N.B. The link in the original message was broken. I corrected it and
here is correct version.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [blind-democracy] How the Israel Lobbies Hurt the University
of Illinois and the First Amendment in the Salaita Case
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2015 13:37:08 -0400
From: Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
You can find a more detailed and accurate description of this at the
electronic entifada website.
Miriam
Truthdig
How the Israel Lobbies Hurt the University of Illinois and the First
Amendment in the Salaita Case
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_israel_lobbies_hurt_university_illinois_1blind
Posted on Aug 15, 2015
By Juan Cole
Shutterstock
This post originally ran on Juan Cole's
website(http://www.juancole.com/2015/08/illinois-damaged-amendment.html) .
There is no honor among thieves or ideologues, and it is sad to see a great
university's leadership descend into petty squabbling and vicious infighting
over the illegal firing of Professor Steven
Salaita.(http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/nationalism-political-salaita.html
)
In recent days new revelations and developments have emerged that make
clearer the contours of the crime that was committed against Salaita. What
happened was this. Salaita is a specialist in Native American studies who
has also written about Palestinians in a comparative vein, and was at
Virginia Tech. In 2013 he was hired by the University of Illinois Urbana
Champaign; in summer of 2014 he moved to Urbana, and sold his house in
Virginia, bringing his family out. Then Israeli prime minister Binyamin
Netanyahu launched a brutal attack on the defenseless little Gaza Strip,
which left some 2000 dead, 400 of them children. Whatever the provocation
for this assault, it was certainly disproportionate and showed a reckless
disregard for the lives of noncombatants, and therefore a war crime. The
Israeli human rights group Breaking Silence collected testimonies from
Israeli
soldiers(http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/04/israeli-soldiers-cast-
doubt-on-legality-of-gaza-military-operation ) who invaded Gaza indicating
that they were given such loose rules of engagement that war crimes were
inevitable.
Salaita said as much on Twitter that summer, sometimes deploying hyperbole
and ridicule to get his point across. His bold micro-blogging provoked the
usual angry letters from fanatics demanding that his constitutional rights
be abrogated by the university administration, and through mid-July the
communications of Chancellor Phyllis Wise and the Board of Trustees about
Salaita mainly concerned how to deal with this uproar.
Then, on the July 24 meeting,
(http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2015-08-08/salaita-attorney-more-que
stions.html ) something changed. Critics allege that the Board of Trustees
got enormous pressure from powerful and wealthy pro-Israel donors to fire
Salaita, and that the Trustees caved.
Although the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign is a public, state
university, it, like all state universities, has been deliberately defunded
by the state legislature over the past 30 years, in what must be a
nation-wide conspiracy of some shadowy lobbying organization of the ALEC
sort. Without sufficient funds from the legislature, the state universities
have been forced to raise tuition and to seek large private endowments from
donors. Most of the donors are hard-working, public-spirited and
philanthropic people who want to help their alma mater. But a handful
sometimes start thinking their donation has bought them influence over how
the university is run (an attitude that is unfair to the other donors, and
to the university itself).
Demonstrably(http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2014-09-02/salaita-promp
ted-donors-fury.html ) , the university got pressure from pro-Israel extreme
nationalists who boasted of having made 6-figure gifts to the university
that they would be discontinuing. Why they think their gift to an
institution dedicated to free speech and critical thinking gives them the
right to abrogate the professors' and students' free speech and critical
thinking I'll never understand.
Abruptly, