scholars and teachers under consideration for appointment to the faculty are best made by the faculty, drawing on their own expertise and experience, and informed by the assessments of their colleagues at other institutions. And it is the right decision for pragmatic reasons, because it is the only decision that stands a chance of ending the controversy….

I have said nothing about the substance of Steven Salaita’s controversial tweets, about his scholarship, his teaching record, or anything else. I urge you to do much the same thing: to approve his appointment routinely, without comment on its merits, and without getting embroiled in the details of his case. This may seem like an abdication of your power and your responsibility in an emergency situation. But you also have the power to declare that this is not the emergency it appears to be…

So that’s your task for the night: write the Board of Trustees. Though Patchen went long (for good reason, as you can see), I, like Brian Leiter, recommend short.

Here are the email of all the trustees; I recommend emailing them individually if you can.

Christopher G. Kennedy, Chair, University of Illinois Board of Trustees: chris@northbankandwells.com

Robert A. Easter, President: reaster@uillinois.edu

Hannah Cave, Trustee: hcave2@illinois.edu

Ricardo Estrada, Trustee: estradar@metrofamily.org

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Trustee: patrick.fitzgerald@skadden.com

Lucas N. Frye, Trustee: lnfrye2@illinois.edu

Karen Hasara, Trustee: hasgot28@aol.com

Patricia Brown Holmes, Trustee: pholmes@schiffhardin.com

Timothy N. Koritz, Trustee: timothy.koritz@gmail.com or tkoritz@gmail.com

Danielle M. Leibowitz, Trustee: dleibo2@uic.edu

Edward L. McMillan, Trustee: mcmillaned@sbcglobal.net or mcmillaned@msn.com

James D. Montgomery, Trustee: james@jdmlaw.com

Pamela B. Strobel, Trustee: pbstrobel@comcast.net

Thomas R. Bearrows, University Counsel: bearrows@uillinois.edu

Susan M. Kies, Secretary of the Board of Trustees and the University: kies@uillinois.edu

Lester H. McKeever, Jr., Treasurer, Board of Trustees: lmckeever@wpmck.com

Update (11:30 pm)

I meant to post this but forgot. The graduate student boycott is going like gang-busters. They’ve already got over 400 signatures, which brings our overall number way above 4000. So more than 4000 scholars are now boycotting UIUC. If you’re a grad student and want to join the boycott, go here.

There’s also a statement being organized by Jewish students, faculty, and staff at UIUC, which some of you may be eligible to sign.

We, Jewish students, faculty, staff, alumni, and parents of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are writing to object in the strongest possible terms to the firing of Professor Steven Salaita. As Jewish members of this campus community, we insist that you do not speak for us in your unjust actions. In no way do Professor Salaita’s words, tweets, or presence on campus make us feel unsafe, disrespected, or threatened, as your public letter indicated.

…

…By conflating pointed and justified critique of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism, your administration is effectively disregarding a large and growing number of Jewish perspectives that oppose Israeli military occupation, settler expansion, and the assault on Palestine….

…

It is unfortunate that Professor Salaita’s critique, anger, dissent, and very existence on this campus have made some, donors or otherwise, within the UIUC community uncomfortable. However, there is nothing comfortable (or civil, for that matter) about Israeli war or occupation. While you pontificated over whether or not some comments made on social media were anti-Semitic, the U.S. sponsored Israeli military systematically murdered thousands of Palestinians. Now our campus has been denied an invaluable scholarly voice to help lead this community in a conversation about why as well as how to stop this from ever happening again.

The firing of Professor Salaita is the Israeli attack on Palestine coming to our campus….

E-Mail the University of Illinois Board of Trustees (Updated)

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 the Board of Trustees will be voting on the case at their 9/11 meeting, but she indicated that she thought a reversal was very unlikely.

So status quo. I’ll come back to that 9/11 meeting at the end of this post.

Second, tonight, the English Department became the fourth department at UIUC to take a vote of no confidence in the leadership of the University of Illinois—the trustees, the president, and Chancellor Wise. From what I’m hearing, the departments of history, comparative and world literatures, and East Asian Languages and Cultures will be voting on similar motions sometime this week.

Third, the number of canceled events grows. We now have a second cancelled conference. Today, Columbia law professor Katharine Franke canceled series of lectures she was to give at the UIUC in late September. This was an especially nice touch:

I have long held the view that the use of boycotts as a tactic to protest an unjust practice by a state, business or academic institution may be appropriate in the right context, such as the current crisis at the UIUC, but that those who pledge to honor a boycott cannot rest their political commitments exclusively on a promise not to do something. Rather they should also pledge to affirmatively engage the injustice that generated the call for the boycott. For this reason, rather than merely boycotting your institution, I plan to travel to Urbana-Champaign in mid September at my own expense to participate in a forum (located off campus) with members of the UIUC community in which we will explore the manner in which the termination of Professor Salaita’s employment at UIUC threatened a robust principal of academic freedom.

I just found out that University of Nebraska philosophy professor Mark Van Roojen canceled a scheduled lecture as well. In fact, the list of canceled lectures and events seems to have exploded overnight. There’s now a poster listing all of the cancellations. John Protevi’s also keeping track over at his blog. If you’re cancelling something, please let him know.

Fourth, a group of graduate students has now organized its own boycott pledge. It’s one of the more powerful statements, as it dramatizes the real long-term costs of the Salaita dehiring.

As the rising generation of scholars and public intellectuals, we are troubled about what this signals about the work environments, hiring conditions, and the larger academe we are working to enter.

…

UI-UC’s actions have signaled to the graduate student community that in order to secure employment, we should stay silent on political questions, eliminate our online interactions with others in the public and in the scholarly community, and cease researching and asking tough questions that may displease those in authority. These conditions trouble us all, and will deter many graduate students from applying to faculty positions at UI-UC in the future.

