Follow the Money at the University of Illinois

Thank you for the link to Bonnie Honig’s letter, an interesting and powerful take on this matter.

Here’s hoping the flames of outrage continue growing.

I’ve just read “I would like to take this opportunity to state I was mostly wrong,” in the comments section of a blog about politics with the topic being at least tangentially Israel.

Wow. Good for you Gator90. I’m almost suspicious…

Carry on, all.

Yes, wow. Thank you Gator90! (A rare thing to hear anywhere. You made my day.)

Also thanks, Gator90. Clearly you are classier than I am, and that is a sincere compliment.

What I find interesting is that the name of this big donor is redacted, even though he/she made threats, and the university administration obeyed. Looks like we have an anonymous and unaccountable shadow administration.

How sad it is that public universities rely so heavily on private donations.

I for one cannot wait until rich donors get to deny jobs to academics who they vehemently disagree with.

That’s my viewpoint and you may not demean it, bitches.

That’s my viewpoint and you may not demean it, bitches.

Fine, but I think I can get you fired for that “bitches.”

#15 – yes, anyone who disagrees with you is a racist. Of course, Chancellor Wise is Asian American. But maybe she’s just a bootlicker to her white masters. That’s the road you’re going down, and you are welcome to it.

I’m actually bewildered by the opposition to Salaita at this stage. Absolutely flabbergasted. Andrew F’s position is now that Salaita is too much of a loose canon for University of Illinois so instead Virginia Tech should be pressured to take him back(although Im sure he’s been replaced at this stage) Bloix has run out of ‘clear eyed’ oppositional nonsense and so has reverted to reverse race baiting.
Bizzare.

Bloix: If I’d meant anyone, I’d have said something like “anyone”. I meant Andrew F. I don’t, for instance, at all think you’re a racist – I think you’re wrong about more or less every aspect of this case, but if you’ve said anything that would give off a whiff of glorying in the smackdown of another uppity subaltern, you’ve done it somewhere I didn’t see it.

I wouldnt support a scenario like this happening to any of those hypothetical monsters, personally.

There are actually quite a few countries were Holocaust denial could land you in jail:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial

I know. I didnt have any input.

“Frankly I suspect he simply didn’t read the terms and that his contacts at Illinois didn’t properly communicate the extent to which the offer was conditional on the recommendation of the Chancellor and the approval of the Board. In consequence, he resigned his position at Virginia Tech before his status at Illinois was assured. This was a terrible mistake.”

After all this time, you continue to demonstrate that you know nothing about academic hiring.

“I think if it’s a holocaust scholar denying the holocaust we’re into the territory of professional incompetence. If s/he’s just an expert on 19th centure French lit who denies the holocaust for some undefined contrarian/bigoted reason who had been offered the job, began to move and had it recindedat the last min, Id think that pretty obnoxious.”

Nope, no, nine, no way. This is too far for me.

a teacher who can’t be trusted with students who don’t agree with him.

As has been pointed out in other threads, there is zero evidence in support of this and abundant evidence, in the form of his teaching record at Virginia Tech., refuting it.

“It may be too far for you, but if we’re talking about a public institution here, firing someone purely because of a political belief unrelated to the performance of his or her job (especially if its expressed in an extramural setting) is pretty clearly a violation of the person’s First Amendment rights (as Brian Leiter points out). There’s no exception for particularly noxious political beliefs.”

One, I am not an American so I really don’t have to care about what your, extremely flawed, founding document says. And two, I don’t believe that the first amendment covers speech that prevents a person from doing her job. If my job involves teaching people of welsh descent and I post a bunch of posts talking about how evil and stupid all welsh people are I would not get to keep my job. And rightly so. We do not want racists and liars using public money to spread their hate.

@jdkbrown: I’ve cited the relevant documents with respect to the University of Illinois, and have even cited documents from Cornell University (which has a similar procedure) that describe, explicitly, the degree to which faculty may sometimes think that higher approval is a mere formality, and why that thinking is mistaken. Perhaps academic hiring at your institution works differently. Or perhaps you simply are under the impression that it does because department recommendations are frequently approved. But in any case, the terms under which tenure is provided at the University of Illinois seem quite clear to me based on the language of the governing documents. If you think I’ve missed something, please, let me know what that is. I’m open to new facts.

@Bloix – Very well said, though I wonder whether you might be judging Salaita with too much certainty? Everything you’ve said could very well be true of him, but sometimes we write or say things in the heat of emotion that don’t accurately convey how we’d actually treat other people. Don’t get me wrong – what he’s written makes your conclusions entirely reasonable – and from a hiring vantage, a reasonable person might want to pass on the risk, but on a personal level, injecting a bit of uncertainty may not be unreasonable.

Regarding the email traffic, the reported redactions in the released correspondence deepens my belief that the email traffic likely holds little that would be harmful to the University, since certain redacted portions that seem to occur early in the traffic quite likely suggest that the University’s lawyers be consulted.

MPA – are you saying Welsh people arent evil ; ) Anyway, what if you were found saying all Republican conservatives are evil ? Would that prevent you from teaching a class with young conservatives in it ?

@23: “I think if it’s a holocaust scholar denying the holocaust we’re into the territory of professional incompetence. If s/he’s just an expert on 19th centure French lit who denies the holocaust for some undefined contrarian/bigoted reason who had been offered the job, began to move and had it recindedat the last min, Id think that pretty obnoxious.”

I’ve met some academics who are respected in their fields, apparently with deep knowledge of subject matter, but who have beliefs concerning unrelated fields that are simply moon-bat crazy. And it somehow makes me wonder if they are actually as smart and knowledgable as they seem to be in their areas of expertise. Are they simply ignorant? Why don’t skills in marshaling evidence and logic transfer?

@Palindrome 41

I dont think those within the golden circle know as much as we all assume, which is why specialisation is such a positive. If theyve passed whatever standards their professional subsection demands and have been greeted with two thumbs up across the board AND think the world is flat, I guess Ill go with the consensus(while remaining sceptical)

Put it this way; you have a very good, efficient plumber who thinks electricity comes from God and the welsh are evil. Why would you not hire him if he fixes your pipes up good ?

#24

I think if it’s a holocaust scholar denying the holocaust we’re into the territory of professional incompetence.

What if instead it’s someone who thinks that not so many Jews died in the death camps because large numbers of people suspected of being Jewish did not survive to reach the camps.

That some particular gas chambers thought to be used to kill victims with cyanide were not designed adequately for that purpose and were instead used to fumigate clothing etc, and the real death chambers were elsewhere, perhaps using carbon monoxide as so many other camps did, a product of internal combustion engines which was cheaper, safer, and more available.

What if it was not denial that the Holocaust happened, but denial that the Holocaust industry got all of the details correct?

Should that deserve a prison sentence?

@45 – Is that a rhetorical question? Or are you just using my comment as a lead in to make a more general point ? Why would I think it deserves a prison sentence when I’ve implied above it doesnt and said such a person doesnt even deserve to lose their job ? However, if the person was known as an anti semitic crank then I’d just ignore the them.
Anyway, Im not gonna argue *this specific* point any more.

This captures the larger point

https://twitter.com/lukelewis/status/494077593755217922

One question for those who do know about academic hiring: Corey mentioned on one of the other threads that Salaita got his job offer last October, to start in January, but the start date was postponed to August. 9 months is a lot of time for the Board to get round to approving it, and presumably covers most of an academic year’s worth of board meetings. Is it normal for a Board to take that long to approve or reject an appointment?

MPAVictoria 08.26.14 at 9:13 pm
“@ Bruce sign me up for thinking that Yoo should fired, shunned by decent people for the rest of his life and staked through the heart and buried on unconsecrated ground when he dies too make sure he stays dead.”

The point is that mainstream academia has accepted his behavior (and the California Bar).
Same with Dershowitz. If only anti-Zionists are held to this standard,……….

Well, if it’s a ‘rubber stamp’, the timing doesn’t matter, does it?

If it’s not a rubber stamp, then the timing does matter – in real jobs, you don’t start work until you are actually hired. Based on that, UI’s position is that Sailaita would have been drawing a salary, teaching and grading courses, sitting on committees making decisions (admission, advancement to candidacy, approval/rejection of dissertations) and spending university funding for months before being ‘really’ hired.

And the chancellor sat on the appointment through various meetings, giving no indication she wouldn’t pass it on, until it was too late to get board approval before he started work.

Did she have reservations before the tweets, or is that just her usual practice?

I was skeptical in 2008 about going after Yoo’s academic employment, mainly because I couldn’t imagine an appropriate process by which an academic institution assesses someone’s extracurricular activity. I also wrote re Yoo that “going after someone’s job rubs me the wrong way,” which certainly applies here.

I’ve done a lot of academic personnel work in the intervening six years and it has confirmed my belief in careful and open process, clear standards, and good documentation. One of the things the IHE story makes pretty clear is that the U of I board did *not* have a standard process for reviewing and deliberating on hires: reversing one was a highly unusual event.

The IHE story says “Seventy people wrote to Wise to urge her to block Salaita’s appointment … Only one … wrote to urge Wise not to block the appointment. ” I wonder how that one person knew to write, because this end-run effort against Salaita’s appointment seems to have been quite stealthy (possibly on the advice of Cary Nelson, who admits to having been involved in the effort). Wise and the board were pushed into this position without proper review and apparently without Salaita having any chance to respond to allegations, something that is built into tenure processes, for example.

All of this chicanery has been thrown into the shade, however, by the subsequent decision by Wise and the board to double down and eliminate a big chunk of academic freedom at U of I: the new standard that faculty cannot “demean” a “point of view” — in any forum at all. This was Tim Burke’s point that those letters make a bad situation much worse. There’s now a principle at U of I that extracurricular political speech is a relevant criterion in academic employment. Imagine if you’re one of the hundreds of folks there coming up for tenure in the next few years. If a big donor doesn’t like you or your work on _____, they just have to argue that their point of view was demeaned by something you said, and they can do a stealthy end-run to the board.

Which is why, to circle back, you have to think of teaching, student mentoring, research, institutional service, and so forth as specific professional responsibilities generating documentation by which someone’s success in those things can be assessed. Otherwise you’re open to this kind of abuse.

