This is a guest post by Don Eron, who recently retired after twenty-five years as a non-tenure-track instructor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the primary author of the Colorado Conference’s “Report on the Termination of Ward Churchill,” which was published in volume 3 of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom. His writing on academic freedom has been cited in petitions before the United States Supreme Court, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, and the National Labor Relations Board. He is a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure
In at least one regard, I’d like to thank John Wilson for his passionate condemnation of “Professor Salaita’s Intramural Speech,” my essay in the current issue of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom. I hope that Wilson’s indictment inspires people to read the essay, something that I feared wouldn’t happen. If they do, I hope they’re not disappointed if they don’t concur with Wilson’s assessment that my ideas on the difference between intramural and extramural utterance, if adopted by the Association, would represent the greatest catastrophe in the history of the AAUP.
My argument, in essence, is that speech, even when conducted outside traditional academic venues, should be considered relevant to a professor’s professional profile when that speech directly relates to his or her area of professional expertise. I argue that this is especially true when the professor becomes so well known for that speech (as can happen through social media) that it is difficult to view his more scholarly writings other than as filtered through that speech. Finally, I argue that if a faculty committee, charged with assessing Salaita’ s professional fitness, considered Salaita’s speech as intramural utterance—speech that was of relevance to his professional performance—the committee might arrive at a negative assessment of his fitness.
Wilson and Henry Reichman, who is the chair of Committee A and who has commented at length in affirmation of Wilson’s posting, do not agree with me that the AAUP evidence that I cite in my essay says what I say that it says. In Wilson’s view, my opinions about AAUP policy are not just a matter of disagreement, but I am “dead wrong,” “plain wrong,” “absolutely wrong,” and “deeply misguided.” One of the bases of my argument is the definition of extramural speech as offered in the AAUP’s recent revision of the 2004 statement On Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications: “The fundamental meaning of extramural speech, as a shorthand for speech in the public sphere and not in one’s area of expertise, fully applies to the realm of electronic communications, including social media” [italics mine].
Wilson and Reichman do not quarrel with my understanding of this definition as much as they quarrel with the definition itself. Wilson offers an alternative reading—focusing on “shorthand” and disregarding “fundamental meaning”—to propose that the sentence does not quite say what I think it says. In any event, according to Wilson, the definition of extramural utterance offered in this AAUP document is “just wrong.” “I don’t know who tossed in that line,” Wilson writes, “but it’s contrary to all AAUP doctrines.” Reichman comments that the inclusion of “and not in one’s area of expertise” was a “mistake and an oversight” for which he assumes full responsibility. “To be honest,” Reichman confides, “despite the Committee’s usually diligent vetting (and revetting) of its statements somehow we simply missed this.” At any rate, Reichman agrees with Wilson that the definition of extramural utterance that I cite “cannot be viewed as a meaningful amendment to AAUP doctrines.”
In response, I’ll say two things. First, as someone who taught argumentation for twenty-five years, I find “It was a mistake, somebody must have thrown it in there” to be flabby as a tactic of refutation. Of greater significance, as an activist whose work relies almost entirely on AAUP documents, I wonder what else somebody must have “tossed in,” or “the Committee simply missed” that I have been passing off as AAUP doctrine. It would be inconvenient for me to call up John or Hank every time I read an AAUP document to ask them what the AAUP really thinks.
But, of course, that definition is not a mistake. Nor is the definition a dramatic departure from the AAUP’s “more extensive policies on extramural expression”—a body of documents in which I suspect I am as well versed as Wilson or Reichman. The AAUP has long allowed that professors can be fired for extramural speech, just as they can be fired for intramural speech, if that speech implicates professional fitness. As formulated in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, academic freedom protects extramural utterance to ensure that professors have the same right as other citizens to speak out on issues of public concern. But the protection is not unlimited. As the 1964 Committee A Statement on Extramural Utterances clarifies, “The controlling principle is that a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen [is protected] unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness to serve. Extramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member’s fitness for continuing service” [italics mine]. Because when one speaks within one’s area of academic expertise, one’s professional competence is invariably implicated to some degree, such speech, by definition, is almost always intramural.