We hold that the value of scholarly efforts must not be determined by how readily they appease the powerful or cater to the status quo; instead, such efforts must be weighed by their degree of due diligence and attention to the ethical pursuit of knowledge, as well as the imperative to voice righteous criticisms when necessary. To constrain our research and public engagement in such a way as to protect ourselves from the treatment Professor Salaita has received promises to strip the academy of all relevance to society as an institution that values intellectual debate.

If you’re a grad student, please sign it.

Fifth, the American Historical Association, the official professional body of historians, issued a scorching denunciation today of Chancellor Wise’s decision.

The First Amendment protects speech, both civil and uncivil. It does so for good reason. The United States made a wager that democracy can flourish only with a robustly open public sphere where conflicting opinions can vigorously engage one another. Such a public sphere rests on the recognition that speech on matters of public concern is often emotional and that it employs a variety of idioms and styles. Hence American law protects not only polite discourse but also vulgarity, not only sweet rationality but also impassioned denunciation. “Civility” is a laudable ideal, and many of us wish that American public life had more of it today. Indeed the AHA recommends it as part of our own Statement on the Standards of Professional Conduct. But imposing the requirement of “civility” on speech in a university community or any other sector of our public sphere—and punishing infractions—can only backfire. Such a policy produces a chilling effect, inhibiting the full exchange of ideas that both scholarly investigation and democratic institutions need.

If allowed to stand, your administration’s punitive treatment of Steven Salaita will chill the intellectual atmosphere at the University of Illinois. Even tenured professors will fear for their job security, persuaded that their institution lacks respect for the principles of academic freedom. The unhappy consequences for the untenured will be even more pronounced. A regimen of defensive self-censorship will settle like a cloud over faculty lectures and classroom discussions. Faculty will be inclined to seek positions elsewhere. This, surely, is not the future you wish for your historically great institution.

The AHA joined the Modern Languages Association, the professional organization of literature and language scholars, and the American Studies Association, in putting the weight of a major disciplinary organization behind Salaita’s case. I hope American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and other disciplinary organizations join in soon.

It has become clear from various UIUC faculty I’ve spoken with that the trustees are now the main focus of our campaign. Between now and 9/11, we have to bombard them with emails and phone calls urging them to do the right thing. Unfortunately, we don’t have all of their contact information, but Thanks to John Protevi’s heroic efforts (and a little angel who came to my aid after this post went live), we have most all of them. Here they are (plus a few others that are relevant).

If you’ve already joined a boycott, signed the petition, and emailed Chancellor Wise, I want to ask you—all of you, in the tens of thousands now—to rattle the trustees with your voices. As John says: “Be polite but firm, open, frank, forthright, unapologetic, and exigent when writing these folks.”

Christopher G. Kennedy, Chair, University of Illinois Board of Trustees: chris@northbankandwells.com

Robert A. Easter, President: reaster@uillinois.edu

Hannah Cave, Trustee: hcave2@illinois.edu

Ricardo Estrada, Trustee: estradar@metrofamily.org

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Trustee: patrick.fitzgerald@skadden.com

Lucas N. Frye, Trustee: lnfrye2@illinois.edu

Karen Hasara, Trustee: hasgot28@aol.com

Patricia Brown Holmes, Trustee: pholmes@schiffhardin.com

Timothy N. Koritz, Trustee: timothy.koritz@gmail.com or tkoritz@gmail.com

Danielle M. Leibowitz, Trustee: dleibo2@uic.edu

Edward L. McMillan, Trustee: mcmillaned@sbcglobal.net or mcmillaned@msn.com

James D. Montgomery, Trustee: james@jdmlaw.com

Pamela B. Strobel, Trustee: pbstrobel@comcast.net

Thomas R. Bearrows, University Counsel: bearrows@uillinois.edu

Susan M. Kies, Secretary of the Board of Trustees and the University: kies@uillinois.edu

Lester H. McKeever, Jr., Treasurer, Board of Trustees: lmckeever@wpmck.com

Reading the Salaita Papers

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 the years, I know our support is ending as we vehemently disagree with the approach this individual espouses,” wrote one UI business school graduate.

…

The letters from donors, some of them identifying themselves as members of the UI’s $25,000-plus “presidents council,” have also raised questions about the motivation behind the administration’s decision to not forward Salaita’s name to the board of trustees for formal approval last month.

The chancellor, however, through a spokeswoman, maintains her decision was not influenced by them, but was based out of concern for the students, campus and community.

Then tonight Phan Nguyen sent me 443 pages of documents he had posted online. These are all the documents released by the UIUC in response to four different FOIA requests from various news organizations. I’ve now spent the entire evening reading through these documents and here are some of the highlights.

When the Salaita story first broke in the local press, Associate Chancellor for Public Affairs Robin Kaler said, “Faculty have a wide range of scholarly and political views, and we recognize the freedom-of-speech rights of all of our employees.” That was on July 21. The UIUC documents reveal that not only was Chancellor Wise apprised of that statement minutes after it was emailed to the media, but that she also wrote back to Kaler: “I have received several emails. Do you want me to use this response or to forward these to you?” (p. 101) In other words, this was not the rogue statement of a low-level spokesperson; it reflected Wise’s own views, including the view that Salaita was already a university employee. Even though Wise already had been informed of Salaita’s tweets.

In the days following this forthright defense of Salaita, the Chancellor and her associates begin to back-pedal. Around July 23, Wise starts reaching out to select alumni, trying to arrange phone calls (and in one instance, struggling to rearrange her travel schedule just so she can meet one alum in person [pp. 78-94]). To another such alum, she writes, “Let me say that I just recently learned about Steven Salaita’s background, beyond his academic history, and am learning more now.” (p. 293) That “beyond his academic history” is going to get Wise in trouble on academic freedom grounds.

