Steven Salaita spoke tonight at the University of Illinois at Chicago before a supportive crowd of 150 about his new book, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom, which Aaron Barlow reviewed and I also reviewed last week. Salaita will be speaking on Oct. 13 in Urbana. He wondered about the controversy that got him fired, “Why was it…
The new issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom was released yesterday, including Cary Nelson’s much-anticipated essay. As an argument for firing Salaita, Nelson’s essay is a complete failure. Robert Warrior writes a response, but it’s unnecessary because nothing Nelson writes provides any evidence to justify Salaita’s dismissal. The bulk of the essay is devoted…
By Robert Warrior, Director of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign As the one-year anniversary of the debacle over the aborted appointment of Steven Salaita at Illinois approached, Inside Higher Education published an op-ed by former AAUP president Cary Nelson spelling out the lessons he contends we can all learn from…
One year ago, on September 11, 2014, Stephen Salaita was fired by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. This is not a date that has attracted any media attention on its anniversary, and seems to have gone completely unmentioned, perhaps because Salaita’s dismissal by this time was a foregone conclusion. But this is a…
By Andrew Scheinman The fallout at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) continues unabated: the Chancellor and Provost have both “stepped down,” and Steven Salaita’s legal team’s added destruction of evidence claims to their lawsuit. Here in Urbana-Champaign we’re having a “red soybeans” moment, what with the show-trials and blood sports already occurring and, no…
University of Illinois Provost Ilesanmi Adesida will be resigning his position next week and returning to his faculty position in the College of Engineering. No reason was given in the announcement this afternoon to the campus by acting chancellor Barbara Wilson, but Adesida was one of Phyllis Wise’s most trusted subordinates, and his personal emails…
August 23, 2015 Dear President Killeen and Acting Chancellor Wilson, We the forty-one undersigned Executive Officers and campus leaders from departments and academic units across the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign urge you to help end the crisis that has plagued our university for more than a year. It has increasingly become clear that the…
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.…