As Reichman attests, Committee A spent several weeks reviewing various drafts of the revised Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications. Reichman, of course, is free to apologize that in all that time nobody noticed the definition or he doubts “it would have remained in the document” but that, unfortunately, “attentions were elsewhere.” However, to make one obvious point, I noticed the definition. When I did, for the first time AAUP policy on the relationship between extramural utterance and social media made sense to me, for I’ve long felt that it is foolhardy for the AAUP to insist that speech in one’s professional area of expertise that is issued through social media, and for which one may be considerably better known than speech expressed through more scholarly venues, is essentially irrelevant to one’s professional profile. Such a view is not only illogical and unsustainable but is, in my view, protectionist in the worst sense of the term.
Despite the certainty of Wilson and Reichman regarding the AAUP’s “extensive” literature on extramural utterance, there is surprisingly little in AAUP literature that might constitute an explicit definition. Often, it is as if the writers of the documents assume that the audience knows what they are talking about when they use the term, and thus their definition is implicit in the discussion and examples. For example, the AAUP’s recent investigative report on Salaita tries to make the case that Salaita’s tweets were extramural, “regardless of whether they were related to his area of expertise” because he was speaking as a citizen. To validate this opinion, the report relies on the “definition of extramural speech” in the AAUP document Protecting an Independent Faculty Voice: Academic Freedom after Garcetti v. Ceballos:
[P]rofessors should… have the freedom to address the larger community with regard to any matter of social, political, economic, or other interest, without institutional discipline or restraint, save in response to fundamental violations of professional ethics or statements that suggest disciplinary incompetence [italics mine].
I endorse everything quoted in this passage. However, my problem is that in Protecting an Independent Faculty Voice this passage is not offered as an explicit definition of extramural speech. The authors of the Salaita report, however, declare this passage to be an explicit definition of extramural speech and then disregard the part of the sentence that I have italicized to posit this “definition” as proof that, when a professor speaks as a citizen, the question of whether he or she speaks within his or her area of expertise is irrelevant. This was not an attempt at deception, but rather reflects the permutations that can occur when trying to supply evidence for an argument that is inherently flawed. Academic Freedom and Tenure: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has many virtues. Considering the significance of the Salaita case, this report may stand as one of the notable investigative reports in the Association’s history. But it got extramural utterance wrong.
In some recent AAUP documents, the implicit distinctions that are made between extramural and intramural speech clearly stem from the thinking of Matt Finkin and Robert Post, whose For the Common Good may stand as the definitive explication of AAUP thought as evolved through numerous AAUP policy documents and Committee A statements. I agree with Wilson that there is a difference between the writings of Finkin and Post and AAUP documents, but Wilson can’t be unaware of the influence of Finkin and Post, both long-time members of Committee A, on AAUP policy. I wonder if he would be so quick to dismiss their ideas if he agreed with them. Wilson’s understanding of extramural utterance also differs from mine, and therefore he may read the same passage that I read and draw conclusions that differ. Wilson dismisses an implicit definition of extramural utterance that I derive from Ensuring Academic Freedom in Politically Controversial Personnel Decisions, as “inaccurate,” but it is not inaccurate. The passage in question (which offers several sentences I could have cited in my essay) argues that campus speech codes make no more sense, especially in this era of social media, than it would “make sense to permit…freedom of expression only to the extent that it directly relates to an academic’s particular area of study” [italics mine]. Presumably, these expressions that “directly relate to an academic’s particular area of study” are not assumed to require the protections of extramural utterance because they are intramural. Wilson’s interpretation of this passage would be plausible except that, as I point out in my footnote to this section, the discussion of extramural utterance in Ensuring Academic Freedom is based on Finkin and Post. Given that the authors of this document have so thoroughly internalized Finkin and Post’s views on extramural utterance, which are essentially in accord with my own, I’m confident that it is not my reading of this passage that is the inaccurate one.
