A year after he was fired by the University of Illinois over concerns about the “civility” of his criticism of supporters of Israel, Steven Salaita says that, despite the emotional trauma he suffered as a result of his ordeal, he hopes to find a way to return to a teaching position at the school.
“The response to my firing has really emboldened a lot of people there, and I’ve gotten almost unanimous support from faculty at the school,” Salaita said in an interview. “On some level, to be honest, it would be a little weird coming to work at a campus where I’ve been the source of so much controversy. But ultimately, I’d see it as a victorious moment, not just personally, but for the principle of free speech in American academia.”
There is a legal effort underway to bring Salaita to that moment. In August, an amended complaint was filed against the school by lawyers from the law firm Loevy & Loevy and the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group focused on civil liberties and human rights. The complaint amends a lawsuit first filed in January 2015 on Salaita’s behalf seeking his reinstatement plus financial damages. In the new complaint, Salaita’s lawyers argue that school administrators hid or deleted emails that constituted evidence related to his termination. The lawyers are also anticipating the disclosure of more information about the impact of donor pressure on his termination during the forthcoming discovery phase of the case.
In the meantime, Salaita has returned to academia after nearly a year out of work, accepting this past July a visiting position as the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut for the 2015-2016 academic year. This month, he also released a new book, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and Limits of Academic Freedom, which attempts to contextualize his own case within the broader struggle for academic freedom of speech in the United States.
Despite these positive developments, Salaita is still shaken by his ordeal with the University of Illinois. In August 2014, just weeks before he was scheduled to begin a tenured role as associate professor of American Indian Studies, Salaita received a letter stating that his appointment was being terminated. Salaita, who had already resigned from his job at Virginia Tech to take the professorship, suddenly and inexplicably found himself cut adrift.
While the letter did not specify the reason for his termination, it surfaced shortly thereafter that Salaita had drawn the ire of influential donors and advocacy groups, who complained to university officials over a series of social media posts Salaita had made criticizing supporters of Israel during Israel’s 2014 bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Salaita, who had already rented out his Virginia home and made preparations to move his young family to Illinois, suddenly found himself unemployed, ostensibly on grounds of “personal and disrespectful words” in his public statements on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“In my mind, I felt that my academic career was finished. This was going to be a lifetime punishment that would follow me even if I tried to get another job,” Salaita told The Intercept recently. “I had uprooted my family and had just gotten a contract to buy a condo. Instead, we suddenly found that we had nowhere to live, no income and no health insurance.”
Steven Salaita
Photo: Seth Perlman/AP
For Salaita himself, the case has been both a trying emotional experience as well as an eye-opening firsthand encounter with the unspoken limits on acceptable discourse in the United States, particularly with regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“Graduate students and young scholars are fearful of speaking out on this issue because of the potential career implications of being perceived as a critic of Israel,” Salaita says. “It’s an example of the compromises to our freedoms that an unthinking commitment to a foreign country can produce. Even if we disagree with people politically, its a bad idea to voluntarily confer more power to a hierarchy that can silence people just because we don’t like what they say.”
Salaita, 40, is a Palestinian-American Christian who was born and raised in the United States. His interest in American Indian studies was inspired in large part by his own Palestinian heritage, and his desire to “study what colonization looked like all over the world.” Before Salaita’s termination from the University of Illinois, he had experienced pressure for his political opinions, including a 2013 controversy triggered by an article he had written criticizing what he perceived to be uncritical public support of the U.S. military.
“There’s unfortunately a widespread perception in academia that scholars from minority backgrounds can’t be ‘objective,’ and I’ve experienced this myself to varying degrees throughout my career,” Salaita says. “People working in fields that are committed by their very nature to challenging power dynamics, particularly women’s studies, native studies, African-American studies, are often seen by universities as both superfluous and threatening. Anything that can’t be measured through corporate algorithms is often viewed as suspicious at best.”
Shortly after Salaita’s termination, emails made public through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that financial donors to the University of Illinois had been privately waging a campaign to pressure the university into rescinding his professorship. This June, a judge ordered the release of more emails between university administrators and donors that may shed further light on the circumstances of his firing.
