According to today’s News-Gazette, the University of Illinois trustees are scheduled to vote this Thursday on a settlement with Professor Steven Salaita. Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson informed the Senate Executive Committee of the news late this afternoon.
Click here for the agenda of Thursday’s trustees’ meeting. Item #21–“Authorize Settlement (Salaita v. Kennedy et al.)”–is at the bottom of page 4. The meeting will be webcast live here.
Stay tuned.
Good. A settlement will allow UIUC to bury all the dirt that would otherwise be uncovered during discovery and trial about what really went on.
As I’ve said before, my guess is it was mostly about the medical center, combined with perhaps satisfying the demand of a donor or two. By burying the truth we can look forward to the incident as being seized upon by all for their own purposes (sit was the Joos! it was the uncivil statements!), with little or no hope that the circumstances that caused this debacle being examined enough to be prevented in the future.
[Footnote. I’ve been friended by many pro-Salaita people because of my involvement; as a result I’ve seen that “the Joos” is apparently the way to avoid face book’s automatic flagging of anti-semitic statements; “the Joos” and “the Rothschilds” appear so often in some of these rants that it makes my skin crawl. Of course I haven’t yet friended any staunch Israel supporters, from whom I’d no doubt see references to “dirty arabs” and all the hate speech on that side of the fence. All of which again makes me certain that the thing to do in the Salaita case is emphatically NOT to let the facts escape.]