Wilson doesn’t seem very impressed by my understanding of the legal foundations of academic freedom, either. He finds my view that “First Amendment protections do not generally apply to the workplace” to be “not quite right.” (I’m flattered he thinks I came close on this one.) I know few people in the workaday world who think that they can publicly criticize the policies of their employer and not be fired, or that they might protest their firing in court because they have a legally protected right to publicly criticize the policies of their employer with impunity. That’s what I mean by “First Amendment protections do not generally apply to the workplace.” As for the academic workplace, Wilson notes, “Eron is simply assuming that academic freedom is not a right under the First Amendment, [an idea that] the Supreme Court rejected in Keyshian and continues to reject.” Wilson is correct that Keyshian extended First Amendment protections to academic freedom. As for his faith that Keyshian continues to represent prevailing legal sentiment almost fifty years later, as Jake Barnes says in The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” If anybody today is counting on the justice system to protect their academic freedom, they are rolling the dice. There have been some recent judicial decisions that have been less discouraging than others have been, but some day—perhaps in a couple of years, in consideration of Salaita—the Supreme Court is going to reconsider academic freedom in light of Garcetti. I am not confident that the AAUP will welcome the outcome.
Would that be a catastrophe? Probably. But it will be even more disastrous if professors understand academic freedom as a protection more than as an obligation. Unlike most scholars who engage issues regarding academic freedom, my views are influenced by the fact that, in 25 years of teaching at the university level, I did not for a second enjoy legal protection for my academic freedom. In this time I saw many instances when faculty—contingent faculty such as myself—were disciplined for their speech. This was never in response to incivility—incivility was mostly practiced by those with a stake in maintaining the status quo—or to the voicing of political opinions, but was always against faculty who took issue with the opinions or ideas of the program director or department chair. I was fired on numerous occasions for voicing opinions that my program director found to be inconvenient, only to win back my job thanks to a favorable appeal system. (To be fair to myself, it is an appeal system that I was instrumental in implementing.) I favor legal protections—I’ve been instrumental in formulating and advancing legislative proposals to expand academic freedom rights to all faculty, probably as much as anyone in the AAUP has, but as a career at-will employee I was never able to count on those rights.
While I lack Wilson’s habitual certainty, here is one thing of which I am certain: I would not have won back my job through the courts, in the unlikely event that I could have found an attorney to take my case. But I did not voice those opinions with the expectation that my program directors—or, in the case of my work on the Instructor Tenure Project and the Mitchell and Churchill reports, the administration of my university—would find my opinions to be welcome. As an instructor, my only means to help ensure that the AAUP’s notion of the “common good” was not empty rhetoric—a slogan “somebody threw in” to justify special privileges for professors that do not exist in other professions—was to practice academic freedom, even if, as a practical matter, I had none. I have seen many contingent colleagues in Colorado and elsewhere—colleagues with no special privileges—practice academic freedom with courage that has exceeded mine. If more professors were like these contingent colleagues and practiced academic freedom as an obligation—rather than as an excuse to speak as recklessly and destructively as they desire, with impunity—academic freedom may have a chance to survive even if the legal protections are stripped.