Here at UIUC I thought perhaps this LTE would help clear things up:

In their recent MassMails, Chancellor Wise and the University Trustees, led by Chris Kennedy, have clarified some poorly understood points about free speech in the University and in the United States. Chancellor Wise explains
“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.” Trustee Kennedy further elaborates “Disrespectful and demeaning speech that promotes malice is not an acceptable form of civil argument …. There can be no place for that in our democracy, and therefore, there will be no place for it in our university.”

In light of these clarifications, I would urge that certain texts often taught and discussed here should be modified to a form allowable in our democracy. Here are some examples to start what may be a lengthy process.

1. Admittedly this first example should probably just be dropped altogether, since the original quote is from an illegal group engaged in violence, including terrorism.

Old form: “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”

Acceptable form: “In our opinion he has at times exceeded the proportionate use of force.”

2. This next quote gives strong support to the corrections suggested by Kennedy and Wise to our old Bill of Rights, since the demeaning rhetoric of the old form led directly to massive bloodshed.

Old form: “Your wickedness and cruelty committed in this respect on your fellow creatures, are greater than all the stripes you have laid upon my back or theirs. It is an outrage upon the soul, a war upon the immortal spirit, and one for which you must give account at the bar of our common Father and Creator.”

Acceptable form: “You have not given full consideration to the feelings of myself and other people. That would seem inconsistent with the tenets of our religion.”

3. The viewpoint represented in the next quote is obviously irrelevant to our modern world, but perhaps still should be allowed if converted to proper form.

Old Form: “We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred.”

Acceptable Form: “At times money has led to what might be regarded as improper influence. I oppose that, although of course respecting those who might disagree.”

Once corrections like this are made to our old, unacceptable patterns of speech, we will be prepared to face the great challenges of our day.

The supporters of Salaita come in two flavors: the professorial prerogative protectors, who more or less admit that Salaita’s a jerk but argue that professors are allowed to be jerks,

This is a ridiculous assertion. It would be like me saying (a) Bloix is Jewish, and (b) his/her defense of UIUC is entirely informed by his/her Jewish identity. Now, I have no idea if you’re Jewish, let alone to what extent your Jewish identity—if such exists—informs your position, so I wouldn’t say this. Which anyway would be an amazingly unfair thing to say. By the same token, your utter refusal to even acknowledge that people objecting to Salaita’s firing might be moved by a sense of injustice is basically offensive.

I mean, look, coming from Andrew F., it wouldn’t be. It’s Andrew F. after all. But I’ve followed CT threads for several years now, and unless there’s more than one ‘Bloix’ who posts on these threads, I have some sense of your posting history on topics others than Israel/Palestine. It tends to be a tiny bit more gracious, from what I remember.

Anyone who dresses so overtly provocatively is asking for something like this to happen.

your utter refusal to even acknowledge that people objecting to Salaita’s firing might be moved by a sense of injustice is basically offensive.

I think the more prevalent problem on these threads was many people’s utter refusal to entertain the notion that critics of Salaita might be motivated by reasons other than fanatical zionism.

#63 Novakant

I think the more prevalent problem on these threads was many people’s utter refusal to entertain the notion that critics of Salaita might be motivated by reasons other than fanatical zionism.

I would leave out the “fanatical”. It seems like normal zionism to me.

I simply see no other idea what the objection could be.

What Salaita said about Israel and Zionists looks to me no worse than what Democrats and Republicans say about each other all the time.

What other explanation can there be except that zionists don’t want to allow such things to be said about Israel or about them?

“56: I am entirely serious. Your job as a professor is to teach the students, and a few other specific things, success in which should be documentable.”

Well I disagree. Some views are beyond the pale and prevent you from functioning in a teaching role.

@66: Possibly because the story has not made it out. I’m in a STEM field and only know about this story because I read here. Also, I’ve been made very, very aware of how inadvisable it is to have any other view than a pro-Israel one, at least as far as my colleagues are aware (perhaps a cautious and vague wishing for peace would be acceptable). I’m sure if you took a vote, our entire hallway, minus the canadian muslim guy, would vote like the US congress. Slightly paranoid? I don’t know, but I’m not going to test it out with my career. If I had tenure, I would probably sign.

In the sky 08.27.14 at 4:01 am
“Under the new rules, if a horrible anti-Semite were to speak at UIUC, would I be allowed to hold a protest sign saying “Your views are stupid”?”

(1) No anti-Semite would be allowed to speak there.
(2) If they were, you’d be allowed to hold up whatever sign you wished, since it’d be interpreted as pro-Israel.

J Thomas, what’s your operating definition of Zionism?

MPAVictoria,

J Thomas has said he is a moral relativist but he also thinks some things are right. I have tried to say that this is contradictory, and people are not likely to be convinced of his conviction about the moral rightness of some things (anti wage-slavery reforms) when he also pronounces that morality is relative. But he did not see any contradiction.

“Many people think this. What varies is which views they consider beyond the pale.”

Moral relativism. You can do better.

We can discuss which views are really beyond the pale, and which views many influential people wrongly think are beyond the pale.

But in the short run what matters is not who is right, but who can enforce their opinions.

Regardless whether it’s *really* beyond the pale, currently zionists often can persecute non-zionists and it does not work in the other direction.

If you think that’s the way it ought to be, then you can applaud them. If you think it’s wrong you can try to discourage them, but note that you might possibly be punished for it unless you can maintain your anonymity.

“But he did not see any contradiction.”

Wow. Really?

Yes.

Try this analogy. I can believe that there is no objective standard to decide what art is good art and what art is bad art, that it’s just aesthetic preference and nobody is inherently right or wrong.

But maintaining that belief, if somebody wants to put up a statue in my local traffic circle that I think is hideous, I have the right to tell them I don’t want them to. There’s nothing to say that I’m objectively right and the people who want it are wrong, but still I have the right to try to get what I want.

Or if — by the real objectively true morality that I haven’t found out about — I don’t have that right, I will try anyway.

I have just as much right to try to enforce my own morality, that I have chosen for myself and that may very well not be objectively better than anybody else’s, as I do to try to enforce my own artistic taste.

J Thomas,

Well objecting to the statue on grounds of poor craftsmanship or that it is a bit ugly is different from objecting to the statue on moral grounds. What if the statue was celebrating a very bad person or deed?

We have controversy here in Australia sometimes because what to make of the colonial period is a matter that people’s views differ. I think we should not make statues of explorers involved in massacres, if we want monuments to the period they should not glorify or ignore the terrible things that were done.

“The ABC was sent a photograph of one of the flyers which was found on a car windscreen.
Headlined ‘John McDouall Stuart is a murdering racist,’ the leaflet reproduces passages from a book about the explorer by historian John Bailey.
One of the passages, from the book In Stuart’s Track, tells of the Scottish explorer giving the order to shoot Aboriginal people during an encounter at Mount Hay, in central Australia.
It also calls on the Alice Springs Town Council to remove the statue, which was installed in Stuart Park last week after four years in limbo.
The creator of the leaflet, Alice Springs resident Kara Dodson, says that she hopes her actions will result in the eventual removal of the statue.
In a statement, she said the statue was ‘blatantly disrespectful to the first people of this country’ and that Stuart was responsible for ‘numerous killings of Aboriginal people’.
“…notably the massacre at Attack Creek on June 26 1860 (Stuarts first expedition) and the Mt Hay massacre on March 5 1862 (Stuarts third expedition),” she states.
“These incidents as well as several others are documented in the popular and well respected book ‘Mr Stuart’s Track’ -by John Bailey, 2006.
“These are not made up stories- they are fact.”
Ms Dodson said she realised her description of Stuart was ‘harsh’ but that it was based on the truth.
“I think that if people knew the truth about this man, they too would feel as passionately as I do about it,” she said.
However, historian Stuart Traynor says labelling Stuart as a murdering racist is unfair.
“I think that’s an unfair depiction of John McDouall Stuart and the attitude he had in relation to his very few encounters with Aboriginal people during his three trips through the Northern Territory,” he told ABC Morning’s Nadine Maloney.”

http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2014/07/29/4056338.htm

I still think some of Salaita’s statements were objectionable and deserving of criticism.

I think you’ll find that plenty of people of various political stripes agree with this.

It is a much more limited group that insists UIUC was justified in violating just about every established norm of academic hiring in order to fire Salaita after he had quit his previous job.

One more item – I presume that Salaita could request reconsideration (or that he could be recommended, again, by the department and the dean).

Were evidence to emerge of Salaita treating those who disagreed with him on Israel respectfully, that might, perhaps, place his tweets in a context that would undermine some of their negative value. Ideally, moreover, this evidence, if it exists, should be brought to light as “new facts for the Board to consider” and not as “more evidence that the Board was wrong.” If you really want to change someone’s position, rather than merely mount a stronger argument, you almost always need to allow him an opportunity to change his position without losing face.

I think there’s a little bit of arrogance at play here(which we’ve all done, god knows I have for sure) with non academics trying to tell academics about the rules and norms that underpin their profession.
Afaics(although there’s probably some selection bias involved) most people actually working in academia *oppose the university*, and for practical, professional(rather than ideological) reasons.
Should we not give a little bit more credence to people who are socialised into this career and who know it’s expectations and protections inside out, because their livelihood depends on it ? Who know what it actually takes to teach competently, do research to a high enough standard and hold yourself professionally ?Rather then people who, eh….dont?

@49
I suspect–although I do not know–that the 9 month delay in confirming Salaita’s appointment is probably because the board does this particular task of confirming hires once a year in the Fall, probably in order to include all new faculty, including those who have accepted offers relatively late in the process. Which would suggest a “rubber stamp” understanding of the process. As others have suggested, if we are to understand board approval as something more than a formality, something that can be lobbied against by, for instance, a pressure campaign from donors, the entire process of academic hiring will have to be revised. The very fact that the board would wait 9 months or more after an offer was accepted argues that the administrators at UI understood it as a rubber stamp.

@J Thomas #86

In #65 you appeared to say that “critics of Salaita” had to be Zionists, as you could see no other explanation for their criticism.

If you meant to say that Zionism was the only possible basis for wanting Salaita fired, you were mistaken. I have since changed my view, but until quite recently I supported the University’s decision, and I was no Zionist then either.

Lynne writes: I’m curious what the academics here think a university’s reaction would be if a professor, having been offered a tenured position, to start teaching in January, said he would like to accept it but would naturally await board approval

I think we will find out when the University attempts its next lateral hire, unless Salaita has tenure by then.

