This morning, Sept. 11, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees will meet in Urbana, and the trustees show no signs of backing down from their support for the firing of Steven Salaita. But the protests continue: at noon, the Campus Faculty Association and other campus unions and students will hold a rally at UIUC.…
Steven Salaita issued the following statement today in a press conference near the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For more about his case, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights. My name is Steven Salaita. I am a professor with an accomplished scholarly record; I have been a fair and devoted teacher to hundreds of undergraduate and…
Steven Salaita will be speaking in Urbana tomorrow, Tues. Sept 8, at a 12:30pm press conference at the University YMCA, 1001 S Wright St. The press conference will follow an 11:30am student walkout and rally on the quad. The press conference will feature several speakers: Professor Steven Salaita Professor Robert Warrior, director of American Indian Studies…
By Marjorie Heins, founder of the Free Expression Policy Project and author of Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge. By now, the controversy over University of Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s August 1, 2014 decision to terminate the faculty appointment of Professor Steven Salaita has gone viral. A multitude…
University of Illinois emeritus professor Robert Weissberg published an essay this week with the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a right-wing think tank, in which he argues about the Salaita case: “The trustees are not guilty of violating free speech; their sin is cowardice in overseeing the faculty. They did not perform…
Below is a Sept. 2 letter (read the full letter with footnotes here) from Katherine M. Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University, to UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise. Dear Dr. Wise: Last June several University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty invited me to your campus as part of The Cultures of…
This is a guest post by Adria Battaglia, a contributor to the newest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Professor Battaglia received her PhD in rhetoric and language from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. She served as a visiting professor at Illinois College for one year before returning to Texas to join the…
UPDATE: This report may not be accurate. English professor Ted Underwood just tweeted: Regret to say that last night’s report from students appears premature. Faculty have since met with Wise, & report no change in position. University of Illinois student Stephanie Skora reports back on a meeting that a group of students had with Chancellor…
Here’s what Christopher Kennedy, chair of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, told the Chicago Tribune in an article in today’s newspaper: “We create an environment appropriate for students to learn in,” Kennedy said. “In the few instances where the board has been brought into decisions regarding faculty, our position has been really consistent…
If you want to engage your students in a thoughtful debate about public discourse in the age of Facebook and Twitter, you can of course use the ten or twelve excellent posts that John K. Wilson, Hank Reichman, Michael Berube, and others have made to this blog on the Steven Salaita case. If you would like…