I appreciate that Wilson has always said very nice things about the Colorado Conference’s Report on the Termination of Ward Churchill (JAF 3), for which I was the lead author. He said these things publicly at a time when not a lot of people connected with the AAUP were inclined to do so. But Wilson seems to see an irony—that if my “theory of extramural utterances was accepted [at the time], then Churchill could have been fired solely for his idiotic blog post about 9/11 victims.” For one thing, Churchill’s “idiotic blog post” wasn’t at issue at the time of my involvement in the case. The university administration had declared that Churchill’s speech was protected by the First Amendment, but then charged him with numerous counts of research misconduct. The focus of the report was not on whether Churchill’s speech was protected, but on the fatuous nature of the charges against him, as well as on the machinations of the faculty committee that convicted Churchill of academic crimes that he did not commit. But I think that, on this, at least, Wilson may be right. Since the time that I wrote the Churchill report (with Suzanne Hudson and Myron Hulen) I have thought much more deeply about intramural and extramural utterance than I had at the time. In view of my current thinking, it is certainly possible that a decision to consider Churchill’s speech as intramural, and thus of relevance to his professional profile, would be defensible. But I do not think that a decision by a faculty committee to fire Churchill based solely on that speech, when the speech is taken into consideration with the entirety of his professional record, would have been rational. At the time Churchill was the most frequently cited scholar in his field. He had won every significant award offered by the University of Colorado that honors service, teaching, and contributions to the spirit of the University. Long after his speech had been pasted across headlines, seemingly endlessly, Churchill remained what he had always been—one of the most popular and credible teachers in the history of the university. Even a faculty committee stacked with professors inclined to find Churchill’s 9/11 posting to be despicable would have been hard put to argue that Churchill was unfit to participate in the academic profession.
Wilson views Cary Nelson and me as a tag team out to destroy academic freedom as we know it today. (I haven’t mentioned Nelson because he’s capable of speaking for himself). Wilson argues that “Nelson and Eron’s theory, if adopted, would be the worst disaster for academic freedom in the AAUP’s history,” and that “Eron and Nelson want to turn back the clock and make professors scared to open their mouths on anything they’re knowledgeable about.” I assume that Wilson is being rhetorical, and he doesn’t actually think that I would find such a circumstance to be desirable. I hope readers of my essay will judge for themselves. I hope they’ll agree with me that Wilson seems not to have read large portions of my essay where I explicate AAUP policies on due process, civility, and the necessity of weighing speech (whether extramural or intramural) against the entirety of one’s professional profile—all measures that protect academic freedom.
But I think it does the AAUP no credit to pretend that under no circumstance can speech, when issued as a citizen, be of relevance to a professor’s professional profile. The slippery slope that Wilson sees—that if Salaita’s tweets, which clearly fall within his area of academic expertise, were considered intramural utterance, every professor will quake in his boots and academic freedom will soon be dead—is as facile as it is protectionist. There is a difference between something a professor is “knowledgeable about” and that professor’s area of academic expertise; I think that professors—most, anyway—can tell the difference. But if, as Wilson seems to think, professors are too feeble to know the difference and will be too cowardly to speak out for fear someone might confuse the two, the challenges facing the AAUP, in creating policies that might attract the best minds to the profession, may already be too steep to surmount.
“that it is difficult to view his more scholarly writings other than as filtered through that speech…” By who?
It may seem paradoxical, if not perverse, that I have “liked” both this post and John Wilson’s earlier post written in response to Don Enron’s article in the most recent issue of Journal of Academic Freedom. But this is exactly the sort of exchange of strongly held opinions that this blog should ideally facilitate–arguments from all sides that are knowledgeable, thoughtful, articulate, and anything but dryly academic.
Eron is right that the AAUP does not provide absolute protection for extramural utterances. If the utterances prove professional unfitness, however rare that is, they can be punished. But the “professional unfitness” standard is very different from the standard evaluation of faculty for hiring, tenure, and promotion based on a “professional profile” that includes any extramural utterances related to any part of one’s academic work.
According to Eron, “if a faculty committee, charged with assessing Salaita’ s professional fitness, considered Salaita’s speech as intramural utterance—speech that was of relevance to his professional performance—the committee might arrive at a negative assessment of his fitness.” Not if they were following AAUP standards. Even Cary Nelson has admitted that Salaita’s tweets don’t meet the AAUP’s extramural utterances standards of “professional unfitness.” Instead, Nelson proposes an end run around academic freedom by simply declaring that certain extramural utterances are actually part of a scholar’s academic work, and therefore can be used in academic evaluations to reject their hiring (even when the evaluations are done by trustees and chancellors rather than academics, and even when the evaluations don’t actually evaluate any academic work).