#89 Gator90

If you meant to say that Zionism was the only possible basis for wanting Salaita fired, you were mistaken. I have since changed my view, but until quite recently I supported the University’s decision, and I was no Zionist then either.

Interesting! Do you remember how you were thinking then?

Speaking as someone who made a lateral move similar to Salaita’s a few years ago, I don’t think any conspiracy theories are necessary. University boards are just slow.

OK, a third interpretation. They aren’t a rubber-stamp, they weren’t malicious, they’re just slow.

So by the time Salaita was fired, for the board to disapprove him they would have had to do it after he had been teaching awhile. That’s one possible explanation why the chancellor did it when she did, instead of giving the board a chance to do it.

How often does that happen? The slow board disapproves a hire after the start date?

If it hardly ever happens then they’re a rubber-stamp. If it happens enough that they aren’t a rubber-stamp, then that’s bad too.

J Thomas #93: “Do you remember how you were thinking then?”

Sloppily and with incomplete information. I felt some of Salaita’s remarks crossed the line into anti-semitism, and I’m cool with universities dismissing anti-semitic professors, as well as professors who espouse other types of ethnic, racial or religious bigotry. (After giving the matter more thought and learning more about Salaita, I realized that although some of his statements were in my view objectionable, he is no bigot and thus did not deserve his treatment by UI.)

#65 – “I simply see no other idea what the objection could be.”

Do you have any idea how hard it is to fire a tenured professor? See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Rancourt

If were Chancellor Wise and I’d woken up to an email saying, “have you seen this?” I would have said, Jesus H. Christ the guy isn’t even here yet and he’s ranting and raving and dripping spittle all over himself. Are we going to be stuck with him for the next 50 years?

And the General Counsel would have replied, you lucked out – you can withdraw the offer.

Tenure isn’t the right to stand on a street corner and harangue the passersby. It’s a lifetime meal ticket. You’re supposed to have demonstrated that you have certain qualities before you get it, and according to the AAUP those qualities include the ability to “exercise appropriate restraint [and] show respect for the opinions of others” when engaging in public discourse.

A university can’t fire a tenured professor who’s incapable of restraining himself, but it can decide not to hire one.

Sure enough, googling those phrases, you left out the important sentence preceding: When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline

Ah, you did. But you are very late to the discussion.

As I have said numerous times, a tenured professor can’t be censored, fired or disciplined for what he says. But before he is tenured, he can be judged on whether he is fit for tenure based on his ability to conform himself to the norms of academic freedom. And according to the AAUP, those norms include the ability to show restraint and respect.

J Thomas at #65 professed bewilderment that anyone could object to Salaita on grounds other than political disagreement. I have countered that you can object to Salaita on the grounds that one qualification for a tenured professor is that he can speak in public without gibbering.

There’s an argument over whether Salaita was hired – had tenure – or not. I have stated the reasons for my conclusion that he was not hired. If we was not hired, it is appropriate for the U to withdraw the offer based on the conclusion that Salaita is not qualified for the benefits of life tenure.

#103 Bloix

J Thomas at #65 professed bewilderment that anyone could object to Salaita on grounds other than political disagreement. I have countered that you can object to Salaita on the grounds that one qualification for a tenured professor is that he can speak in public without gibbering.

I guess that’s possible. One can object to the stupid-looking grin on his profile photo, or the quirk of his eyebrow, or anything at all.

But at this point I think the most plausible hypothesis is that Wise etc had no idea they were going to object until they found out at the last minute.

And probably they did not so much object to the tweets which were not so different from his previous tweets, but to the opposition he created among donors etc. Which helps explain why they were caught so flat-footed, because that opposition started at the last minute.

So then, I guess it’s possible that the donors etc who wanted him gone were complaining about his grammar, and his spelling, and his general style. Maybe his politics were only a coincidence, and if he had written better and more calmly they would have had no complaint.

If you believe that I have a great explanation for Israel’s latest Gaza attack you might want to buy. It’s smooth, comfortable, and it gets great mileage.

I’ve demonstrated why those arguments are incorrect.

No you haven’t.

There was a neo Nazi, of sorts it seems, fired from Fairleigh Dickinson some time back. No tenured, to be sure; but still, if one wants to petition for his reinstatement feel free.
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=&ie=UTF-8&q=fairleigh%20dickinson%20university%20neo%20nazi

Tom, if that’s supposed to be some kind of gotcha it’s a more than a bit weak. As you would know if you had actually read some of the reporting on the case.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acrookedtimber.org+%22scott+lemieux%22

Yes Andrew, you clearly are the one person thinking clearly on this issue ; 0

If Salaita could demonstrate that UI had in the past let new lateral hires begin teaching and performing other duties of a tenured professor (membership of appropriate committees, e.g.) before formal approval by the Board, it seems to me that he would have a strong court case under contract law (if both parties behave as though a particular contractual relationship exists — it exists). IANAL, so this may be wrong; OTOH, I was an academic department head and dean, and nothing senior administrators do under fire surprises me. This has the stench of fear all over it. Wise should be canned for abject incompetence and gutlessness, but I’m not holding my breath.

“Moreover, I think most academics understand that Board approval (where it applies) is not truly a rubber stamp even though they may expect it.”

And this explains a bit of the reaction. I think this statement is true for internal promotions. While denial of tenure is very rare at the President or board level, it does happen.

But I don’t think academics think about this issue much at all, one way or the other, when moving laterally.

But in both cases they have a job for life on the state’s dime at a public institution.

And belatedly, I would like to give a big thumbs up to gator90, whose comments on this thread have been gracious to the extreme, and whose @82 I’d happily sign on to.

js @120: Hm. Let’s see. Ad has been repeatedly pointed out on these threads, academics regularly resign, move cities, plan classes, and very often, start teaching before board approval comes through. You think most academics are utter fucking idiots?

Start from the premise that I am not an idiot and that most academics are not idiots. What alternative explanation might there be for why some academics move to a new institution, lured by the possibility of tenure, even when the University withholds the right to say no until after you’ve unsettled your life.

Palindrome, if you read my comment, you’ll see that I was discussing the case of professional ethics, as in John Yoo.

#119

I was an academic department head and dean, and nothing senior administrators do under fire surprises me. This has the stench of fear all over it.

Agreed. And it’s understandable. A sudden crisis at the end of July, that required immediate action. Way inside the administration OODA loop.

Wise should be canned for abject incompetence and gutlessness, but I’m not holding my breath.

It’s only one known mistake in a long career. She doesn’t have tenure at the job, but that shouldn’t get her fired.

Although her action has caused considerably more damage than a few tweets….

Bloix – here are 6 paragraphs of legal reasoning complete with citations.
Lemieux – neener neener neener!

I would have thought the thousands of words I’ve written on the subject makes clear why I find your arguments unpersuasive, but I would hate for you to be offended.

Let’s start with this: the question of whether Salaita was fired is not a simply a question of formal law. I think everyone understands that if you look at the language of the offer in isolation of the basic practices and norms of the profession — perhaps we can call this the “Halbig” reading — it appears as if the hiring process was complete. He might, and I certainly hope he is, be entitled to civil damages, but he might not.

Nonetheless, even if what UIUC did was within its formal legal authority, Salaita was fired and the firing obviously violates norms of academic freedom. UIUC apologists are asking us to believe that Salaita was not “hired” to perform duties he would have been performing for a at least a month before the pro forma approval went through. This is absurd. Salaita believed he had been hired, and by the basic norms of the profession he was. He moved quit his job and moved his family based on this expectation. Can you site a single example of a dean-approved job offer not getting the pro forma approval under similar circumstances?

He’s a jackass, a juvenile embarrassment to the word academic, and a teacher who can’t be trusted with students who don’t agree with him.

The idea that you can infer how someone teaches from her Twitter feed is deeply silly on its face. But the silliness is compounded in this case. If he “can’t be trusted with students who don’t agree with him” this presumably would have surfaced…at some point during his teaching history. But the letter justifying his firing, just like the hack apologias for UIUC, site absolutely no evidence based on his teaching and scholarship. A serious problem here, since under the norms of academic freedom these are the relevant criteria.

The supporters of Salaita come in two flavors: the professorial prerogative protectors, who more or less admit that Salaita’s a jerk but argue that professors are allowed to be jerks,

This, at least, is useful. You oppose the norms of academic freedom; you think they’re a racket. You have no objection to people being fired because the board of trustees disagrees with their political views; Coke Stevenson’s Texas is as good a way to run a university as any. Whether this is right or wrong is a matter of judgement; I evidently disagree. But Wise is claiming to support the norms of academic freedom. A claim that is rather undermined when she arbitrarily fires someone while citing precisely nothing about his scholarship or teaching.

and the political supporters, who argue that universities need more professors who are hostile to Zionist students.

[Citations of people who think that Salaita is hostile to Zionist students omitted.]

The first group makes objective arguments: Salaita was “really” hired, the Board’s powers are meaningless, there’s this thing I heard of an hour ago called promissory estoppel. I’ve demonstrated why those arguments are incorrect.

Again, you really haven’t.

The second group makes advocacy arguments: Salaita didn’t say anything offensive and anyone who says he did is suppressing speech in an evil cause. I’ve explained why I expect that these arguments are likely to fail. But only “likely” – the 1st A protects jackasses, so if Salaita can drape himself in it, he’s got a shot.

I agree that some of Salaita’s tweets were offensive, although it requires willful misreading to see them as anti-Semitic. Since I believe in the norms of academic freedom, however, I obviously do not think that offensive tweets are firable offense.

But it’s a horrible shame that this posturing clown has become the poster boy for academic freedom, the cause for which the defenders of the academy have staked their sacred honor. Academic freedom is worth fighting for. Steven Salaita is not.

This demonstrates a remarkable and fundamental misunderstanding not only of academic freedom but of the principles of free speech in general. People who don’t say things that anyone can consider offensive cannot be “poster boys” for academic freedom and free speech because the principles are not needed to protect them. “Academic freedom protects people unless they tweet some things I find offensive” is not a principle of academic freedom at all.

I feel kinda bad, because I publicly ripped this guy from my comfortably anonymous blogospheric perch, and he’s really n0t a bad guy at all.

Well, but you read what a bunch of zionists said about him, and their selective quotes.

It’s very easy to get taken in by that sort of thing. It happens a lot, to a lot of people.

