It’s 6:50 in the evening on Wednesday, October 8, 2014. The 7:00 event start time at Columbia College Chicago draws near. The lecture hall is filling up rapidly. The star attraction has not arrived. Professor Iymen Chehade, indeed a star in his own right, and I are waiting for Steven Salaita. A skilled, poised and charismatic student…
By Sharon Ann Musher In the aftermath of the board of trustees’ vote at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to terminate Steven Salaita’s conditional job offer, the scholar of Arab-American literature is pursuing two options. He has engaged the Center for Constitution Rights to sue the university. And he has requested that the American…
The Campus Faculty Association of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was an early advocate of an American Association of University Professors investigation of the university’s administration. Throughout the Steven Salaita viewpoint-cleansing assault on academic freedom, CFA has sustained an impressive advocacy in support of academic freedom and shared governance. One of the benefits in being engaged in AAUP matters, is the…
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure is apparently investigating the Steven Salaita case. What will be achieved is unclear since the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, the highest unit an appointee can appeal a dismissal on campus, has already cast its unseemly vote to dismiss the professor eleven…
Hank Reichman, the First Vice-President of AAUP and a frequent contributor to this blog, is marking his retirement by teaching a seminar on the history of academic freedom in the American university. Unprompted, his provost handed him a sizable check and invited him to organize a broader symposium, a speakers series, on the history of…
Here’s a creative but effective educational and organizing tool that our colleagues in the AAUP chapter at Front Range Community College in Colorado have published and which merits the broadest distribution: The Adjunct Cookbook, described as “48 pages of foodbank-friendly concoctions,” including “No Bucks Coffee Drinks,” “The Frappes of Wrath,” as well as “high-fat,…
UPDATED ITINERARY SEPTEMBER 24, 2014: Professor Steven Salaita, who had been appointed as an associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is planning a five-day speaking tour in Chicago not only to seek a reversal of the sudden cancellation of his appointment, but also to defend other critical-thinking academicians who dare challenge the ideological preferences of chancellors,…
The American Association of University Professors censured Northeastern Illinois University at its annual meeting this past June. The annual meeting launched the centennial celebration of the Association’s founding. The censure was an appropriate sanction for the tenure denial of John Boyle, a linguistics professor at the university, who has since moved on to another institution.…
This is a letter from the University of Iowa AAUP chapter to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise seeking reinstatement of Professor Steven Salaita. It is admirable that an AAUP chapter from another campus would engage itself in this manner. I think chapter solidarity in upholding AAUP principles and statements is essential in affirming the…
Two days ago I posted a piece on this blog that asked, “Is ‘Incivility’ the New Communism?” In that post I suggested that recent attempts to enforce standards of “civility” at colleges and universities, often, as in the Salaita case at Illinois and the Marzec incident in Ohio, in response to pro-Palestinian expression, recalled previous…