Omar Shakir, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, says that the organization decided to take up Salaita’s case in part due to the potentially dire First Amendment issues his firing raises. “This is a line-in-the-sand type case that really goes to the heart of hiring in academia and academic freedom,” Shakir says. “The fact that a tenured professor can be fired for criticisms of the policies of a foreign government should raise concerns for anyone who cares about freedom of speech, as well as the historic role of universities as bastions of free thought and debate.”
I spent an hour composing a reply to this article, whiuch was a great one, only to see it blown away and unrecoverable when I hit the last period. Is someone reading as I write, and killing what they don’t like? I’d said that I had boycotted NBC every since they found Donald Trump’s comments on illegals insufficiently PC, and that when they punished him they punished all who engage in controversial free speech, including every author in The Intercept. As the named plaintiff in Shea v Reno, in which the Supreme Court affirmed my suit against the government censorship law called the Indecency Act, and in my newspaper, The American Reporter, I founded with dozens of other journalists, I have stayed true to those beliefs. Criticizing Israel is the most dangerous thing a public figure can do in terms of their careers, and we should actively defend those who do it on grounds of principle.
Maybe it was not his point of view, but rather the remarkably vicious and unprofessional nature of his expression. Calling it censorship is convenient cover.
Salaita’s dilemma is an important one to pay attention to, as it represents many different issues at once. His book Uncivil Rites is excellent and a relatively quick read. If interested, my review of it is here: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/14/uncivil-rites-the-bitter-and-the-tweet/
This man tyhinks like every Palestinian that the Jews do not have a rigth given to them in the Holy Scriptures and by the UNITED NATIONS. Under his thinking Jews are just underlings of the Moslem Palestinians. I find this man unacceptable and if he is reinstated, I fore one will withdraw my funding of a Chair at the University of Illinois. All he wants is to see Israel destroyed just as the “GRAND MUFTI of Jerusalem” suggested to Adolph Hitler during his self proclaimed exile during WW2. As to his comments about ISRAEL’s Bombardment of GAZA during the 50 day war which started with over 2000 missiles being launched at Israeli civilians. As an academic, he forgot that it takes two to make a conflict. HAMAS which he claims is a rightful government was guilty of WAR CRIMES. Israel had the right of Self-Defense against a TERRORIST REGIME whose only demand was that all Jews be eradicated.
Ahhhhh the self-defense excuse. Lemme guess-you think it was self-defense when Israel murdered 34 American sailors, Marines and a civilian on the USS Liberty. We can all hope that you are forced to withdraw your funding, as your philosophy in this case has no legal standing.
If those “holy scriptures” give Jews the right to dismember children playing soccer on a beach by naval bombardment… they’re not really that holy, are they?
“This man tyhinks […] Jews do not have a rigth given to them in the Holy Scriptures […]”
The US is a country where the Ten Commandments (cited by Holy Scriptures as fundamental law) are being systematically removed from courthouses because they are perceived to violate tender sensibilities of zealots who tolerate no possible taint on the separation of church from state.
It is therefore breathtaking that the very same government accepts an ancient promise recorded (only) in the same Holy Scriptures as a SOLE legal basis for another government to arbitrarily occupy and rule another territory and evict its existing population from possession of homes and land by brute force. And then said government further demands all other nations recognize this “right” manufactured solely from religious texts.
The Old Testament details bloody killing of every living being (down to pigs and goats) in the course of execution of a God-mandated “promise” which the Israelites carefully wrote down and preserved down to the present day. Ethnic cleansing of other nations had been bestowed on them as a divinely sponsored public policy, and Israelite leaders promptly set about effecting that policy with vigor. They secured their own lebensraum the good old fashioned way: with a great deal of spilled blood.
Are we seriously expected to support the same public policy some two thousand years later? Because the Bible says so? The mind boggles.
