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…
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,…
The following essay originally was published on the anthropology blog Savage Minds. By Martin F. Manalansan IV and Ellen Moodie* The crisis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has become known as “the Salaita case,” or just “Salaita.” In common parlance the surname refers not so much to the Palestinian American literary scholar…
Shortly after the AAUP’s annual membership meeting placed the administration of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) on its list of censured administration for its summary dismissal of Professor Steven Salaita in response to his anti-Israeli comments on Twitter, I received an email from an old friend from the California State University Academic Senate,…
Yesterday evening, UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise sent out the following mass email: Dear Colleagues: I write to address the June 13 vote by the American Association of University Professors to censure the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign administration. The censure is focused on the hiring decisions and processes involving Professor Salaita, as well as AAUP…
Today, members of the AAUP at its annual meeting voted overwhelmingly to censure the administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign because of the dismissal of Steven Salaita. Harry Hilton, president of the UIUC AAUP chapter (and who was also president of the chapter in 1963 when UIUC was censured for the firing of…
The AAUP is holding its annual meeting today, June 13, 2015, and voting on the question of censuring the University of Illinois administration over the dismissal of Steven Salaita. Salaita was unable to attend, but sent this statement that was read at the meeting. I wish to thank the AAUP leadership for its advocacy on…
By Andrew Scheinman Two weeks ago I wrote a short post for academeblog.org discussing the facts I’d learned by filing Freedom-of-Information-Act (FOIA) with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) on the Steven Salaita Affair, a post in which I also considered the follow-up investigations into that Affair by the UIUC Committee on Academic Freedom and…
By Andrew Scheinman A few weeks ago, the AAUP released its Report on the Steven Salaita affair at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), in which it concluded that UIUC and its Chancellor Phyllis Wise violated Salaita’s academic freedom and committed serious breaches of governance when they “un-hired” Salaita by Wise’s not forwarding his hire…
The following talk by Michael Rothberg, Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, was prepared for a Campus Faculty Association forum on shared governance and academic freedom at the University of Illinois in Urbana on February 13, 2015.…