That’s what Eron is talking about: not using the “professional unfitness” standard for extramural utterances, but using instead a “professional profile” standard in which any controversial tweet any professor has ever made can be used to get them un-hired or denied tenure if it has any relevance to their academic work.
There’s much more of Eron’s blog post that I disagree with, but that’s what this debate is about. That’s the disaster that I fear: the notion of the AAUP endorsing the use of tweets, blogs, letters to the editor, or other extramural utterances to justify rejecting the hiring of a controversial professor, or to deny them tenure. And although Eron, unlike Nelson, is careful to say that faculty committees should do this, the reality is that if you fundamentally change academic standards, administrators can enforce them, too.
So, if I speak on an issue that falls within my area of expertise in a manner that provokes controversy, I can be held accountable, but if I do so on an issue outside of my area of expertise, I cannot be held as accountable? On a certain level, that seems ass-backwards.
But, let’s say that we accept that principle, then what is the standard by which my speech on an issue that falls within my area of expertise to be judged? How does one protect politically risky positions? How does one insure that all debate does not become muted on topics related to the discipline that are provoking the most heated political debate in the broader world outside of the university? Are the standards academic or political or somehow both? And what board internal to a department, college, or university–or external to any individual institution and connected instead to a professional association–will be tasked with determining someone’s fitness?
Wow, even posing those questions is very unsettling!
So, although I agree that our ability to protect academic freedom does depend in practical terms on whether we have a consensus of opinion, within and beyond the AAUP, on what ought to be protected and not, I do think that there has to be a firm principle against which those decisions can be measured, even if that principle appears sometimes to be idealized, rather than pragmatic.
That seems to be the way most American principles or values have been articulated.
Yes, and according to this logic, if two professors sign a letter criticizing the government, the math professor cannot be punished, but the political science professor can be un-hired or denied tenure.
I’m a math professor, and I’ve published controversial letters to the editor–though the controversy was over academic policy, not mathematics. I did use mathematics, however (in expressing the unlikelihood that reductions in proposed raises were made at random, as opposed to being made in retaliation for opposition to the president). Suppose my mathematics had been incompetently performed; would that amount, then, to something that could be held against me professionally by the university?
Yes, I think it could, in principle, and that principle is part of what keeps me honest in public pronouncements that include mathematics. But the reality is that a bit of failure-to-carry-the-one does not hold a firefly’s gleam to the sun of my entire body of mathematical research, nor to twenty-five years’ teaching at the university. It’s simply not relevant.
Suppose instead my mathematics had been fraudulently performed, that I had used the prestige of my position as a full professor of mathematics to give credibility to an argument I knew to be false, for purely political purposes. That would be reprehensible, and it could conceivably substantiate charges of professional misconduct.
But who is in a position to judge either of those issues–the relevance of mathematical incompetence done in the public sphere or the gravity of mathematical fraud perpetrated on the public? My peers: my chair, my department; not the administration.
If the political scientist writes a letter criticizing the government that betrays professional incompetence or (say) fraudulent citing of literature, then, in principle, his professional competence could thereby be called into question–by his peers, not the administration.
Salaita’s public utterances, on areas connected to his professional expertise, conceivably could reflect ill on his professional competence. But who is in a position to make that judgement? His peers: the department that was charged with finding a candidate and recommending his hiring; not the administration.
One’s professional reputation is always, and legitimately, at stake in anything one does related to one’s profession. But then it is up to one’s professional peers to make judgement thereby–including balancing of the controversial element against the entire rest of the record. *That* is what protects us from being punished for controversial public utterances; not that they are automatically outside the realm of consideration, but that the judges of such consideration are (well, should be) our fellow experts.