The foundation of modern Israel (and its government) rests on one of the most truly risible claims ever asserted to justify forceful colonization of a national territory and eviction of its people by force. Pure chutzpah. And former colonial powers warmly endorse it with a straight face.
Why do western governments particularly “support Israel” based on this exceedingly flimsy religious claim? The only possible justification must be unrequited guilt in countries whose former leaders coldly turned away Jews fleeing the dreaded Nazi terror.
But how do aims of a Zionist zealot significantly differ to those of a Nazi zealot? Put another way, are modern, secular nations of the world permanently wed to an obligation to actively sponsor and approve ethnic displacement (or worse) which is ultimately authorized solely by an ancient Biblical “promise” regarded as credible in the modern world by only a minority of living people?
It can be no particular surprise that many Muslims may regard blind Western support for undeniable and systematic persecution of Palestinians by the State of Israel to be only different in degree — but not substance — to similar efforts by flint-eyed Crusaders in ancient days who waded deep in Arab blood at the gates of Jerusalem. Or Nazi armies trooping on Poland with an eye to extermination?
Relying on religious text as a purported basis for vesting national authority over a territory in a “chosen people” requires magical thinking on a scale not witnessed since Medieval times. There should be no surprise, then, that Medieval consequences will likely follow.
Eugene… Is it hard to be that stupid? JW…
Is there any chance The Intercept can get a guest column by Salaita? Not to retell his story – I understand that’s under litigation, and he must be tired of talking about it. But if he’s both a Palestinian and a professor of American Indian studies, he must know better than anyone the historical parallels and direct influence of the mistreatment of American Indians in the U.S. on the system of ever-shrinking reservations in Palestine! This is something I would love to hear about, because I don’t think Israel’s approach can work – I don’t think they can make the Palestinians reduce in numbers the way America did Indians, and I’m not sure how much of that is the level of brutality vs. cultural/economic differences between the eras.
People really need to check out the Steven Salaita entry at Rational Wiki (which I greatly contributed to). The guy is winning hands down in court and University of Illinois officials have been resigning in the wake of the fiasco. The judge didn’t buy for one minute that Salaita’s tweets were that awful or were unprotected speech.
Some people are just ridiculous :b
“historic role of universities as bastions of free thought and debate.”
Makes one wonder why the donors who threatened to take away their support if they couldn’t dictate University decisions actually gave to a University in first place. A lobby group or politician would have been a better fit for a pay-to-dictate scheme, it might also have gotten them closer to annulling First Amendment Rights for everyone who outraged their sensibilities.
It’s a donor’s right to withdraw support if they’re not happy with what the University is doing, and it’s the University’s responsibility to ignore those donors if not doing so would run counter to the University’s academic integrity. It’s a simple formula, really, and I don’t know how it manages to get muddled in spite of this.
This offers substantial cause to publicly name donors who seek to influence policy decisions.
Academia is mortally banktupt and on the main swings which ever way the political leadership is leaning.
Even when Eugenics was the political agenda back in the 30s Academia towed the line as did the scientific community.
Unfortunately when government and select foundations supply all the cash they control the end product.
“the emotional trauma he suffered”
LOL. You really couldn’t make this up.
“a series of social media posts Salaita had made criticizing supporters of Israel during Israel’s 2014 bombardment of the Gaza Strip.”
Well, that’s one way of putting it. If you are a deceptive piece of trash, that is. In reality, “criticizing supporters of Israel” is not what was appalling about the murderous rage of this miscreant ragehead – criticisms of Israel are a dime a dozen, and nobody really gives a shit.
But witness just how compatible the “thinking” of this worthless piece of Islamofascist anti-Semitic “Palestinian Christian” trash is with what is still generally agreed to be the basic standards of decency within the scholarly community, just two examples will suffice:
a) he retweets a wish for knifing of Jeffrey Goldberg (seen in the perspective of the current “Palestinian” knifing frenzy – in their idiotic delusion that a Jew-free “Palestine from the river to the sea” is just a stab away – this is remarkably indicative of his deranged mind):
http://legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/[email protected]
b) he posts this in response to the news about kidnapping and murder of innocent Jewish children:
https://twitter.com/stevesalaita/status/479805591401922561
“You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the fucking West Bank settlers would go missing.”