Scott Lemieux @ 130

It’s a shame you have to work so hard to refute an argument so obviously made in bad faith, but I’m glad you’ve gone to the trouble. Bloix may take some temporary comfort from his braying defense of the indefensible, but the desperation evident in it tells us more than he’d like about what he’s really up to. Likewise with the University of Illinois’ administrators. They may believe that that the obviousness of their lies does them no harm — when power is sufficient to trump the claims of justice, this is often the case — but they’re mistaken. If no one believes you, all you have left is threats, and a university which willfully puts itself in that position is more of a threat to itself than to the victims of its casual injustices.

In a lateral move of this kind, the hiring university, I would think, normally would provide moving costs. If Salaita had negotiated with the department on this, and they had provided him with a budget to cover costs, this would seem to be another example of a presumed employment condition. To say “yes we will pay to move you for the express purpose of employing you” but “no you’re not hired” seems a little backward. What other institutions agree to provide moving costs without a presumption of employment?

Layman 139

You had me pegged exactly right. At that point, I had figured out I was wrong, but was, as you said, too churlish to admit it straightforwardly. I am working on being less of a churl (what a cool noun that is — I’ve never used it before).

@131 — Well, let me offer a charitable amendment. I would say that on the part of someone who purports to know enough and have thought enough about the content and context of Salaita’s tweets to write an op-ed about them, it requires a willful misreading to call them anti-Semitic. Someone getting their information mostly from these op-eds may not be guilty of the same misreading themselves. So you not have been willfully misreading the tweets because you weren’t aware of the context (which is eminently forgivable for someone commenting on blogs, as opposed to someone writing op-eds.)

Andrew F@141: I’m not sure that the issues of incurred costs and hiring norms are as separable as you suggest. Academics moving to different institutions are prepared to incur the costs because it’s so unheard of for universities to violate the norms of academic hiring the way that UIUC has done. As I said upthread, if this sort of behavior from administrators is now “on the table” then the whole process of academic hiring is going to have to change.

It was a misreading: inverted commas
Are clear (if one’s rudimentarily skilful).
But when they are used by Arab F-bombers
We might blame a bias that’s not fully wilful.

(To Scott Lemieux @ 1 4 2.)

Limericky Dicky #147

Shit, you said it better than I did, and with fewer words, and it rhymed. Well played.

A (once) young man one wishes were slimmer picked
Crooked Timber on which to post limericks
But the main problem with ’em
Was that they had no rhythm
His adherence to form thus was chimeric*

While to (guess who!), that mad would-be blogger, all
Of humanity bowed down to ZOG, or all
Of the Jewish part, anyway,
Give credit, he didn’t say
All that crap in the form (sic) of doggerel

*(sic) again, although it actually is a word apparently. I was thinking of starting the second limerick with the syllable “al,” instead of “While,” but screw it.

T @150
And I feel I’m beating my head against the wall a bit. In general, do the boards have the same power over lateral promotions as they do in internal cases? Is that power lost or diminished because this was a lateral hire with the accompanying timing and cost issues that we all recognize?

Though I haven’t been commenting recently I’ve been following, more or less, the discussion. The issue is not whether the board technically has the power; the question is whether boards ever exercise that power in cases short of e.g. intervening commission of a felony. The answer is, according to those who know: boards never exercise this power absent intervening commission of a felony by the person in question. Therefore the Chancellor’s decision not to forward Salaita’s name to the board and the board’s subsequent support of that decision represent a drastic departure from the established norms of the academic hiring process. Such a drastic departure that their application here amounts to real unfairness. I’m not sure why this point is eluding you, as it seems quite straightforward, at least to me.

For those not familiar with universities, here’s a story.

Suppose a state trooper crossed over a national border in pursuit of a “criminal”. This is highly unusual. Nobody has ever heard of this kind of thing, or truly thought this could happen. State troopers don’t cross borders, do they?

Now, it turns out, that under certain circumstances, the trooper would have been permitted to cross that line. Such as if there had been a felony committed.

But there was no felony committed. Actually the ‘crime’ was protected by the First Amendment. Very routine stuff, if a bit stupid. Guy has no criminal convictions.

Oh, but the trooper is banging the guy’s ex-wife.

UIUC looks, for all intents and purposes, to be possibly breaking the law, certainly violating all norms and conventions that academics are used to, and picking on a guy their corporate donors don’t like. I’m amazed they haven’t already apologized.

@152 153
Thanks. Just a factual question. Doesn’t the new school typically run through the tenure process again — hiring committee, outside readers, etc.? Also, aren’t there some laterals denied tenure (or see the writing on the wall) at a higher ranked departments that are offered tenure at the new school?

I’m not arguing about the perceived unfairness of the timing from the academic’s perspective at all. But the state told the board to have the final say on tenure. And the state is paying after all. The state might feel it’s not fair to let the school’s employees grant a job a life with their oversight. That’s not unreasonable to me. (And the idea that all laterals avoid the mandated test for internals seems very weird both legally and logically.) It just might be that the timing of board decisions in the future might have to change. Hence my questions.

#150 T

In general, do the boards have the same power over lateral promotions as they do in internal cases?

Let me put it this way. Imagine you have a job that you cannot be fired from. You are offered a job at higher pay, but they can fire you at will. How much more money do you need before you take the new job in place of the old one?

If tenured professors thought there was any chance that they were not getting a job but instead a bait-and-switch that left them without tenure anywhere, they would not move. They don’t believe it will happen.

What can blow the deal, is some giant surprise. “Did you hear about Bentley? He was found having a naked orgy with three co-eds, two high-school students, and a goat.” “Ouch. Hey, so his school will be hiring, right?”

So the question is whether Salaita did something which was so surprisingly horrible that it’s proper to renege on the deal.

In general, zionists say that he did, and non-zionists say he didn’t. But it looks bad to get a tenured professor de-tenured because of his political views. So zionists say that it wasn’t what he said, it was the way he said it. He could have any political stand he wanted — there are lots of tenured professors who have come out against Israel, and haven’t lost tenure yet, and that proves that they aren’t going after this one because of his views. It’s just that he said them the wrong way, too rudely. It’s a terrible, terrible crime that’s worth him losing his tenure over.

Apart from that there’s the legal question whether the university administration has the legal right to dump him. That will be determined by a court if it gets that far, and nobody’s opinion about what is fair or right or legal will matter except the judge’s, and possibly an appeals court judge. The contract appeared to say they had that right, but then have you installed any software and looked at the rights you agreed to? Most of them basicly say that if they upload everything on your disk to their own system, delete everything on yours, and use 100% of your computer’s bandwidth to spam, DDOS-attack, and search for passwords until you shut the whole thing down and install from scratch, that you have no legal rights whatsoever. They do not promise to do anything for you that you would want, they do not promise there is anything you don’t want that they will fail to do, but you promise not to figure out what they are doing or how they do it, or give them bad reviews. If it comes to a lawsuit you must pay their legal fees and you agree ahead of time that you won’t win damages worth more than what you paid for the software. Would that stand up in court? I dunno. I think most people who lose stuff that’s worth enough to justify a lawsuit are probably too ashamed to admit it in public.

In other words, if X is hired with tenure or into a tenured position, that’s that. X has tenure; he or she doesn’t go through the tenure process all over again.

Corey @157

Thanks again. I wrote 159 before seeing your comment. Great explanation of why situations 1 and 3 are similar from the academic’s perspective and I agree. And it explains why academics of all stripes are nervous.

But I don’t think 1 and 3 are similar from the state’s perspective. They see 2 and 3 as the similar. They’re committing millions of dollars of state money for a lifetime guaranteed job. Hence the rub.

From reading the thread, I get the impression that the state my have a stronger case on the contract issues but that university boards are going to have to change the timing of the tenure decision for laterals for all the institutional reasons you mentioned. If the timing is changed, the academic knows that they’re hired and the state keeps final authority about the hiring decision. Otherwise the board doesn’t follow the statute or academics don’t move.

Perhaps off topic, but if Professor Salaita is as skilled and gifted a professor as the reports seem to suggest – why wouldn’t some other university, perhaps anxious to demonstrate their free speech chops – extend him an invitation to join their faculty at substantially similar terms?

I appreciate class schedules are set and all that jazz, but surely there are universities that could find a way to carry him for a term or so and then work him into the line-up. Seems like said university would win twice – get a talented employee, and demonstrate that they believe in academic freedom.

Maybe there have been offers and he hasn’t reported them?

#158 – “they have too much invested to understand”
says the man who personally benefits from the broadest possible understanding of the protections of tenure.

There are some people who are incapable of opening their mouths without accusing others of bad faith. The self-righteousness flows like curses from a sailor.

@159 and @160
So someone moving from an English Dept. to an American Indian Studies Dept. at a higher-ranked school doesn’t have to supply a dossier for review during the selection process before tenured appointment? (I understand that the review must occur before the selection and not after the appointment if that’s causing confusion.)

Just searching a coupe of schools for tenure (USC came up) shows the dossier for senior laterals to look much like all required dossiers.

Thanks for the info.

A few things:

(1) the relevant public statements by Salaita were made after she received the dean’s recommendation; there was no judgment on the question of those facts for her to defer to;

(2) Salaita was an external candidate, meaning that the University had far less information about his teaching and general style of interaction than they would have about an internal candidate;

(3) the judgment by the Chancellor was not one on which the recommending department would have any advantage in expertise – she was not judging his scholarship;

(4) can someone please post evidence of the super-deferential norm to departmental recommendations? Is there any governing document, from any university or college, with a similar approval process to the University of Illinois, in which the Chancellor and the Board are directed to only disagree with a departmental recommendation for tenure if evidence of an unarguably egregious fact, such as commission of a felony, marking the candidate unfit for appointment comes to light?

I have not seen any. I have however seen documents from other universities, such as Cornell University, which seem to explicitly take an opposing viewpoint, and moreover make provision for a candidate’s interim appointment, preserving the Board’s full right to decide on the hire, should the candidate need to begin at the University before the Board has been able to consider the question.

While I agree that in general the practice is to be deferential to the recommendation of the dean, the circumstances here are such that material facts came to light after the dean’s recommendation, and I don’t know of any institution that has recognized such deference to only be limited by commissions of felonies or plagiarism.