In the background of this change of tune are the donors and the university’s fundraising and development people. In a July 24 email to Dan Peterson, Leanne Barnhart, and Travis Michael Smith (all part of the UIUC money machine), Wise reports about a meeting she has had with what appears to be a big donor. In Wise’s words:

He said that he knows [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] well and both have less loyalty for Illinois because of their perception of anti-Semitism. He gave me a two-pager filled with information on Steven Salaita and said how we handle this situation will be very telling. (p. 206)

Once Wise and her team start back-tracking, the trustees are brought into the picture. On July 28, Susan Mary Kies, who is the secretary of the Board of Trustees, writes Wise, who had been apologetic about “filling your inbox” with Salaita info, “No problem, we will place the letters in weekly dispatch (as we did last week) so the trustees can see the depth of the matter!” (p. 62) The next day, Kaler starts writing to complaining alums that the final decision regarding Salaita lies with the trustees (this is the first we hear of what will become the ultimate strategy of the administration: putting it all on the trustees):

While I cannot comment on any specific employment decisions of the university, pursuant to the governing documents for the university the final decision for any faculty appointment at the level of assistant professor or above rests with the Board of Trustees. I, therefore, have passed your concerns along to the Secretary of the Board of Trustees. (p. 62)

What’s most stunning about these documents is that they show how removed and isolated Chancellor Wise is from any of the academic voices in the university, even the academic voices on her own team. As she heads toward her August 2 decision to dehire Salaita, she is only speaking to and consulting with donors, alums, PR people, and development types. Ilesanmi Adesida, the provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, makes exactly one appearance in these 443 pages. That is on Tuesday, July 22. Even though Wise has been inundated with emails about Salaita for days, she only finally emails Adesida about the matter a day after the story has broken in the local press. His response: “Thanks for sending these emails. I was not aware of any controversy on this person until yesterday!” (p. 95) And he’s never heard from again.

Then on August 4, two days after Wise has informed Salaita and Robert Warrior, chair of the American Indian Studies department, that Salaita won’t be hired, Warrior writes Brian Ross, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, to find out what happened. Warrior first gets an email back from one of Ross’s associates, who says, “Brian is not in the office today, and I’m not sure he knows anything about this because I presume he would have discussed it with me if he had” (p. 361). And then Ross himself writes back, “i am in NY, traveling back tomorrow. I have not seen the letter but have a request in and will let you know when I hear any more” (p.362). In other words, even two days after the Chancellor has dehired Salaita, she still hasn’t informed the dean of the largest college at the UIUC of her decision.

What’s also clear from reading these documents is just how high up the chain Salaita’s appointment had gone, and how ensconced at the university he was becoming—up until the day that he wasn’t. On September 27, 2013, for example, Reginald Alston, one of two associate chancellors who works directly in Phyllis Wise’s office, writes the following report on Salaita’s candidacy (pp. 238-239):

After closely reviewing Dr. Steven Salaita’s dossier, I support the Department of American Indian Studies’ (AIS) request to grant him the rank of Associate Professor with indefinite tenure at the University of Illinois. The uniqueness of his scholarship on the intersection of American Indian, Palestinian, and American Palestinian experiences presents a rare opportunity to add an esoteric perspective on indigeneity to our cultural studies programs on campus.

…

Again, I support offering Dr. Salaita a tenured position because of the obvious intellectual value that his scholarship and background would bring to our campus. His presence would elevate AIS internationally and convey Illinois’ commitment to maintaining a leading academic program on the historical and sociopolitical intricacies of American Indian culture.

On January 15, 2014, his appointment is approved by the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Access, which is one of the key and most powerful offices in any university hiring decision; if they don’t sign off, the appointment goes nowhere (p. 398).

Then, between July 22 and July 25, while the chancellor and her aides are formulating their strategy to deal with the backlash, Salaita and Warrior email back and forth about Salaita’s moving expenses. The UIUC had originally promised to cover up to $5000 of Salaita’s expenses (p. 387), but when the University-approved moving company comes back with an estimate of $7500, the department decides to cover the difference (pp. 341-347).

And then, when the tech support start asking Warrior about Salaita’s computer needs (“Did Steven Salaita say he had any special PC laptop needs? Does he run SPSS or any other resource intensive applications? Does he need something geared toward video work or any other special area?”), Warrior replies, “He’s pretty much a meat and potatoes user. Nothing complicated” (pp. 341-347).

That was on August 1. The next day, Chancellor Wise fired Salaita.

Update (12:20 am)

Apparently, Carol Tilley on Twitter revealed earlier today the identity of that the alum whom Wise scrambled to rearrange her schedule over. His name is Steve Miller; the UIUC redactor failed to catch it. Tilley then tweeted some other information about Miller. He’s a huge venture capitalist. In 2010, he donated a half-million dollars to endow a professorship in the UIUC business school. He’s given money for years to endow the Steven N. Miller Entrepreneurial Scholarships. He believes in “venture philanthropy.” And he’s on the board of Hillel.

 

Breaking News! Wise to Forward Salaita Appointment to Trustees!

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 efforts will focus around speaking at, and appearing at, this Board of Trustees meeting. We will be attempting to appear during the public comment section of the Board of Trustees meeting, as well as secure a longer presentation to educate them on the issues about which Professor Salaita tweeted. Additionally, we are going to attempt to ensure that the Board of Trustees consults with a cultural expert on Palestine, who can explain and educate them about the issues and the context surrounding Professor Salaita’s tweets. It has been made clear to us that the politics of the Board of Trustees is being allowed to dictate the course of the University, and that the misinformation and personal views of the members of the Board are being allowed to tell the students who is allowed to teach us, regardless of who we say that we want as our educators. We will not let this go unchallenged.

