This afternoon, the University of Illinois trustees’ Executive Committee voted to reject Phyllis Wise’s negotiated settlement and $400,000 payout to resign last week, effective today. The Executive Committee is made up of Chair Ed McMillan and trustees Karen Hasara and James Montgomery (the lone trustee who changed his mind about Salaita and voted against dismissing him). All…
Northwestern law professor Steven Lubet has an op-ed in today’s Chicago Tribune with the headline, “The writing is on the wall, U. of I.: Offer controversial scholar Steven Salaita a job.” It’s a well-written piece expressing Lubet’s previously expressed opinion that Salaita an anti-Semite and an idiot, but arguing that the U of I’s fight…
What are the most important revelations in Phyllis Wise’s secret personal emails that were uncovered on Friday? Perhaps the key fact is that these emails existed at all. Using a personal email address to evade FOIA requests is clearly unethical and possibly illegal. And confessing that this was the purpose, as Wise did, is remarkably stupid.…
The sudden resignation yesterday by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign chancellor Phyllis Wise now has a clear explanation: the U of I announced today that Wise and other administrator were using personal email accounts to engage in secret discussions about sensitive matters, and released new emails about the Salaita case. In one email to a…
The National Review’s Phi Beta Cons blog has yet another entry in its seeming endless series of posts predicting the imminent doom of academia. Like the world’s worst psychics, the conservative movement keeps declaring its certainty that higher education is a “bubble” and on the verge of annihilation. In reality, there is no bubble in…
Cary Nelson has an essay at InsideHigherEd today (along with Michael Rothberg) on the Salaita case. Here’s my comment on Nelson’s piece. First, I must note that absolutely nothing in Nelson’s essay is relevant to the actual reasons given by the chancellor and the trustees for firing Salaita. They have never questioned Salaita’s academic credentials,…
AcademeBlog invited Jay Schalin, Director of Policy Analysis at The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy to respond to a critique by John K. Wilson of Schalin’s essay on Gene Nichol and the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund at UNC-Chapel Hill. Below is Schalin’s response, which is crossposted at the Pope Center. No…
These are dark days for conservatives: 7 years of President Obama, gay marriage spreading across the land, health insurance coverage growing every day, and a collection of mediocre Republican candidates that make the words “President Clinton” seem like the future rather than the past. It’s enough to make a conservative blurt out “Jiggery-pokery” and bemoan…
I have an essay about the Salaita case posted today at University World News. Salaita’s dismissal and the case of Sara Goldrick-Rab may lead some people to think that professors must never use Twitter, but I think that would be a mistake. Twitter doesn’t cause controversial statements. There’s nothing about 140 characters that makes people…
Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of educational policy and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is under fire for tweeting to some incoming freshman an article about the budget cuts and attacks on tenure at her institution. The campus College Republicans started a campaign denouncing her tweets as “disgusting and repulsive” and declared, “The…