Steve Harris
I call it the Nelsonian stretch, recognising Dr. Nelson has been in many areas a staunch defender of academic freedom: If one speaks, utters, and writes an extramural utterance on a topic that is also examined by one’s scholarship, it can be adjudged as scholarship. So if one writes a book on the Vietnam War that wins a Pulitzer Prize, but tweets an expletive-filled denunciation of the war with a full complement of four-letter words, it can be evaluated as inappropriate, unprofessional scholarship leading to sanctions.
A Facebook statement, blog post or tweet is qualitatively different than publishing a piece of scholarship in a referee journal or with a university press. I think the effort to establish a linkage of extramural utterances to one’s scholarship as a means of purging unpopular ideas, is nothing more than censorship.
“A Facebook statement, blog post or tweet is qualitatively different than publishing a piece of scholarship in a referee journal or with a university press.”
This is what I have been thinking. A tweet can determine whether someone is fit to do research or be a teacher?? How about this: a scientist is religious. Does an unscientific belief in an invisible entity for which there is no empirical evidence mean that person cannot do research? No, because many successful scientists are religious. If I looked around I could probably find examples of important scientists with crackpot beliefs.
The somewhat strained efforts to challenge Prof. Eron’s arguments are complicated further by the fact that Steven Salaita himself denies the very distinction being defended here: he SAYS that his social media posts are part of his professional work.
When did he say this?
I recall him saying more or less explicitly this in a post on Twitter, but his older posts no longer appear on his site. Here is an interview with him, posted in AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom, in which he asserts much the same thing:
http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/SotoandKannan–JAF6.pdf:
In other words, online media’s affordance for rapid dissemination of dissenting public opinion can be understood as an extension of the kinds of clashes that scholarly writing can (and does) produce. In Salaita’s case, his tweets can be understood as an extension of the geopolitical concerns raised in his academic work.. . . In his “Normatizing State Power,” Salaita also connects the “myth of untainted knowledge” to “archaic ethics of scholarship, which were created during an era of colonization in twentieth century United States and in an atmosphere of near – total Eurocentrism.” . . . Following this view on academic writing, Salaita’s tweets must be understood in the context of the rhetorical affordances and constraints of writing for social media. As he explained, this “disinterested methodology” is antithetical to the rhetorical project of writing for social media platforms. To reiterate, AAUP’s updated report on electronic communications already questions the possibility of maintaining the public and the private, the academic and the personal, in neatly compartmentalized spheres . . .The growth of social media calls such a distinction into question, because social – media sites blur the distinction between private and public communications in new ways. As increasing numbers of scholars turn to social media both for professional networking and personal expression, this blurring becomes increasingly important. What do scholars gain from writing for social media platforms, particularly when they are disseminating critiques and analyses that are aligned with their academic research? . . .The fact that Salaita has already published on the perils of engaging in what is sometimes dismissively called “political” work in academia suggests why he, and many others, rely on social media to more directly express what he terms “justice – oriented scholarship.” As he expressed in our interview, “Social media platforms allow us a space for organizing and for provoking and for being thoughtful in a different way . . . to go into spaces and onto platforms where you can state things directly and you can engage in a debate without all the baggage that comes along with academic debate.” . . . .. Salaita’s quote draws attention to the fact that the rhetorical considerations of writing for social media platforms are an important factor in understanding the public/private divide and how it affects academics, particularly in discussion of Palestine. In Salaita’s case, one cannot be separated from the other.
I think this passage that you cite actually makes a distinction between academic speech and social media speech.
It begins with
1)”online media’s affordance for rapid dissemination of dissenting public opinion can be understood as an extension of the kinds of clashes that scholarly writing can (and does) produce.”
This does not mean the two modes of discussion are the same and later in the passage distinctions are made.
2) “In Salaita’s case, his tweets can be understood as an extension of the geopolitical concerns raised in his academic work”.
Again, this passage does not actually assert that the two modes of discussion are the same. On the other hand, the authors do seem to have some concrete ideas on this subject in mind but they have not yet been spelled out.
3) ” In his “Normatizing State Power,” Salaita also connects the “myth of untainted knowledge” to “archaic ethics of scholarship, which were created during an era of colonization in twentieth century United States and in an atmosphere of near – total Eurocentrism.””