Additionally, Chancellor Wise has agreed to several parts of our demands, and has agreed upon a timeline under which she will take steps to address them. The ball is currently in her court, but we take her agreements as a gesture of good faith and of an attempt to rebuild trust between the University administration and the student body. She has not agreed unilaterally to our demands, and but we have made an important first step in our commitment to reinstating Professor Salaita. In terms of his actual reinstatement, the power to make that decision is not hers. This is why we have shifted the target of our efforts to the Board of Trustees, because they alone have the power to reinstate and approve Professor Salaita’s appointment at the University. In regards to the rest of our demands, which we have updated to reflect the town hall meeting, we have made progress on all of those, but continue to emphasize that it is unacceptable to meet any of our demands without first reinstating Professor Salaita.

We have made progress, but we all have a LOT of work left to do. We must organize, write to the Board of Trustees, and make our voices and our presences known. We will not be silent on September 11th, and we will not stop in our efforts to reinstate Professor Salaita, regardless of what the Board of Trustees decides.

Please keep organizing, please keep making your voices heard, and please‪#‎supportSalaita‬!

Also, feel free to message or comment with any questions, comments, or concerns.

Assuming the report is accurate, I can think of two interpretations of what it means.

If the UIUC is thinking politically, it would be an absolute disaster for them to open this can of worms, to act as if Salaita’s appointment is now a real possibility, to raise expectations for two weeks or so, to encourage all the organizing this will encourage (I can imagine the phone calls and emails that will now start pouring into the Board of Trustees), only to have the Board vote Salaita down. From a political perspective, this would be a disaster for the university. The strongest weapon the UIUC has always had is the sense that this is a done deal, that they will not budge, that we can raise all the ruckus we want, but they simply don’t care. Opening the decision up again calls that into question. Where does this line of reasoning lead us? To the possibility that the UIUC Trustees will vote to appoint Salaita on September 11, throw Chancellor Wise under the bus (remember, the Executive Committee that upheld her decision is only comprised of three Trustees, not the full Board)*, and say it was all a misunderstanding wrought by an incompetent chancellor. Who’ll then be pushed out within a year. The advantage of this approach is that it will effectively bring this story to a close. There will be angry donors, but everything I’ve ever read and experienced about that crew suggests that their bark is often worse than their bite. The ongoing atmosphere of crisis and ungovernability on campus is not something any university leader can bear for too long, and this threatens to go on for a very long time.

The other possibility is that the UIUC is thinking legally. One of the many weak links in their legal case was that Wise never forwarded Salaita’s appointment to the Board of Trustees for a vote. She basically did a pocket veto. Salaita’s offer letter stated that his appointment was subject to approval by the Board of Trustees, but Wise effectively never allowed the Board to approve or disapprove. So the UIUC’s lawyers could have decided that the better thing to do would be simply to carry out the full deed.

Many questions remain. Stay tuned. Regardless of which interpretation is correct, we have to operate on the assumption that the first is a very real possibility and that we have a lot of work to do in the next ten days.

*John Wilson reminds me in this post that all the members of the Board did sign a letter supporting Wise’s position, which I had forgotten about.

Update (11:15 pm)

Just to clarify my blog post: Like all of us, I have no idea what Wise and the Board are thinking (though we can assume that they are making this decision together). But while I think we have to be as strategic and smart about this as possible (fyi: John Wilson thinks I’m wrong; he may have a point), and gather as much information as we can, there’s always a tendency in these situations to play armchair strategist, to try and read the tea leaves, to figure out the pattern of power, as if we didn’t have hand or a role in shaping that pattern of power. Particularly when questions of law get involved (in a country of lawyers, Louis Hartz reminded us, every philosophical question is turned into a legal claim.) We have to resist that tendency. We have to treat this announcement, assuming it’s true, as a golden opportunity. To use the next 10 days as a chance to shift the balance of power on the ground. Remember the Board will be meeting and voting on campus. There are students, faculty, and activists on and around that campus. That’s an opportunity. Remember these trustees are individuals who can be called and emailed round the clock. That’s an opportunity. Between now and 9/11 (they really chose that date), let’s be mindful of the constraints, but also be thinking, always, in terms of opportunities.

Labor Day Readings

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 us less free. See, for instance, his work on “Lavatory and Liberty,” which points out that the government doesn’t even enforce the right to bathroom breaks at work. What could be a greater insult to liberty than that?

My other favorite political writer, Heather Parton, blogs under the name “Digby.” Daily for over 10 years she’s been unleashing a fire hose of brilliance on the fecklessness of the Democrats, the craziness of the Republicans and especially the way that what we now call the “culture wars” has been seared into our national DNA at least since the Civil War. In the acknowledgments to “Nixonland,” I called her the other half of my brain.

Thank you to all my commenters, to Rick, and also to Digby, who was one of this blog’s earliest champions and who is, as Rick says, a great blogger herself. I’m humbled to be in such company.

I’m mindful that, thanks to Rick, I now have many new readers; over the weekend, I’ve gotten hundreds new subscribers to this blog. And because it’s Labor Day, I’m mindful that many of you might want to read something about labor. Unfortunately, because of my involvement in the Salaita affair, the beginning of the semester, and the fact that I’m department chair, I don’t have anything new to post here on labor.

But…

I would urge all of you newbies to maybe start by reading all that I’ve written about the Salaita affair on this blog. It’s easy to forget, in all the back and forth about academic freedom, that Salaita’s situation is actually all too typical of at-will employees across the country. The only difference is that Salaita, being an academic, may have a chance in court—and has been the recipient of a certain kind of internet and now media attention that non-academics almost never get.

But readers of this blog know all too well that American employees are routinely punished by their employers for speaking out, controversially or uncontroversially, on political issues (and for a great many other things). As I’ve argued many times, this is a distinctly American mode of political punishment and repression: outsource to the private sector (or the workplace) the coercion that a liberal state is constitutionally forbidden to do, a feature of our system noticed by everyone from Tocqueville to DuBois that nevertheless continues not to get enough play.

