After Three Weeks of Terrible Publicity, 41 UIUC Leaders Call on Administration to Resolve Crisis

In what may be the most significant and largest statement by campus leaders at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to date, 41 department chairs and program heads have issued a powerful call for the university to reinstate Steven Salaita. Addressing the new acting chancellor, Barbara Wilson, who recently replaced Chancellor Phyllis Wise, and UI President Timothy Killeen, the writers not only register just how severe the Salaita crisis has been but they also make plain a way out of the mess: reinstate Salaita. In a statement accompanying the letter’s release, English Department head Michael Rothberg said:

The Salaita case has become an international symbol for the precariousness of academic freedom and shared governance in the contemporary university. Until the university reinstates Dr. Salaita to his rightful position, our campus will continue to exist under a cloud of censure and boycott. The university needs to do the right thing: to reinstate Salaita and to take steps to ensure that future hiring is based purely on scholarly review by faculty members and not on political considerations or the influence of interests beyond the university.

In addition to many of the chairs and directors of departments in the humanities and social sciences, the signatories include the heads of the chemical sciences, math, statistics, and animal biology.

The letter suggests that we may be in a new moment of the Salaita fight. After last year’s initial burst of activism—which included multiple department votes of no confidence in Chancellor Wise, a boycott by more than 5000 scholars of UIUC, and censure by the AAUP—we’ve seen, in the last three weeks, the following developments:

The stunning and comprehensive rejection by a federal judge of UIUC’s claim that it had never hired Steven Salaita and thus owed him none of the obligations of academic freedom that it is bound to honor among its faculty.
The sudden resignation of Chancellor Wise.
The revelation that Chancellor Wise and other campus administrators had been using personal email accounts to discuss the Salaita case—and that those emails had not been released in response to multiple FOIA requests and that Wise had admitted to destroying some of them.
The embarrassing pas de deux between Wise and the Board of Trustees over the $400,000 bonus she had been promised, resulting in a frenzy of steps and counter-steps—rejection of resignation; initiation of dismissal proceedings; threats of lawsuit; acceptance of resignation—that would challenge even the most seasoned dancer at Martha Graham.

A story that seemed to be settling into the cozy chambers of a federal judge was now back on the front pages, showing the university once again in a most terrible light. Between the lines of this latest letter from the department chairs and unit heads one can hear a reminder to the trustees and administration: we can’t take another year of this. Perhaps the university’s new leadership will listen.

Here are excerpts from the letter:

We the forty-one undersigned Executive Officers and campus leaders from departments and academic units across the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign urge you to help end the crisis that has plagued our university for more than a year….The decision has also inflicted harm upon the reputation and standing of our university.

The AAUP has censured the Urbana-Champaign campus for the violation of academic freedom. An ongoing academic boycott against our campus continues to adversely affect an important dimension of our intellectual livelihood. More than 5,000 scholars around the world, many of them prominent intellectuals, refuse to participate in talks or conferences at the University of Illinois. Such events are part of the exchange of ideas for which our campus has always been known, and their cancellation impoverishes the conversation on campus to the detriment of students and faculty alike. Over the long term, it threatens our competitiveness in bringing in external funding and recruiting distinguished scholars.

We are therefore asking you to use the authority of your offices to recommend to the Board of Trustees that they reverse their previous decision and reinstate Dr. Salaita at the next board meeting in September. We firmly believe that this step will help put the university on track toward ending AAUP censure and regaining its place among the most respected public institutions of higher education in the country. The decision to reinstate Dr. Salaita will also make it easier to resolve pending litigation and save the university community and state taxpayers from the high costs of defending a wrong decision in the court of law.

We ask for a meeting to discuss our request to restore the rightful stature of the University of Illinois.