So Salaita is claiming there is a colonial and Eurocentric bias in scholarship but the details are not presented here.
4) “…Following this view on academic writing, Salaita’s tweets,”
I assume this means Salaita’s social media comments are, in his view, free of the aforementioned bias.
5) “must be understood in the context of the rhetorical affordances and constraints of writing for social media”
There are differences between academic writing and social media writing which have not been spelled out yet.
6) “this “disinterested methodology” is antithetical to the rhetorical project of writing for social media platforms.”
Social media writing does not follow the “disinterested methodology” of academic writing; it should not be held to that standard.
7) “AAUP’s updated report on electronic communications already questions the possibility of maintaining the public and the private, the academic and the personal, in neatly compartmentalized spheres . . .The growth of social media calls such a distinction into question, because social – media sites blur the distinction between private and public communications in new ways.”
It isn’t clear from this passage that a blurring of public and private means that tweets should be considered professional commentary. There is nevertheless something specific in mind.
8) “As increasing numbers of scholars turn to social media both for professional networking and personal expression, this blurring becomes increasingly important. ”
“professional networking” and “personal expression” are not professional expression.
9) “What do scholars gain from writing for social media platforms, particularly when they are disseminating critiques and analyses that are aligned with their academic research?”
This sentence indicates a possible connection between social media commentary and academic writing but it does not assert the commentary is academic writing.
10) “.The fact that Salaita has already published on the perils of engaging in what is sometimes dismissively called “political” work in academia suggests why he, and many others, rely on social media to more directly express what he terms “justice – oriented scholarship.” As he expressed in our interview, “Social media platforms allow us a space for organizing and for provoking and for being thoughtful in a different way . . . to go into spaces and onto platforms where you can state things directly and you can engage in a debate without all the baggage that comes along with academic debate.”
This passage indicates Salaita’s internet comments do have a connection with his scholarly work. However, I don’t think he intends these comments to be part of his scholarly record because the advantage, for him, of social media is that “you can engage in a debate without all the baggage that comes along with academic debate.”
*******
Getting back to the question of the status of twitter comments, I have a hard time seeing how they can possibly be regarded as scholarly writing because they are at most a few sentences in length.
Nick: This argument is simply not credible. He was not fired because of his scholarship; he was fired because folks like you and Joyce used your influence with Phyllis and nailed the guy. It was convenient for you, as you wished to protect your privileged status. He was fired for his tweets that were critical of Israel. CAFT wanted to punt to another committee in CLAS to assess his scholarship: I am glad the fired chancellor turned that down. It would have probably been another lynching, and set a terrible precedent. “Don’t call it draconian viewpoint cleansing; call it 142-character tweets that did not properly use the Chicago Manual of Style in footnoting.” Also Steven did not include a bibliography in his tweets; also I doubt he submitted his tweets for peer review. It is simply not credible to play this game and start calling social media musings scholarship, if they tangentially or directly relate thematically with what one wrote in a more formal venue.
Folks ought to be more forthright. you wanted him fired for his tweets, as we debated in the News-Gazette in competing op-eds. Your right to have that position. Your academic freedom to take a position as you did, but stick with it and don’t try to find other venues as the Nelsonian stretch to justify it. Peace!
In response to Nicholas Burbules’ argument, let me note that the AAUP and Salaita may have different views about what scholarship is. However, the fact that Salaita thinks of his tweets as another kind of scholarship does not remove them from extramural utterance protections: in an ideal world, extramural utterances also serve scholarly purposes. The AAUP’s rules, however, reject imposing scholarly standards on extramural utterances, even if the professor is trying to be scholarly or is talking about scholarly issues. The point is, nobody is granting tenure for tweets, so we shouldn’t be punishing professors for their controversial tweets. Until universities hire professors to tweet, and make tweeting part of their scholarly output, they can’t make tweets part of the scholarly evaluation process.