In order to get new readers started on some of these issues, and in honor of Labor Day, I thought I’d present here a Greatest Hits of some of my posts about labor, law, and political and other kinds of repression in the United States.

This post, which I wrote with Chris Bertram and Alex Gourevitch over at Crooked Timber, will help get you started. It provides a good overview about “unfreedom” at work.

Unfreedom in the workplace can be broken down into three categories.

1. Abridgments of freedom inside the workplace

On pain of being fired, workers in most parts of the United States can be commanded to pee or forbidden to pee. They can be watched on camera by their boss while they pee. They can be forbidden to wear what they want, say what they want (and at what decibel), and associate with whom they want. They can be punished for doing or not doing any of these things—punished legally or illegally (as many as 1 in 17 workers who try to join a union is illegally fired or suspended). But what’s remarkable is just how many of these punishments are legal, and even when they’re illegal, how toothless the law can be. Outside the usual protections (against race and gender discrimination, for example), employees can be fired for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. They can be fired for donating a kidney to their boss (fired by the same boss, that is), refusing to have their person and effects searched, calling the boss a “cheapskate” in a personal letter, and more. They have few rights on the job—certainly none of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendment liberties that constitute the bare minimum of a free society; thus, no free speech or assembly, no due process, no right to a fair hearing before a panel of their peers—and what rights they do have employers will fight tooth and nail to make sure aren’t made known to them or will simply require them to waive as a condition of employment. Outside the prison or the military—which actually provide, at least on paper, some guarantee of due process—it’s difficult to conceive of a less free institution for adults than the average workplace.

2. Abridgements of freedom outside the workplace

In addition to abridging freedoms on the job, employers abridge their employees’ freedoms off the job. Employers invade employees’ privacy, demanding that they hand over passwords to their Facebook accounts, and fire them for resisting such invasions. Employers secretly film their employees at home. Workers are fired for supporting the wrong political candidates (“work for John Kerry or work for me”), failing to donate to employer-approved candidates, challenging government officials, writing critiques of religion on their personal blogs (IBM instructs employees to “show proper consideration…for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory—such as politics and religion”), carrying on extramarital affairs, participating in group sex at home, cross-dressing, and more. Workers are punished for smoking or drinking in the privacy of their own homes. (How many nanny states have tried that?) They can be fired for merely thinking about having an abortion, for reporting information that might have averted the Challenger disaster, for being raped by an estranged husband. Again, this is all legal in many states, and in the states where it is illegal, the laws are often weak.

In other words, it’s really easy to get yourself fired in this country. Even for liking My Little Pony.

The 2012 election brought to public attention a whole series of stories about employers forcing employees to attend campaign rallies of the employers’ favored candidates (almost invariably Mitt Romney; you can see why they support Romney, after you read this piece I wrote for the New York Times on the Republican war on worker rights). This is a serious issue in that it involves coercing workers to support a certain kind of political speech; indeed, if you take participation in a rally as a mode of political speech, you could say that employers were actually forcing their employees to speak with a particular opinion. What also came to light: employers trying to force workers to vote for one candidate, as employers do in some countries the US disapproves of.

One of the basic themes of this blog, and which Rick referred to in his interview, is about employers controlling the bodily functions of their employees. Sometimes employers are trying to prohibit workers from going to the bathroom; other times, they’re trying to force them to go to the bathroom. Employers are also obsessed with when workers get to eat. Goodbye to the lunch break.

Another theme, related to the bathroom, is how employers infantilize employees. Sometimes, employers are , comparing their workers to children. Sometimes employees find themselves participating in this regime in the most unsavory ways.

We often think non-profits like universities and hospitals do better on this front because they’re non-profits. Think again. Universities can be terrible; hospitals, even worse. Even the ACLU seems to have trouble with liberty in its workplaces.

Ah, but can’t workers just join unions to fix all this? Turns out that a combination of US law and employer resistance makes that a very difficult thing to do.

These last posts try to put some of these the issue in broad historical perspective: showing how workplace unfreedom can be traced back to the feudal origins of the American workplace, which persisted well into the twentieth century; how minimal sometimes are the protections for workers’ freedom of contract, which is supposed to be the capitalist freedom par excellence; how the workplace functions as a private government, exercising powers that have been outsourced to it by the state; (which may be the best way to think about the whole question of birth control and Hobby Lobby); how this relates to some of the classical themes and questions of liberalism; and how one of our most famous metaphors of freedom of speech—shouting fire in a theater—has its origins in a forgotten labor struggle from 1913.

Happy Labor Day.

Salaita By the Numbers: 5 Cancelled Lectures, 3 Votes of No Confidence, 3849 Boycotters, and 1 NYT Article (Updated Thrice)

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 freedom, almost immediately drew pushback from the academic community. Thousands of scholars in a variety of disciplines signed petitions pledging to avoid the campus unless it reversed its decision to rescind the job offer. A number of prominent academic associations also urged the university to reconsider.

In the past few days, several people have followed through on promises to boycott the institution. Two scholars declined invitations to speak at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study/MillerComm Lecture Series this fall, and a campus-based project called off a four-day national conference that it was scheduled to host there in October.

David J. Blacker, a professor of philosophy and legal studies at the University of Delaware, notified the Center for Advanced Study on Aug. 20 that he no longer wanted to participate. His lecture had been scheduled for Sept. 29.

“Instead of choosing education and more speech as the remedy for disagreeable speech,” he wrote to the committee, the University of Illinois “has apparently chosen ‘enforced silence.’ It thus violates what a university must stand for — whatever else it stands for — and therefore I join those who will not participate in the violation. In my judgment, this is a core and nonnegotiable issue of academic freedom.”