How offensive and disrespectful does one have to be before a University can decide not to hire you for life? There’s likely to be a wide scope of opinion here, and any standard will be vague.

As to predictions that this will be massively disruptive to the academic hiring process, okay: the predictions are noted. When is the anticipated massive disruption likely to begin?

Let me get this straight — you’re asking for proof of an unwritten norm in written documents?

There’s a serious argument against Salaita and his paper trail that no one has even made in the several threads here, so far as I can see — probably because it challenges a polite convention about academic domains of authority which is (1) demonstrably useful, (2) nearly always empirically right, (3) socially vulnerable as a meritocratic claim to democratic assent, and (4) very close to the paycheck for a lot of us. Since I know so little about the Salaita case (practically everything I have read on both sides I dismiss on internal evidence as strongly biased), I will present this indirectly as I have personally heard it applied to a notorious racist professor in my wife’s department, by several of his colleagues.

The argument is that, merely on the datum that they judged Professor X’s teaching and research exemplary, the speaker’s view of the competence in discipline of Department Y goes down. The 0.1% of us who can do so start checking footnotes, rederiving equations, rereading recommendation letters out of Y for nuance . . . all without admitting it, of course, but grants are very competitive and “we’re all Bayesians in foxholes.” The general public, unequipped to spot-check the output and already casually skeptical about the excellence of peer-evaluated research, do not even have a Bayesian chance to correct the presumption. Instead, they smear out the anecdote into a diffuse disposition to vote down bond issues and leave their fortunes to other institutions.

Any analysis that begins, as hosts and commenters have courteously done here, by presuming that departments know their business and that attacks on their professional competence are both rude and irrelevant, rests on a base of privilege and trust whose defense is very much within the chancellor’s domain of concern, and on whose easy inviolability she can therefore not lightly presume.

#175

I’m simply asking for some tangible evidence of this super-deferential norm.

I’ll say it again. Tenured faculty have strong defenses against being fired. They will hardly ever give up a tenured job to get an untenured job.

If they thought it was at all plausible that they would be fired during a lateral transfer, they would not accept a lateral transfer. But they do accept lateral transfers a whole lot.

This is evidence that it hardly ever happens.

So, imagine you’re transferring from one tenured job to another. You must send them a letter saying that you are on trial for the murder of your wife, but you didn’t do it, and you would like to postpone your teaching until you are free. The school might reply that they are holding the position for you and hope to see you after you are declared innocent. Or they might reply that they no longer want you.

Imagine you are transferring. They know you are a member of the GOP and you have generally conservative views. But a little while before you are to start teaching they find that you posted at LGF some silliness including “Democrats are all liberal poopy-heads and the jobs they most deserve are to be moving targets at shooting ranges.”. Would it be right for them to dump you over that?

Well, it hardly ever happens. And so the question is whether the tweets were a serious enough crime to justify changing their minds. And opinions vary. Zionists, who tend to think that enemies of Israel have no right to live much less be employed, consider it completely justified. Others, generally not.

On the one hand, the courts might say one way or another.
On the other hand, if it turns into enough of an issue to get a bunch of faculty organized, then they will have a say. Universities can, though choose to stop giving tenure and gradually break the faculties. When they can at any time convert any professor to part-time pay, and get the teachers competing desperately enough that they never work together, then the unions can be broken and the politicized administrations then get full control.

T@173: I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. The standard procedures in place for promotion and hiring are procedures that the state itself deemed satisfactory until a private donor applied pressure to the chancellor. Why did these procedures suddenly become inadequate? Are you arguing for a system in which wealthy donors have the prerogative to over rule the faculty? The Koch brothers would be thrilled, since they could ensure that no scientists who felt that coal power has any drawbacks would ever get tenure or be hired.

Took me a few minutes to work out the problem, but it’s here:
> despite the statutory language

Question-begging. Your “despite” is imputing a specific meaning to the statutory language that you’re requiring Corey to agree with, when the exact/intended/actual import of the statute is in large part in dispute.

Literally the same error as “have you stopped beating your wife yet”. Easier to make in good faith, though.

As a general rule, you shouldn’t use words like “despite” when you’re writing out those “am I stating your position correctly” statement/questions because… well, see above. Instead I suggest writing out in full what [you think corey thinks] the law means, that way the assumptions/errors are on the surface where they’re directly tractable.

#187

He is asking you to meet your burden of proof, a concept that no doubt you are familiar with.

This is a dog-didn’t-bark-in-the-night argument.

If tenured professors thought there was any chance that they would lose tenure by making a lateral transfer, they would not do it. They would at the least do a lateral transfer only after the board of trustees signed off on it and all the terms of the contract were firm.

But many tenured professors do make lateral transfers without taking any precautions like that. They consistently assume that they will not suffer a bait-and-switch, that they will in fact get the job they were promised.

Tenured professors are saying that if this unprecedented action does stand, they will no longer do that but will insist that all the t’s are crossed and the i’s dotted before they accept a transfer. Because this is something brand new.

Whether there used to be an unwritten rule against it, I can’t say. Just nobody did it. If they had done it, there would have been various consequences. Now it’s been done once and various consequences are starting to unfold.

#188- “Just nobody did it.”
New hires didn’t used to buy time on tv in order to show commercials of themselves being jackasses. It’s a brave new world.

T @170
So someone moving from an English Dept. to an American Indian Studies Dept. at a higher-ranked school doesn’t have to supply a dossier for review during the selection process before tenured appointment? (I understand that the review must occur before the selection and not after the appointment if that’s causing confusion.)
Just searching a couple of schools for tenure (USC came up) shows the dossier for senior laterals to look much like all required dossiers.

Yes, presumably they have to supply a dossier for review. In some cases there may be outside input to the review, in others not, it prob. depends on the particular institution and/or opening . But as AcLurker has pointed out, someone who already has tenure elsewhere is on a different footing than an untenured person, whether the latter is being hired laterally or promoted from within.

Fwiw before teaching basic calculus at a large public university I was legally required, as an employee of a state body, to formally confirm something or other about adhering to the state constitution. Everyone in the room knew it was a stupid formality. The existence of these laws doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

#193 LFC

Prevailing and (heretofore) universally accepted norms of academic hiring preclude the board from exercising its statutory authority to overrule lateral hires approved by the dept/faculty and the relevant dean(s), except in cases of intervening behavior so egregious (e.g., criminal acts, obvious plagiarism) that there could be no reasonable disagreement about its decisive negative bearing on the candidate’s suitability for academic employment.

This is an example of moral relativity. For zionists, it’s clear that Salaita’s behavior is so egregious that he should not be teaching in a US university. But for pretty much anybody else, he didn’t do anything particularly wrong.

Is there reasonable disagreement about its decisive negative bearing? No, only unreasonable disagreement. There’s no basis to decide who’s morally right and who’s morally wrong about the question. You’ll get different answers depending on who you are.

There is no way to resolve the disagreement short of good will, compromise, etc. But any weakening in zionist positions compromises Israel’s existence, which is unacceptable to zionists.

We argue about side issues because it’s clear the fundamental issues are not going to get any good resolution. So maybe if we discuss this other stuff we can occupy ourselves until the particular issue blows over, and then we can put it aside until next time.

We cannot reach agreement whether Salaita’s tweets were bad enough to justify destroying his career. So instead we argue whether Chancellor Wise had the legal right to do that.

170: You can do different things. Sometimes a department at an R1 will hire an Associate from a less research-intensive institution as an Assistant: in other words that person gives up tenure in the move and knows they’ll have to go through the process again at the new place. (It’s telling that nobody has even suggested that as a compromise here: Salaita could not possibly trust Wise to give him a fair shake in a new U of I tenure process.)

Remember that when you hire at the senior (Associate or Full) level you’re going to have a pretty capacious dossier in any case: course evals and sometimes student letters, and of course access to all the person’s publications. The hiring faculty is going to make their own assessment of scholarship and teaching during the hiring process. The relevant Dean will have access to this material before an offer goes out. (I don’t know if there is any additional provost-level vetting – it would be interesting to hear from someone who knows the specifics of the U of I admin circuitry exactly what route Salaita’s appointment took through the admin process.)

175: Andrew F has been on balance helpful – it’s clarifying to see how a legal defense of the U of I might work – but the 2nd para @175 is insane.

180: The problem in this case is obviously not the guy’s research – it’s his political speech in a non-academic setting. Surely we can take Wise at her word on that point. Not one of his assailants – even Cary Nelson, a fellow English prof who certainly had ample time to prepare the ambush – has made an attack on Salaita’s scholarship as scholarship. (And speaking of updating priors, the fact that Joshua W. Burton terms an admittedly evidence-free insinuation a “serious argument” causes me just a twinge of doubt about the professional competence of Joshua W. Burton.)

To answer Andrew F. and those with whom he’s in alliance:
The contract is the letter on which SS placed reliance.

It says the rec’mmendation (that on which the offer’s based)
is “subject to” approval by the Board [that’s now disgraced].

It doesn’t say “contingent”, though that’s in another clause
which specifies conformity with U.S. visa laws.

Appended to that document, attachment number three
Excerpts from the conditions, to inform the appointee.

Now these are ‘non-exhaustive’ but they make things fairly clear.
For ease of exposition I will quote them freely here:

The University of Illinois Statutes (Article IX, Section 3.a.) provide that only the Board of Trustees has the authority to make formal appointments to the academic staff. New academic staff members will receive a formal Notification of Appointment from the Board once the hiring unit has received back from the candidate all required documents, so the appointment can be processed.

The emphasis is mine. Now, while I shan’t pre-empt a court,
I think it’s clear from what is here just what the author thought.

Appointees are directed, too, to what the statutes say.
The Article I’ll quote is IX; the Section is 3(a):

All appointments, reappointments, and promotions of the academic staff, as defined in Article IX, Section 4a, shall be made by the Board of Trustees on the recommendation of the chancellor/vice president concerned and the president.

The emphasis is mine, again. Note well that there’s no mention
(at least none that’s explicit) that the Board may wield discretion.

The chancellor and president are clearly in this chain,
but they’re not in the letter, and no veto is made plain.

So what is normal’s clear, I think (it didn’t take me long!)
The documented case, for what it’s worth, seems pretty strong.

Dear Andrew F, do please take heed, for maybe you could learn
But I suspect this won’t allay your very real concern.