All the anti-Semitic trash on here will no doubt also enjoy this collection of his thoughts:
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/08/anti-israel-prof-loses-job-offer-at-u-illinois-over-hateful-tweets/
Enjoy – because this is the closest you will *ever* get to experiencing “Palestine” :)
I see you found your way here from the Independent my Hasbara troll friend.
You certainly earn your Bibi bucks. Give my regards to the baby slaughterer.
Israeli politicians can say far worse and keep their jobs. You say worse on a daily basis. Your racist views towards arabs is just creepy
Wow. You’re pretty intellectually bankrupt. There must be a lot of space in that head of yours.
Ladies and gentlemen, Louise cypher is a very popular figure on the intercept. He is either a paid troll or too disillusioned to accept all the evidence mounted against his arguments. It would be wrong (on so many levels) for the intercept to ban him. But the rest of the readers can safely ignore him. Any response to his comments are a waste of your valuable time.
Louise, louise, louise,… you’re going to have a heart attack any day now, if you keep screaming like this… I hope you get paid for this bullshit
Was he technically tenured? I thought the whole point was that he had been approved to get tenure but never actually hit that point, and got fired in the meantime?
He had already been a tenured professor at his previous employment. And according to the petition to “reinstate” his position at UIUC, he was tenured their also before being wrongfully dislodged.
Over 1,200 Scholars Boycott University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Until Professor Steven Salaita Reinstated
“A petition signed by over 1,200 scholars in diverse fields was submitted today to Chancellor Phyllis Wise and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The signatories have refused to speak or lecture at UIUC until Dr. Steven Salaita is reinstated in his position.
Salaita, a leading scholar in comparative ethnic, Arab American, indigenous, and American studies had been offered an appointment, with tenure, as Associate Professor in the College’s American Indian Studies program. After he accepted the position, resigned his previous tenured position at Virginia Tech, and prepared to relocate his family to UIUC, Wise abruptly and unilaterally withdrew his appointment because of his commentary on Israel’s war on Gaza, Palestine on Twitter. The University’s Board of Trustees is scheduled to meet today.
“Well over 1,200 signatures from around the world have poured in — and the petition has only been online for five days. What is clear to the global academic community is that the Chancellor of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s egregious violation of Professor Salaita’s First Amendment rights to free speech; academic freedom; and due process as an employee under both the law and University bylaws, has made UIUC an outlier. In transgressing a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, UIUC has engaged in viewpoint discrimination against Steven Salaita, sending a chilling message to the faculty, staff and students of the University of Illinois that academic freedom and free speech are under surveillance and subject to punishment at the Urbana-Champaign campus. The only honorable course of action would be to reinstate Steven Salaita,”
The best discussion I have seen of this was in the lower part of a comments thread at WAPO, in one of David Bernstein’s columns at the VC. I’ll quote a commentator named Loki13 below, but the whole thing is worth reading, if only to see how upset and pissy Bernstein gets:
The exchange can be found here, towards bottom of the thread. Fun to read.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/04/12/diversity-and-inclusion-at-connecticut-college/
The primary issue with that argument is that “never been done before” doesn’t carry any weight.
“Never been done before” normally carries at least the burden of justification along with it. It implies that new avenues of policy are being opened up for everyone else to use, which is an unpopular and consequential thing to do if it’s just on a “because I don’t like this guy” basis.
He was not technically hired yet at all; his offer letter from the school expressly said that his hiring was contingent on approval from the University’s Board of Trustees. He never got that approval (in fact, the Board of Trustees voted not to hire him). Think what you will of that decision – frankly, anyone who tweets out a wish that “the rest of the West Bank settlers” be kidnapped and murdered like three Israeli teenagers (two of whom, not that it matters, lived within pre-67 Israel) should not be hired by any reputable institution, any more than someone who expressed a hope for more dead African Americans, Syrians, or Palestinians should be, regardless of whether that correct decision is reached based on donor pressure – he has no legal leg to stand on given that he was never actually hired.
He had been given an office, a University email address, and was already working part time on determining curriculum and course work plans. The court has already ruled out the university’s attempt at its “he wasn’t technically hired yet” dismissal attempt.
I’m guessing “A.M.” is probably “David Bernstein,” and he is probably just upset about how “Loki13″ mopped up the floor with him!
Entirely false.
Near as I can tell any criticism of Israeli policy is now construed as “antisemitic” it’s sickening to see them get away with this kind of intillectual dishonesty.
I am inclined to give Salaita a pass for his “uncivil tweets.” Anyone who looks at those terrible photos of dead kids in Gaza, orphaned and maimed kids and homes and neighborhoods cruelly blown to bits, and doesn’t feel a measure of intemperate rage either doesn’t have a heart, or is a Jewish bigot.
How could he help himself?
Oh, and can you please decide whether his surname is Salatia or Salaita? You keep going back and forth between the two forms in the article.
Ironic, eh? This man has been severely punished by rich and influential Jews, for the crime of criticizing Jews. The outcome is certainly calculated to make people think better of Jews, isn’t it?
Sorry, guys – read the tweets. “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror.”
Where he’s essentially blaming the state of Israel for antisemitism (uh, does that mean we can blame Saudi Arabia for Islamaphobia ?)
Or this fun one: “#Israel’s supporters:-Zionist fanatics-CEOs-Christian Zios-Governments-Chickenshits .. #Palestine’s supporters: -Everyone else”
Very mature, balanced, and scholarly, no ?
I personally would not want to be a Jewish student in this guy’s class. I’d actually be concerned that someone so publicly uncouth would not give me a fair shake in terms of grading, class debate, etc.
DTMFA.
Indeed, his comments are nearing latuffian levels of hypocritical flamebaiting drivel. But is this really grounds to fire a tenured professor on the spot? For a social media post from a personal account, and no warnings or reprimands issued first?
Not commenting on the rest of what you said, but what’s wrong, exactly, with blaming Saudi Arabia for Islamaphobia?
Fortunately for every Jewish student or potential Jewish student on the planet Earth your personal wants and not wants about being a student of the professor are of no consequence to any of them.
I thought a bit more about the rest of the comment. In a political climate which sees stupidity like “we think the price is worth it” or “axis of evil” or “we came, we saw, he died” getting thrown into official statements without causing more than a few eyebrows to raise, it’s impossible to say there’s anything offensive about those tweets without validating the accusations of double-standards.
I get it. I mean it’s nice that you want people to consider the feelings of the Jewish student and everything. But by your reasoning, any Palestinian who felt the same about taking a class by a strong zionist professor should be able to get that professor removed too right? Or do the emotions and sentiments only run in one direction?
Folks interested in the Salaita case, and in US suppression of pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist discourse more generally, should check out last week’s Law and Disorder podcast @ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lawanddisorder/~5/ofRcYtxzUTE/lawanddisorder20151012.mp3 . The first half is an interview with Salaita; the second half is an interview with Dima Khalidi (counsel with CCR, founder of Palestine Legal) regarding the new report, “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech” (@ http://ccrjustice.org/the-palestine-exception ).
The determination on behalf of the University to take the case to trial, despite the inherent weakness of their position likely has a lot to do with how politicized American judges are. Even if the case ended up before a judge brave and idealistic enough to defy the same pressures (financial, social, and political) that the University board caved to, the appeal to the next level up the judicial chain only increases how political the judge hearing the case will be.
And at the very top of the chain of appeals is the US Supreme Court, whose justices believe (or profess to believe) that bribery is free speech.
Which pretty much blows away the notion that, having made it to the top of the judicial career path, and having absolute security in that position, they’ve risen above politics. Though, even if you successfully made a case that they had, decisions (including historical ones like Dred Scott) shows that they are a product of society, and allow their views of what is the norm to prevail over an argument about what is right.