Mr. Blacker added that he “would be delighted to reschedule my talk” if the university should decide to reinstate its offer to Mr. Salaita.

The following day, Allen F. Isaacman, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, also pulled out of the series, offering a similar message. His talk had been scheduled for Oct. 30.

“The University of Illinois’s recent decision to disregard its prior commitment to appoint Professor Salaita confirms my fear of the administration’s blatant disregard for academic freedom,” Mr. Isaacman wrote in a letter to Wayne Pitard, a professor of religion and head of the lecture-series committee. “I do hope that the university administration will reverse its decision before it does irreparable harm to your great institution.”

That same day, the Education Justice Project, which is part of the department of education policy, organization, and leadership at Urbana-Champaign, announced that it was canceling the National Conference on Higher Education in Prison, which it had been scheduled to host.

“This decision has not been easy,” Rebecca Ginsburg, an associate professor in the education policy department, said in an announcement posted on the project’s webpage. The project’s leaders reached the decision only after speaking with would-be presenters and attendees, she wrote. “We concluded that for EJP to host the conference at this time would compromise our ability to come together as a national community of educators and activists.”

Ms. Ginsburg could not be reached for comment Friday; university administrators also did not respond to calls for comment.

On the campus, tensions are just as high.

…

That evening, however, faculty members in the American Indian studies program, a unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, cast a unanimous vote of no confidence in Ms. Wise’s leadership, criticizing her handling of the last-minute withdrawal of the offer to Mr. Salaita.

“In clear disregard of basic principles of shared governance and unit autonomy, and without basic courtesy and respect for collegiality, Chancellor Wise did not consult American Indian studies nor the college before making her decision,” reads a statement posted on the program’s webpage.

“With this vote of no confidence, the faculty of UIUC’s American Indian studies program also joins the thousands of scholars and organizations in the United States and across the world in seeing the chancellor’s action as a violation of academic freedom and freedom of speech,” the statement says.

The note goes on to encourage other departments to do the same, and to question whether the chancellor deserves the confidence of Illinois’s full faculty.

My only objection to the piece is that its numbers are out of date.

Cancelled Lectures

As of today, five scholars, not two, have canceled lectures or turned down an invitation to a University of Illinois campus. (And there may be more I am not aware of.)

In addition to David Blacker and Allen Isaacman, Eric Schwitzgebel has canceled a talk he was due to give on campus in December and also notified the organizers of a conference on experimental philosophy that he would not be able to deliver the keynote address, as he had been invited to do.

Jonathan Judaken, a humanities scholar, was asked to deliver the keynote address at conference at the UIUC in October; he was also scheduled to speak, while on campus, at the Program in Jewish Culture and Society. He has turned down the invitation. Despite his opposition to the idea of an academic boycott of Israel, and despite his visceral reaction to Salaita’s tweets, he believes the academic freedom issues in this case are so vital that he must boycott the UIUC.

[Chancellor Wise's] new doctrine of civility ostensibly created to foster a climate where open dialogue, discourse, and debate must be respected has actually planted the latest land mine in this academic battlefield. The result will be opposite of what she intends. Now faculty and students will feel more anxious than ever that views or viewpoints that go beyond the policed confines of what administrators — or worse, the lapdogs of the watchdog groups — define as the norm, will be able to be expressed as part of an open conversation.

It is consequently on the basis of the principles of faculty governance, academic freedom, and freedom of speech that I will not speak at Illinois until Salaita’s job offer is upheld.

This all could have been avoided if Chancellor Wise trusted faculty governance procedures. The faculty who hired Salaita were fully aware of his position on Israel and Zionism and fully equipped to determine if it would negatively impact his ability to teach his classes. There are international experts on the faculty who could have aided the administration in assessing Salaita’s tweets. It is faculty as the leaders of the communities of inquiry in universities and colleges that are best equipped to judge in such cases.

Contrary to the muddled ways it is being used today as a political cudgel, academic freedom is about the right of academics to say what they will without the interference of groups outside the academy policing their positions. Faculty governance is about giving faculty the right to make all decisions within the academy pertaining to their domains of expertise, most significantly hiring decisions. And freedom of speech is our most basic right as Americans.

Campus watchdogs who monitor the academy claim they do so to uphold what is best in higher education. But Salaita’s case shows once more that they threaten to turn campuses from refuges of critical inquiry into battlegrounds of political correctness and narrow norms.

And Julie Livingston, a Rutgers historian and MacArthur Fellow, has canceled a talk at the University of Illinois at Chicago (a UIUC sister campus, whose chancellor came out in support of Chancellor Wise). Livingston writes:

With great sadness I am writing to cancel my upcoming talk at UIC scheduled for September 17, given your chancellor’s recent statement of support for the actions of Phyllis Wise and the U of I Board of Trustees in the Steven Salaita case. While I had been looking forward to engaging with colleagues and students at UIC, I cannot in good conscience visit your campus until the Steven Salaita matter is resolved in a manner that upholds the principles of academic freedom and shared governance that are fundamental to American higher education and the necessary exchange of ideas, especially where difficult and potentially polarizing issues are concerned. I very much hope that your leadership will listen to their faculty and to the several thousand scholars (including myself) who have signed a pledge to boycott the University of Illinois, reflect on their actions, and reverse the errant course on which they have embarked in this matter. Should that happen I would welcome very much the chance to come and speak.

So five cancellations or refusals of an invitation.

No Confidence Votes

In addition, three departments at the UIUC, not one, have taken a vote of no confidence in the leadership of UIUC. In addition to the American Indian Studies department vote discussed by the Times, the Asian American Studies department and the philosophy department have voted no confidence in the chancellor. The philosophy department resolution states:

Whereas the recent words and actions of Chancellor Phyllis Wise, President Robert Easter, and the Board of Trustees in connection with the revocation of an offer of employment to Dr. Steven Salaita betray a culpable disregard not only for academic freedom and free speech generally but also for the principles of shared governance and established protocols for hiring, tenure, and promotion, the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign declares its lack of confidence in the leadership of the current Chancellor, President, and Board of Trustees.