And in those cited cases in which new staff faced ‘de-hiring’
They’ve done things which, in spite of tenure, justified their firing

Since I believe in the norms of academic freedom, however, I obviously do not think that offensive tweets are firable offense.

So just to get this straight: academics can say whatever they want publicly and should never be fired for it, because they are protected by academic freedom.

They can say e.g. :

” Women / brown people / gays / jews / muslims/ catholics / the working class whathaveyou are inferior human beings who lack intelligence and morality.”

and the institution employing them cannot fire them for it?

Corey @169
Thank you for the response and while it would seem kinda silly for administrators to behave as you describe, presuming non-silly behavior from university administrations would probably be a mistake. These are the sort of “in-rules” that so beduddle people not familliar with them. Its not that there is never black-balling outside of academia, but usually at some point, for some deal, some company will bid on talent where its found.

Hopefully some university will find the gumption to do the right thing – At this point I’d judge it highly unlikely, despite the concerted efforts of academia to help them see the right of it, that UI is going to do an about face (then again, since that would seem a silly thing for them to do, the odds should be rising).

It seems like many of the questions regarding established norms versus the fine print of the offer & etc. amount to asking “What will happen if this goes to court?” The answer, I think, is that UIUC’s actions in this case are so unprecedented that we simply don’t know. The lawyers who have weighed in so far certainly do not seem to think that it’s an open-and-shut case.

@208
Completely agree. Hoffman did a fine job of citing to the case law for a blog post but he notes that his analysis was incomplete and he concluded that the contract claim would be difficult but not impossible to reach. There may well be docs, institutional precedents, or legal presidents we are all unaware of. Further, none of this touches on the 1st A claim which Dorf and Hoffman both think is stronger than the estoppel claim. My comments are based on logic: why would the state have less power over employment decisions for laterals than internals given they are conferring the same benefits in both cases? And why would the state cede lifetime hiring decisions to its employees? But logic and law are two different things. Once again, it would be nice to have a practicing Illinois labor lawyer w/tenure experience weigh in. It seems that many posters on the thread are experts in something but not Illinois labor law. In rereading certain of my posts, I should have stuck more to the logic and avoided the law.

Andrew F — Take a look at statements made by the VT administration after Salaita’s “support the troops” piece. That region of Virginia is not a liberal bastion and the whole state has strong ties to the military. I’m much less sanguine about his return than you are. It would be useful if Scott or Corey had examples where an academic was able to find a new position.

I see Andrew F. is selectively deaf and addresses the parts he thinks poorest.
Contractual terms, though, have context, one learns, as one studies the skills of the jurist.

Doing him a favour,
I will give a flavour.
“Subject to approval”;
random hit from Google:

http://www.claytonutz.com/publications/edition/16_august_2012/20120816/subject_to_board_approval-must_the_board_approve_the_contract.page

“Failure to take reasonable steps to seek Board approval may constitute a breach of contract…

“the Board must exercise that right by ensuring that it acts consistently with the general rule that each party to a contract has an obligation to ensure the other party may have the benefit of the contract…

“the other party might have an expectation that Board approval will be given. This will depend largely on the representations and negotiations that have occurred at or around the time the contract was executed. It might be, for example, that representations were made before the contract was executed that the Board approval process is simply a rubber stamp. The other party might be able to sue on that basis….

“Representatives of the company should be careful about what representations are made about Board approval, to avoid giving rise to an expectation that it will be given as a matter of course. They should also be sure to take reasonable steps to obtain that approval.”

And so, he had better read what’s in the letter; the statutes are scarcely germane,
for there’s no rebuttal of hints – most unsubtle – that only formalities remain.

Limericky Dicky@211: Once this whole affair is resolved, I hope you will find the time to recount in the form of an epic poem.

I must admit I have that yearning, but as yet I’m only learning (and my self-appointed coach is not, himself, beyond reproach).

@208
@208
Agreed. My comments were based on the logic. It seemed problematic that the state has less authority over laterals than internals when conferring the same benefit. And it seemed problematic that the state would cede a lifetime employment decision to the employees. But logic ain’t the law. As I mentioned in a post that was gobbled up in moderation somehow, we need a practicing Illinois labor lawyer with tenure experience to weigh in. There are docs we haven’t seen, procedures we may be unaware of, and precedents that have not been cited. Looking back at some of my posts, I should have stuck more to the logic. In any case, both Hoffman and Dorf think the 1stA claim is probably the better of the arguments. And none of us have seen the paper trial.

Andrew — Given the reaction by some in the VT administration to Salaita’s “Support the Troops” article, a rehire might be a struggle. Virginia has close ties to the military and VT is in the red part of the state. That article did not go over well.

Two departments at UI have declared no confidence in the university’s leaders. Last week it was the department Salaita was set to join, this week it’s the philosophy department.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/illinoiss-philosophy-dept-declares-no-confidence-in-university-leaders/84937

Andrew F. knows I won’t muster
The effort to deal with his bluster.
It’s endless, implacable,
and eminently smackable.
One feels one’s life losing its lustre.

From a legal perspective, there’s nothing uncertain about this aspect of the matter.

I think that if the situation were as straightforward as this reading of it suggests, the field of contract law would be a lot smaller than it is.

p.s. As gator90, I believe, said way upthread, in a comment you (J Thomas) evidently completely missed.

Also, ‘Zionism’ does not = unqualified support for whatever the govt of Israel happens to do at any given time. (You might want to look up the word.) Admittedly it has taken on a variety of connotations, but I think you’re stretching them here.

Emphatically +1 LFC @229. There’s an honorable and thoughtful Zionist tradition. Folks can’t always foresee all the uses to which their ideas will be put.

If we reduce this to simple political binaries we lose what’s at stake here.

Emphatically +1 LFC @229. There’s an honorable and thoughtful Zionist tradition. Folks can’t always foresee all the uses to which their ideas will be put.

Was, maybe. Actual zionism is constrained [among other things] by the consequences of choices made by israel and the jewish polity in palestine. Given that actual-real-israel was born out of ethnic cleansing in ’48 [and ethnic cleansing seems unambiguously to have happened, with defence of plan Dalet focussing on extent and whether it was planned or coordinated]… well, support the state of israel for as long as it’s existed has depended on a willingness to accept the fruits of that tree.

Which is pragmatic, yes. Maybe even reasonable. But not I think “honourable” by any measure.

Colin Danby @ 231

“There’s an honorable and thoughtful Zionist tradition.”

I’m willing to believe this, but I for one can’t see how any Zionism (“a nationalist movement of Jews and Jewish culture that supports the creation of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the Land of Israel”, per Wikipedia) doesn’t lead to the present state of affairs. Creating a place for the homeland necessarily means displacing some others; insisting it be Jewish necessarily excludes others. Everything flows from there. I don’t mean to say that Zionists aren’t or can’t be well-meaning, I just can’t see how they could have arrived at some better outcome given the premise, or what it is they propose Israel should do now which makes things better while keeping faith with those goals.

For my part I think Israel is a fact on the ground which makes Zionism somewhat irrelevant. I don’t want or expect Israelis to commit national suicide. I think the only workable outcome for Palestinians is a two-state solution, which will mean the Zionists won and the Palestinians lost, of course. Beyond that, I think Israel cannot remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, which means they’ll have to choose one or the other.

What do thoughtful Zionists say Israel should have done, or should do now?

I made a move very similar to Salaita’s (tenured at A to tenured at B), and it never occurred to me that the Board approval was anything but a formality. In fact, it was communicated to me that it was a formality (I forget the exact wording, but something like “all the outside hires with tenure go up as a single motion in August and are voted on en masse”). There was no indication that the Board was going to “review” my file in any meaningful sense. Before the Board approval I had a desk, was interacting with students, computing accounts were set-up for research and the courses I was scheduled to teach, etc etc. I submitted my resignation at my old institution well before the Board approval process, and there was no one at either my old or new institution (or colleagues at other institutions) who suggested this was weird, risky or unusual. There was never any indication that this wasn’t the norm.

To me, this is a bit like the degree granting process. Most degrees say something like “Upon the recommendation of the faculty, the degree of X is conferred upon…” with the implication that the faculty “recommend” students be granted the degree, but the head of the university (and/or other authorities like the governor) sign the diploma and ultimately confer the degree. But no student goes to his graduation thinking “I may have completed my department degree requirements, but I don’t know if the president/chancellor/whoever will confer my degree.” So this whole thing is a bit like a student fulfilling all the degree requirements and meeting the faculty’s approval, but the president decides not to confer the degree because “Steve’s a dick.” Does the head of the university have such power? Sure, because they ultimately sign off and confer the degree. But if a head of the university did something like that, you’d see the same “what the hell?” reaction that you’re seeing here.

I don’t see how this isn’t about Zionism.

Well, I’d say it’s at the very least not solely about Zionism. Some of J Thomas’ comments make it seem like this is just a fight between Zionists and non- or anti-Zionists, and perhaps even that one’s attitudes towards Zionism determine, or help determine, what one thinks about the Salaita case. This seems totally false.

On the other hand, it does seem right that probably no issue other than Israel/Palestine could have led to this state of affairs, and your thought that the pressure brought to bear on Wise was at least in large part motivated by support for Zionism (in some sense or another) seems exactly right. So in that sense, I guess it does have something to do with Zionism.

233,5,6

Obviously people who understand themselves to be Zionists played a role in Salaita’s firing. It doesn’t follow that “this” is therefore “about” Zionism, whatever exactly that is.

I’m interested in one thing only on this thread: norms of free inquiry and speech and not firing people because of their politics. Response re Salaita should *not* hinge on your particular political positions or historical analyses.

The rhetoric that was successfully mobilized against Salaita was highly reductionist. Is that really the game you all want to play?

Colin Danby, I didn’t/don’t say that this is about Zionism, so I’m not sure why you’re directing that comment at me. I asked you a different question, decidedly off topic, so I guess you can ignore it if you find that helpful…

TheF79 @ 239:

it was communicated to me that it was a formality (I forget the exact wording…)

And S should have been fine; he has this line:

New academic staff members will receive a formal Notification of Appointment from the Board once the hiring unit has received back from the candidate all required documents, so the appointment can be processed.

(AF doesn’t agree, but where is he? Perhaps when he is free, he’ll answer me.)

