The Salaita case and academic governance
This Thursday, September 11, the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois will meet and most likely discuss the case of Professor Steven Salaita.
For those who haven’t been following the case, here’s a quick summary: During the past academic year, Professor Salaita was offered and accepted a position as tenured professor in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He resigned his position at Virginia Tech, and then on August 1 he was informed that the Chancellor would not be forwarding his name to the Board of Trustees for final approval, a formality which apparently often occurs after new hires have started teaching their first classes.
The case has been reported in Inside Higher Ed, The New York Times, and many other places, and Corey Robin’s blog has been indispensable for making sense of it all.
Professor Salaita is an avid tweeter and combative critic of Israeli policy toward Palestine, and defenders of the Chancellor’s decision first argued that Salaita’s tweets about the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza were anti-Semitic. That charge seems to be overblown, and it was good to see Michael Bérubé and others criticize the Chancellor’s decision, despite their disagreement with Salaita’s views on Israel.
The debate shifted somewhat with the Chancellor’s August 22 statement, which emphasized the seemingly more formal charge of incivility:
What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them. . . . A Jewish student, a Palestinian student, or any student of any faith or background must feel confident that personal views can be expressed and that philosophical disagreements with a faculty member can be debated in a civil, thoughtful and mutually respectful manner. Most important, every student must know that every instructor recognizes and values that student as a human being.
The Office of the University President released a similar statement, saying that “we must constantly reinforce our expectation of a university community that values civility as much as scholarship” (a scary thought).
Civility is generally conducive to effective public discussion, and our talk shows could certainly use more of it. But civility is often invoked to silence critics of the powerful. Those who carry big sticks can afford to talk softly (but often shout anyway), while those who don’t may need more energetic means to make themselves heard.
In any case, as Brian Leiter explains in a wonderful television interview, no matter how intemperate Salaita’s tweets, the University of Illinois is on shaky constitutional ground. Leiter writes,
Contrary to the initial misrepresentations put into circulation by far right websites, none of the tweets were either anti-semitic or incitements to violence. Some were vulgar, some juvenile, some insulting, some banal. The First Amendment unequivocally protects Salaita’s right to express every one of those opinions on a matter of public concern, and to do so, if he wants, with vulgarity and insults.
Moreover, in many respects the charge of incivility is a red herring, and evidence suggests that the Chancellor’s decision was driven primarily by pressure from university fundraisers and wealthy donors.
So this case highlights important issues about the relation between polite and passionate speech, between public universities and private fundraising, and between public advocacy and classroom pedagogy. (By the way, Salaita is reported to be a respected and effective classroom teacher.)
But I think all of that is largely irrelevant to the immediate question of whether the University of Illinois should complete the process of hiring Salaita. That question is primarily about academic self-governance.
As Patchen Markell and others have pointed out, established principles of academic self-governance, as well as Illinois statue, require that any substantive evaluation of Salaita’s efforts as a commentator on public affairs, if appropriate at all, would have to be undertaken by the academic units involved in hiring him, not by the Trustees.
I said as much in the email I sent last week to members of the Board of Trustees. I have also signed a boycott statement by political scientists, which is one of many that together include thousands of people. If you’d also like to sign a statement and/or write the trustees before their Thursday meeting, you can find all the information here.