Boycott

The philosophy vote is especially important, to my mind, because it demonstrates the power of the boycott. Of all the disciplines, philosophy has been the strongest in defending academic freedom at the UIUC. Over 530 philosophers have joined the boycott, more than any other field. Why that’s the case, I’m not sure. But the fact that philosophy is the only department at UIUC—besides Asian American and American Indian Studies (where Salaita’s  connections are strong)—to have voted no confidence is symptomatic of the power of the boycott. Seeing so many of their colleagues across the country and around the world take this strong stand, the philosophers at UIUC have now communicated to the administration that the campus is growing increasingly ungovernable. Chancellor Wise will not get any peace on campus till she and the trustees reverse their decision. As even this generally negative piece in a local paper acknowledges.

This is why I  want to press one of the newer boycott initiatives, from Alan Sokal of NYU, for natural scientists. Getting support among the natural scientists is critical, as they are often a favored constituency at big research campuses like UIUC. They draw the big money from federal grants; they have a lot of power. I want to urge any one of you who is a natural scientist to join this boycott pledge and to urge your friends and colleagues in the natural sciences to do the same. With just the right amount of pressure from all of you, we might see something similar to the philosophy vote on the natural sciences side of the UIUC campus.

For a complete list of the boycott statements, go here. While I haven’t gotten a complete update on the numbers, we have at least 3849 signed up for the boycott as of tonight.

AAUP

The American Association of University Professors has issued a strong statement on the Salaita affair. Here are some of the highlights.

The letter details the extensive dealings between Salaita and the University of Illinois subsequent to his signing of the offer letter he received in October 2013. Among other things, the AAUP reveals that Chancellor Wise invited Salaita to a welcome reception for new faculty.

Toward the end of January, Professor Salaita wrote to Professor Byrd about scheduling a visit to Urbana-Champaign in order to make arrangements for a place to live for him and his family. He states that they visited the area in March and subsequently initiated the purchase of an apartment, including payment of “earnest” money, which was subsequently forfeited when the agreement was voided following the abrupt notification regarding his appointment. During this visit, the AIS faculty hosted a dinner for him and his family to welcome him to the faculty. In early April he was notified of his fall teaching assignment, and he finalized his course book orders in mid-summer.

In the intervening months between his October 2013 acceptance of the appointment and early August 2014, when you notified him of its termination, Professor Salaita received information from various offices of the university, indicating that they had been informed of his appointment, including an invitation from your office to attend your August 19 reception “welcoming faculty and academic professionals who joined the Illinois community in 2014,” as the invitation stated. Nothing was said to Professor Salaita about board action still to come, and we are informed that it is not uncommon for board action on new appointments to take place only after the appointment has begun and the appointee is already at work.

Because the AAUP recognizes that Salaita was in fact hired by the UIUC, they reach a vastly different conclusion about what Chancellor Wise has done to him and what Wise must now do.

Aborting an appointment in this manner without having demonstrated cause has consistently been seen by the AAUP as tantamount to summary dismissal, an action categorically inimical to academic freedom and due process and one aggravated in his case by the apparent failure to provide him with any written or even oral explanation.

…

Until these issues have been resolved, we look upon Professor Salaita’s situation as that of a faculty member suspended from his academic responsibilities pending a hearing on his fitness to continue. Under the joint 1958 Statement on Procedural St andards in Faculty Dismissal Proceedings, any such suspension is to be with pay. As detailed earlier in this letter, Professor Salaita has incurred major financial expenses since he accepted the University of Illinois offer. We urge–indeed insist–that he be paid salary as set in the terms of the appointment pending the result of the CAFT proceeding.

Brian Leiter has an interesting followup on the AAUP letter, which I urge you all to read, along with the fascinating comment thread that ensues.

The AAUP brings up the issue of Salaita’s financial standing. If you haven’t donated to the fund set up by his friends and colleagues to help him fight his case and support his family, please do so now. Click on this link and then go to the right-hand side of the page. People often urge individuals in Salaita’s situation to sue. He may have to. But lawsuits cost money. Like a lot of money. Unless you’re independently wealthy, they’re hard to paid for. Like really hard to pay for. So please help Salaita out. And while you’re over there, check out these awesome testimonials from his former students. You know, students: the very people Chancellor Wise and Salaita’s critics claim to be protecting.

Update (midnight)

Someone on Facebook just brought to my attention that there is a sixth lecture cancellation. This one by Pomona English professor Kyla Wazana Tompkins, who was scheduled to give a talk at UIUC in September.

Update (12:30 am)

I should have also mentioned to other cancellations. The first, which the Times discusses in that excerpt and which I’ve mentioned in a previous post, is that the National Conference on Higher Education in Prison, which was scheduled to be hosted at UIUC, was canceled. The second is that Columbia Professor Bruce Robbins canceled a screening of a film that was supposed to take place at UIUC. I should have remembered this one especially, as it was what inspired my original call for a boycott of UIUC.

So the title of this post should really be: “Salaita By the Numbers: 6 Cancelled Lectures, 1 Cancelled Screening, 1 Cancelled Conference, 3 Votes of No Confidence, 3849 Boycotters, and 1 NYT Article.”

Update (September 1, 10:30 am)

Change that headline to “Salaita By the Numbers: 7 Cancelled Lectures, 1 Cancelled Screening, 1 Cancelled Conference, 3 Votes of No Confidence, 3849 Boycotters, and 1 NYT Article.”

I was just informed that Karma Chavez, associate professor of communication arts and Chican@ and Latin@ Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, canceled her lecture at the UIUC Center for Writing Studies, which was scheduled for September 18.