FWIW I’m certainly not a Zionist and my heart was with the Palestinian s for the most part. But I wouldn’t want to take a class taught by someone like Salaita, as I would be unable to respect him as a teacher – maybe I’m old fashioned, but I associate a certain gravitas with academic teachers. I also think Salaita’s tweets habe been counterproductive to furthering the Palestinian cause, since the case draws attention away from it and provides an easy target for those trying to denounce the left.

@Ze Kraggash

Look, obvs. the fact that his tweets dealt w the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, an inflammatory subject, mattered in terms of the emotions etc attending this whole thing. No one is denying that.

What I was saying, however, is that J Thomas’s repeated, incessant references in this thread to “zionists” and “nonzionists,” as if that was the relevant line of demarcation in terms of how one views this matter, are stupid. These references distract attention from the real issues at stake, as Colin Danby has said above. That’s the point, Ze K., though I really don’t expect you, on past performance in these threads, to acknowledge it.

“But I wouldn’t want to take a class taught by someone like Salaita, as I would be unable to respect him as a teacher – maybe I’m old fashioned, but I associate a certain gravitas with academic teachers.”

Oh FFS. Look, I’m not unsympathetic to that(apart from the gravitas part) and his public persona(and the topics of some of his research interests) would probably put me off reading his books, but that has nothing to do with whether the university was in the right here.

Well, it’s not about zionism in the same sense as mccarthyism was not about communism, or, say, the southern strategy wasn’t about racism. There are many ways to tell a story, different levels of abstraction. J Thomas’ way of telling this story doesn’t seem particularly controvercial. You can choose a different interpretation, fine, but it doesn’t negate his, I don’t think.

… albeit less effectively, I guess.

Re Lynne @252:

Honestly, it was a mistake on my part to pick a sentence of yours to reply to because I’m actually completely in agreement with what you’ve said on this thread, and other related ones. I just wanted to signal agreement, mostly—because I do think it has to do with Zionism in somewhat complicated ways—with LFC’s original response to J Thomas (226/229). But anyway, did not mean to signal disagreement to with you at all!

1) U of I violated due process. I think the beleaguered finances of the state of Illinois will take a big hit with this one.

2) Academics must seriously revisit their idea of social media and its role in the world of academia. It is NOT some bar or coffeeshop where one hangs out at after work to blow off steam with colleagues. Social media provides a highly visible public soapbox to very broad audiences. Social media like Twitter and Facebook are public forums and as such must be used responsibly and wisely. Yes, trolls abound on social media. To advocate the idea that academic freedom gives tenured professors the unquestioned right to act with the idiocy of trolls and present info as jaundiced as Fox News ideologues – well that is a terrible argument that does not serve academics well.

If the idea is that Twitter/Facebook, etc. are minor forms of communication not relevant in judging how a professor (or anyone else) presents himself to the world, please, you are living in ancient times. Social media moves the needle – witness the Arab Spring – where Twitter was used as newspapers were used by American rebels back in the late 18th century – to change public opinion. Witness the UC Davis pepper spray incident, when the university wanted to paint student protestors as violent rule-breakers who needed to be sprayed to preserve order. iPhone video posted on YouTube showed otherwise (though in the end, the cop got more money than the individual protestors he sprayed.)

Tenured professors are gifted with a fantastic opportunity to conduct research and engage in dialogue that can transform our lives. The idea that Salaita’s inappropriate language and enraged hysteria are defensible as part of “academic freedom” is perhaps the norm now in academia – but this needs to be changed. There is nothing at all “academic” about his polemical diatribes – and now all focus is on him – not the serious issues he screeched about loudly on Twitter. A terribly irresponsible misuse of a very powerful medium.

Words matter. Academics – of all people – should understand how best to use words wisely, no matter the forum. Passion has a place on social media – but please leave the hysteria to the trolls.

I don’t think ‘derogatory’ is the right word. It’s a description, but same as with ‘islamism’: lifting your religious (or ethno-religious) identity to the top of your political agenda is antithetical to liberalism and to egalitarianism.

Layman 262: “It seems to me that Zionism was always about denying the right to self-determination of some indigenous peoples.”

I’m no historian of the Zionist movement, but I believe there was a time (as I’ve seen others observe in other fora) when Zionism consisted of little more than Jews moving to Palestine, buying some land, and starting farms. At some point, though (and I wouldn’t claim to know exactly when), it became something largely ugly and cruel.

“lifting your religious (or ethno-religious) identity to the top of your political agenda is antithetical to liberalism and to egalitarianism.”

Of course when others lift your religious identity to the top of their political agenda your response should be to point out that’s antithetical to liberalism and egalitarianism? That’s a strategy that hasn’t worked so well for Jews in the past.

Donald Johnson: I meant that, in the link I provided, the holocaust deniers were using the word “Zionist” to smear one of their critics. I’d seen the word “AIPAC” used casually in a similar way on another Wiki talk page. A recent comment here inspired me to take a look at that stuff. None of this is directly relevant to Salaita, though.

#226 LFC

“And that’s mostly because some of us are zionists and some are not.”

You have repeatedly asserted this, in comment after comment. But repeating it doesn’t make it so. This is not about Zionism. It’s about a lot of other things, but really not about that.

Sorry to be late replying, I was metaphoricly putting out fires.

I can’t imagine how you could think any reasonable person would agree it isn’t about zionism. That’s too stupid for words. But it isn’t only about zionism. It’s also about academic freedom, and freedom of speech, and relations between university administrations and their faculties, etc.

I predict that if we look at the people who think that Salaita’s tweets were in themselves adequate reason to reverse his hiring decision, they will almost all be zionists. Some non-zionists may say that the tweets were ill-mannered, regrettable, unfortunate, something better done anonymously etc, but will not say that they are sufficient reason in themselves to de-hire somebody.

I can think of a few exceptions. Somebody like Brett Bellmore might not be a zionist, and might still think that a university chancellor should have the right to de-hire anybody she wants to, so it doesn’t matter whether these tweets were sufficient cause — she didn’t need sufficient cause. It can be argued that whether or not they were right to do it, they can do it legally so nobody has any real right to complain.

When Democrats talk about Republicans this vociferously, or vice versa, we pretty much ignore it. Why did it get so much attention this time? Because zionism.

That isn’t the only thing that can do it. Like, if it had been somebody ranting about male supremacy, that would have seemed at least as bad and to many more people. But if it was a woman ranting about the same about female supremacy? I think we would ignore it. Women have been oppressed for so long and so thoroughly, we cut them some slack about getting angry when they have the chance to speak out. It isn’t parallel.

#264 Gator90

It seems to me that anyone who favors a “two state solution” to the I/P dilemma may fairly be described as a Zionist [….]
By my lights then, and contrary to J Thomas’ interpretation, a number of Zionists have rallied to Professor Salaita’s defense.

Independent of your definition, you raise an important point. I think that it’s almost entirely zionists who think Salaita should have been dehired. But there’s room for zionists to be on both sides. Just, the ones who want him gone have so far gotten their way. It may have been as few as 79 of them who had the influence. Or maybe as few as one single wealthy zionist individual. So far, everybody on the other side of the issue appears to be losing.

But it isn’t completely over yet.

@261: inappropriate language and enraged hysteria are defensible as part of “academic freedom” is perhaps the norm now in academia – but this needs to be changed.

This concedes way too much. Who decides what counts as inappropriate language? As other have been pointing out, democrats and republicans, Ukrainians and Russians, & etc. have equally heated exchanges all the time, and yet it was only when the Israel-Palestine conflict was involved that a bunch of people suddenly discovered their deeply held commitment to civility.

P.Z. Meyers routinely calls intelligent design creationists liars and scoundrels. I’m sure the ID crowd would love it if they could get him fired by calling up his university and crying that they’re soooooo upset by the uncivil things he said on the internet that they are just certain that he can’t be trusted to teach students biology. In fact I believe they’ve tried it several times.

“Incivility is a firing offense” in practice hands control over what can be said to whatever group has the time and energy to throw hissy fits over statements they don’t like.

The current uproar is about one political group that wants to prove that they can claim a scalp in order to intimidate everyone else. That’s all it’s about.

Concern over “civility” has nothing to do with it.

#276 T

In some instances, the course you take doesn’t matter to the people that are defining you. Do you need examples? This isn’t all that hard.

Yes, we need look no farther than Salaita.

@277
Just to clarify the exchange, “you” referred to “religious (or ethno-religious)” groups. With Salaita, the opposition comes from either how he behaved or what he said (depending on your point of view), not because of his ethnicity. That’s distinct from say racism where it doesn’t matter what’s said, only the race of who said it.

@280
The Salaita situation has exposed a glaring unresolved gap in the hiring process of tenured laterals. The AAUP, unsurprisingly, argues that there is no gap and that the academic is entitled to the conditional offer. Of course, this interpretation implies that the authority of the board differs between lateral and internal hires. This gap will need to be resolved and should be resolved because of the nature of the hiring process.

Your point about the lack of conditionality in the earlier case is well taken. And the addition of this issue has raised the profile of this matter as compared to the Norm Finkelstein case.

Layman @262
Of course; but doesn’t general Zionism require the taking of some territory in the ‘Land of Israel’ to make it an explicitly Jewish state? Is it that thoughtful Zionists are those Zionists who can be content with some of it, who would not take it all?

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any reading on the hist. of Zionism, but if I recall correctly there were at one time some Zionists who suggested the est. of a Jewish state somewhere other than ‘the Land of Israel’. At least a couple of different sites in Africa were mentioned, as I recall. Obviously, these plans never went anywhere, but they were discussed in certain circles. Theodor Herzl might even have entertained such ideas briefly at one pt (but I don’t recall for sure). Since even in the late 19th/early 20th cent., few habitable places (incl. then-colonies) were completely unpopulated, some displacement of indigenous peoples prob wd still have occurred had one of these schemes been adopted — though perhaps not on the same scale as occurred in ‘the holy land’. (On a rather diff. note, there’s an odd historical sidelight about Stalin’s proposed ‘homeland’ for the Jews, which I wrote a short blog post about a long time ago, but I don’t remember the details now and I don’t have time at the moment to go back and check.)

So, in short, not *all* definitions of Zionism have always required that the Jewish state be established in the ‘Land of Israel,’ though the ‘non-Israel’ versions obvs. were not successful and fell by the wayside fairly early on.

