More Procedural Violations in Salaita Case (Updated)

In addition to possibly violating Articles 1 and 9 of the University of Illinois Statutes (see update), Chancellor Wise may have violated Article 3 as well.

The Chancellor informed Prof. Steven Salaita on August 1, 2014, that she would not forward his case to the Board of Trustees. The University Statutes (Article III, Section 3) spell out how to handle such cases:  “In case a recommendation from a college is not approved by the chancellor/vice president, the dean may present the recommendation to the president, and, if not approved by the president, the dean with the consent of the Board of Trustees may present the recommendation in person before the Board of Trustees in session.”

A Dean cannot exercise this statutory option if the Chancellor keeps him in the dark and instead announces her decision directly to the candidate. Which is exactly what the Chancellor did in this case. Brian Ross, the Interim Dean of LAS, learned of the Chancellor’s actions only three days later, on August 4. Who knows when the Chancellor might have seen fit to inform him – he found out only because Robert Warrior (Director of the American Indian Studies Program) wrote to the Dean to inquire what was going on. See the correspondence on pages 361-362 of the publicly available documents.

Four members of the Board of Trustees are lawyers by training, and one of them, Patrick Fitzgerald, is the famed federal prosecutor who brought down former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby. Even if the trustees don’t care about these procedural irregularities on the merits, surely the irregularities should make the trustees nervous should this case go to court.

Perhaps that’s worth mentioning to them when you send your emails.

In the past month or so, this blog has attracted, on average, six thousand visitors per day (in addition to its more than 4700 subscribers)—and 20,000 visitors on our highest day of traffic. If just ten percent of those readers sends an email…

Here again are the addresses:

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

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

Hannah Cave, Trustee: [the one we had doesn't work]

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:  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 (10 pm)

That information about a possible violation of Article 3 comes the Campus Faculty Association at the University of Illinois, which is trying to organize a union for the faculty there, as we have at CUNY. I know a lot of faculty, including some who’ve been very outspoken in support of Salaita and academic freedom, have misgivings about unions in the academy. I hope this entire controversy has made clear to the skeptics that preventing these sorts of arbitrary power grabs by the Chancellor and/or the Trustees is one of the reasons we have unions and why we need more of them.