What Would Mary Beard Do? Bonnie Honig On How a Different Chancellor Might Respond to the Salaita Affair

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 Wise went viral on Sunday, weighs in as a guest blogger today, meditating on the possibility of a different response from Chancellor Wise. Inspired by the luminous example of the classicist Mary Beard.

• • • • • 

This week, the New Yorker features a great article about the fabulous Mary Beard, a Cambridge Classicist who, in addition to writing many great books and training a great many students, appears on TV and radio in the UK discussing the ancient world and contemporary topics.

Beard, an “older” woman, does not toe the conventional female appearance line:

Beard does not wear makeup and she doesn’t color her abundant gray hair. She dresses casually, with minor eccentricities: purple-rimmed spectacles, gold sneakers. She looks comfortable both in her skin and in her shoes—much more preoccupied with what she is saying than with how she looks as she is saying it.

Her appearance is often the occasion (though not the cause) of rather vicious and awful tweets, emails, or postings. Beard is philosophical about it all. She sees it as a kind of silencing that is gendered:

“It doesn’t much matter what line of argument you take as a woman. If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it—it’s the fact that you are saying it.” Indeed, Beard goes on, “’Shut up you bitch’ is a fairly common refrain” and these often come with threats, what she refers to as a “predictable menu of rape, bombing, murder, and so forth.” She mildly reported one tweet that had been directed at her: “I’m going to cut off your head and rape it.”

Beard’s response? When one “commenter posted a doctored photograph in which an image of a woman’s genitals was superimposed over Beard’s face,” she posted the image on her blog “and suggested possible responses for her supporters to take, such as flooding the offending message board with Latin poetry. The story made international news, and the message board soon shut down.”

In another “highly publicized incident, Beard retweeted a message she had received from a twenty-year-old university student: ‘You filthy old slut. I bet your vagina is disgusting.’” Asked by the BBC what she would say to the student, Beard replied, “‘I’d take him out for a drink and smack his bottom.’”

In practice, though, she does something a bit different: she writes back to her detractors. and soon discovers they are somehow thwarted in their lives and taking out their frustrations on her. She listens, she may even help out with a problem, and so some sort of relationship takes the place of the prior antagonism; “often, she receives not only an apology from them but also a poignant explanation.”

For example:

The university student, after apologizing online, came to Cambridge and took Beard out to lunch; she has remained in touch with him, and is even writing letters of reference for him. “He is going to find it hard to get a job, because as soon as you Google his name that is what comes up,” she said. “And although he was a very silly, injudicious, and at that moment not very pleasant young guy, I don’t actually think one tweet should ruin your job prospects.”

In the context of recent events at the University of Illinois, in which Professor Steven Salaita was “de-hired” because of things he tweeted this summer, commenting on Israel’s bombing of Gaza, you might think that what I am drawn to here is Mary Beard’s charitable attitude toward tweets. But that is not it. That is just icing on the cake.

Instead, I find myself thinking about what life would be like if Mary Beard was chancellor of the University of Illinois. What I am enjoying right now is the idea of Mary Beard, or anyone with HALF her character, in university administration receiving an email from, say, a donor expressing concern about the likely unfairness of a faculty member with strong views about a political matter.

WHAT WOULD MARY BEARD DO?

I do not think she would defer to said donor, nor meet with university fundraisers, nor telephone the Board of Trustees. Instead, if the New Yorker article is any indication, I imagine she would listen and then invite the protesting or concerned donor or alum to come in for a lunch or a coffee with the faculty member whose views are so disturbing to him.

I imagine she would arrange the lunch, have it paid for, and perhaps have a word with the faculty member in advance, specially requesting s/he be patient and respond to concerns expressed with care (as s/he likely would do anyway). (We know, for example, that Steven Salaita sometimes responded to tweets of disagreement with offers to meet in person to discuss).

I imagine she might tell the donor—after lunch, with a nice wine, provided courtesy of the University of Illinois’ fundraising arm—that this lunch is a model of what universities are supposed to do: bring people together from diverse backgrounds and put them in challenging positions where their assumptions are in question and they can talk and learn from each other or respectfully disagree.

If she were American, she might then suggest that the donor could, with a nice donation, make such lunches a regular feature of student life at UIUC. They could be called something like, I don’t know… Salaita Salons, perhaps, and they could be featured monthly at the university.

WHAT WOULD MARY BEARD DO? It would not be a bad idea to have THAT emblazoned on some chancellors’ desks…

(with apologies in advance to Professor Beard, whom I have not met, if this post is too familiar, and with thanks for the inspiring example)

Follow the Money at the University of Illinois

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, she received 70 communiques (in one instance from a very high-level donor), regarding the Salaita hire, only one of which was urging her to keep him on board.

The communications show that Wise was lobbied on the decision not only by pro-Israel students, parents and alumni, but also by the fund-raising arm of the university.

…

For instance, there is an email from Travis Smith, senior director of development for the University of Illinois Foundation, to Wise, with copies to Molly Tracy, who is in charge of fund-raising for engineering programs, and Dan C. Peterson, vice chancellor for institutional advancement. The email forwards a letter complaining about the Salaita hire. The email from Smith says: “Dan, Molly, and I have just discussed this and believe you need to [redacted].” (The blacked out portion suggests a phrase is missing, not just a word or two.)

Later emails show Wise and her development team trying to set up a time to discuss the matter, although there is no indication of what was decided.

At least one email the chancellor received was from someone who identified himself as a major donor who said that he would stop giving if Salaita were hired. “Having been a multiple 6 figure donor to Illinois over the years I know our support is ending as we vehemently disagree with the approach this individual espouses. This is doubly unfortunate for the school as we have been blessed in our careers and have accumulated quite a balance sheet over my 35 year career,” the email says.