Of course, even if Salaita had used the exact same language in his scholarly work, the UIUC firing of him would still violate due process, was purely motivated by politics, and failed to even glance at his academic record. It cannot be justified even if you accept the Eron/Nelson/Burbules standards on extramural utterances. But we need to protect extramural utterances precisely because it is so easy to abuse their use, as the Salaita case clearly shows.
Peter: we are probably reaching the point of diminishing returns in this debate. I thought we were discussing the boundaries of extramural speech, not the decision about hiring or not hiring Steven Salaita. Like other colleagues posting in these pages you have decided you know all you need to know about who I am and what my motives were. You’ve read a few emails and you think that tells you the whole story of what happened and why.
All I want to say here is that this case raises real questions in my mind about AAUP’s principles and positions, and whether they are consistent internally and with each other. Going back to the original article that started this thread, I am not the only one who has those questions. But I can see why you want to change the subject, and make this about me.
Nick: You wrote: “Like other colleagues posting in these pages you have decided you know all you need to know about who I am and what my motives were. You’ve read a few emails and you think that tells you the whole story of what happened and why.”
While I am just a lowly contributor to a lofty blog, I believe you would have full access as a guest blogger to set the record straight. If you were to send me or the executive editor or one of the editors a reflection or clarification on the Salaita affair, I presume it would be published. The blog is very open to different viewpoints.
I understand you are not the only one who construes academic freedom protection for extramural utterances as limited to areas outside one’s scholarly expertise. Based on the email that I read, you were the most important faculty member engaged in the decision to dismiss summarily Dr Salaita. I felt conjoining your opinion and your role was appropriate in my reply.
Since I was traveling for the past week I am joining this exchange somewhat late but hope that my comment will still be read. For the record, my previous comment on John Wilson’s piece cited by Don Eron should in no way be taken as an “affirmation of Wilson’s posting” much less a lengthy one. My comment consisted of two paragraphs. The first corrected a comment by one davem1962 who falsely accused the AAUP of blaming “bad but powerful Jews” for Steven Salaita’s firing. The second paragraph simply stated that one sentence from the AAUP’s Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications statement employed by Eron to support his position was, in my opinion, “a mistake and an oversight” for which I, as Committee Chair, took responsibility. Nowhere did I state that those words were simply “tossed in,” as Eron’s use of quotation marks suggests I might have. And while I am certain that in all the many, many pages of AAUP statements, policies, and reports one can find other unfortunate or mistaken phrasings, I hardly think my acknowledgment of this one instance justifies Eron’s apparent fear that such acknowledgment could render all AAUP documents suspect.
But let me be more clear: My comment was directed solely at the use of this one phrase from one document. It was not intended and, in my opinion, cannot be read as either endorsement or disavowal of either Eron’s or Wilson’s views. Indeed, it would be highly premature of me to render such judgment if for no other reason than that owing to a busy schedule I have yet to read the JAF article by Eron that triggered this debate. Moreover, I am more than happy see this discussion continue without taking any public position of my own. I agree with Marty Kich that facilitating such discussions is precisely one of the important functions played by this blog. Moreover, the complex issue of extramural expression has long engaged the AAUP and no doubt will continue to do so for some time, whether one agrees with Wilson or with Eron.
However, for the sake of clarity it might be useful to remind readers of this statement from Committee A’s 1964 Statement on Extramural Utterances: “The controlling principle is that a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness to serve. Extramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member’s fitness for continuing service. Moreover, a final decision should take into account the faculty member’s entire record as a teacher and scholar.” It seems to me that this principle applies whether or not the expression is directly (or indirectly) related to a faculty member’s disciplinary expertise or not.
Admirably put. Intra- vs. extra-mural, it’s the same issue: Whatever one does, in any sphere, *if* it reflects badly on one’s professional expertise, then it can legitimately be held against one, with consequences to follow–but it is only one’s professional peers that are in a position to make such judgement, and such judgement must be made in the totality of one’s entire professional record.