Layman @262
“It seems to me that Zionism was always about denying the right to self-determination of some indigenous peoples.” (emph added)

Not centrally, not in the early stages of Zionism. Political Zionism a la Herzl was modeled quite consciously (again, if my memory serves) on the European nationalist movements of the 19th cent. that contributed e.g. to the est. of unified Italian and German nation-states (and contributed decisively in the Italian case). Political Zionism saw Jews as ‘a people’ who had been persecuted for centuries and needed a territorial homeland of their own if they were ever to be free of persecution. Recall that in 1897 it was not yet at all clear that large Jewish communities could exist safely and freely as Jewish communities in other countries, and the historical record to date suggested a negative answer as to whether this was in the cards. Hence the idea of a natl homeland made sense to a lot of Jews on political and historical grounds. The Zionist ‘project’ was not originally conceived mainly as a mvt to deprive indigenous people of their rights, but rather as something closer to a mvt of ‘natl liberation’. That the latter goal came to involve the former, and *arguably* had entailed it all along, is one of the several tragedies, if not the main tragedy, of this particular slice of history.

Layman
Yes, of course, though if ‘thoughtful Zionists’ means those who were focused on other uninhabited places in 1898, does that mean there are no thoughtful Zionists now? If not, what do those modern thoughtful Zionists think?

First, perhaps a minor pt, I never used the phrase “thoughtful Zionists” (nor did anyone else, though I think C. Danby referred to a “thoughtful” version of the Zionist tradition). Second, I think a 2-state solution on terms that wd create a viable Palestinian state is entirely consistent w and prob even required by “thoughtful Zionism,” though it’s not a goal, unfortunately, that the current Israeli govt has shown any interest in seriously pursuing.

@Layman
What you have not done is described how “thoughtful” people “should” have responded to the dilemma to which political Zionism was a response. Presumably your answer is: they should have found some completely uninhabited piece of land that was either claimed/occupied by no state (terra nullius) or that was claimed/owned/administered by e.g. an imperial power that wd agree to give it to them. In hindsight, I can prob agree this wd have been the more “thoughtful” course. But hindsight is easy. Also, there were some Zionists who favored a bi-national state that wd have not have ‘subjugated the indigenes’. Again, obviously, that’s not how things worked out.

‘First, perhaps a minor pt, I never used the phrase “thoughtful Zionists” (nor did anyone else, though I think C. Danby referred to a “thoughtful” version of the Zionist tradition). ‘

Is there a ‘thoughtful Zionism’, but no ‘thoughtful Zionists’? I don’t grasp the point of this quibble.

‘Second, I think a 2-state solution on terms that wd create a viable Palestinian state is entirely consistent w and prob even required by “thoughtful Zionism,” though it’s not a goal, unfortunately, that the current Israeli govt has shown any interest in seriously pursuing.’

I think I’ve already suggested that this is where ‘thoughtful Zionism’ arrives, and as I’ve said this is my own view of the only practical solution at this point. Having said that, I don’t know how it elevates Zionism.

The proposed solution leaves Israel in possession of much of the colonized land, and it guarantees continued political subjugation of non-Jews who live in Israel. This is because, per Zionism, Israel must be a Jewish state. This requirement necessarily constrains the free choice of Israelis – Zionism doesn’t contemplate that they can vote to make a Israel a non-Jewish state. To maintain its Jewish character, Israel must sacrifice its desire for open democracy.

This is very much making the best of a bad job. Call it ‘pragmatic’ Zionism.

@290
So are you saying Jews haven’t been defined by others?

Again, I repeat that quotation:

The University of Illinois Statutes (Article IX, Section 3.a.) provide that only the Board of Trustees has the authority to make formal appointments to the academic staff. New academic staff members will receive a formal Notification of Appointment from the Board once the hiring unit has received back from the candidate all required documents, so the appointment can be processed.

…and now AF, blatant and brazen:

There’s nothing in the letter, in the terms accompanying, or in the Illinois statutes cited therein, that imply Board approval is a rubber stamp.

Be advised: here is no devil’s advocate; no ‘wisdom of crowds’ in disaggregate. This stuff will obstruct us, divert and disrupt us. It’s specious; evasive; inaccurate.

“It wasn’t inherent in the zionist idea that anybody had to be dispossessed”

For Herzl, at least, it was going to be an outpost of European civilization against Asian barbarism. IOW: yes, nobody would have to be dispossessed, because barbarians don’t count.

J Thomas @ 296

“I can argue that it did elude them in the early days.”

Indeed, you seem able to argue anything. In any event, all you’re doing is proposing a later date by which ‘thoughtful’ Zionists ought to have understood the implications of their plan. When do you place it? When the non-existent indigenes rioted in the ’20s?

There’s a book published a couple of yrs ago: Eyal Chowers, The Political Philosophy of Zionism (Cambridge UP) that I read a review of a few months ago. Chowers, to judge from the review, portrays a movement that mixed what we wd prob think of as ‘progressive’ w what we wd prob think of as ‘reactionary’ elements. Fwiw.

I see also that Hobsbawm has a few brief remarks about Herzl and Zionism in his chapter on nationalism (ch.6) in The Age of Empire (at which I was just glancing). While I wdn’t nec. put *too* much weight on the general tone of the remarks themselves, H. tends to be good at fitting things (incl. things he doesn’t like) into some context.

Corey, I don’t know when that invitation was sent. I suspect it was sent either before or during Chancellor Wise becoming aware of Salaita’s tweets.

Regardless however, an invitation to a Chancellor’s cocktail hour for new faculty does not constitute notice that the Board of Trustees approved his appointment; and indeed Salaita was told the manner in which the Board would notify Salaita should such approval be forthcoming.

The University of Illinois may well have, as other institutions do, titles and procedures for those who begin work even though Board approval is pending. There is no doubt that Salaita may well have begun work at the University prior to the Board’s approval. And Professor Salaita would have assumed the risk that the Board might not ultimately approved, had he done so, and that his term of employment would end with the academic term or year.

Ordinarily this risk is minimal, because ordinarily red flags that excite national attention do not come to the attention of the Chancellor and the Board after the Dean’s offer letter is sent but before they have recommended and approved.

When they come before the Dean’s offer letter and recommendation, the Dean’s offer letter and recommendation is unlikely to be sent at all, removing any need for the Chancellor or Board to confront them.

And that is why most, once they have the Dean’s letter in hand, undertake the risk, and think little of it.

And that is why – while I think it an entirely stupid hiring practice that exposes academics in a manner that I find just shy of unconscionable – while I think, as I said in my first comment on this subject, that the University of Illinois ought speedily revise its hiring practices – I also understand why it is a system which functions.

That is, because actions by a Chancellor, or a Board, to reject a recommendation are rare, nearly all hiring goes by plan. As to the reason for this rarity – perhaps it is in part the product of the judicious selection of faculty, who ever unswayed by viewpoint discrimination or personal affront, send up only qualified candidates without the kind of serious red flags that the Chancellor and Board would see and then act to disapprove.

Yet this rarity of action has also led to vague and varied understandings of when the Chancellor and Board ought follow the recommendations sent to them and when they ought not.

The most favorable answer to that question from a faculty advantage is that, barring the commission of a relevant felony by the candidate, the Chancellor and Board ought otherwise follow the recommendations.

That interpretation grants to the faculty too much power in the hiring process, and the Board of Trustees too little power to protect the interests of the institution. I am in favor of substantial deference, but not to that extent. And any realistic standard of deference will, because of the limits of language, leave areas of uncertainty.

It remains an arguable issue whether the red flags in question justified the University’s action to decline approval. I really would like to see further evidence of what any norm might be concerning the University’s action. I take you at your word as to your view on the matter, and those of others. But your personal observations, and those of a few others, are not enough to settle the matter – though I place high value upon them, and would not bother commenting here at all if I didn’t.

What seems less and less arguable though is that the red flags, whether sufficient or not, came to their attention before Professor Salaita was appointed to the faculty, however close he may have been, however rightly – until his July tweets – he may have expected it.

Therefore the crucial issue remains: were Professor Salaita’s tweets such that the Chancellor, given the information she had available to her, and such that the members of the Board, given the information they had available to them, were justified in rejecting the recommendations of the department and dean below?

As to others, who believe that only those who must hate Salaita for his views can be those who think the Chancellor acted, controversially but reasonably and legitimately, within her powers, all I can say is that you are wrong in at least one case. Quite frankly, my sympathy lies entirely with Professor Salaita. It is true that I find his views on Israel and Palestine to be composed of entirely understandable emotion and very little understandable reason; that I think his support of the “decolonization of North America” to be likely to be quite dubious; that I think his tweets in July were offensive, small-minded, ignorant, disrespectful in the extreme to those with sound reason to disagree with him, and intolerant of the mere possibility of a different view. This does not diminish my sympathy for the man who horribly has lost tenure while in transit between appointments, who must surely be wracked with severe financial and professional worry, and who has a family to support through it all. Had I it in my power, I would restore his position at Virginia Tech without further thought.

My head is not supportive – yet – of the push to have the University of Illinois instate Salaita because of all the reasons I have given – not because of Salaita’s beliefs, nor because of my disagreement with them.

#305 Andrew F.

It remains an arguable issue whether the red flags in question justified the University’s action to decline approval.

Quite frankly, my sympathy lies entirely with Professor Salaita.

So, you don’t argue that they were right to de-hire him, but you argue that right or wrong, they had the right to make the decision?

#308 T

Without touching on the merits, it’s not because of his ethnicity. See Norm Finkelstein.

Whew! So, here’s a Jewish scholar whose parents survived the concentration camps, and when no one could argue against his anti-Israel evidence, they denied him tenure.

And so your argument is that it doesn’t matter that Salaita is Palestinian because another university (threatened by presumably the same zionists, or possibly different zionists) treated a Jewish man the same way!

I can see various ways to reason about this and I’m not sure which of them you are using. Would you mind spelling out your argument in more detail?

I have been troubled that Corey’s position would imply that the state of Illinois gave the board different powers of oversight for laterals and internals.

Your problem is thinking that the only thing that matters is whether the Board is within their legal powers to act as they have.

But the fact is, there’s a whole branch of the law called “equity” that deals with limitations on people’s legal rights: how and under what circumstances you become prohibited from doing something that’s your plain black-letter legal right [or equally obliged to do something that isn’t your black-letter legal obligation]. Injunctions, laches, orders for specific performance. Estoppel.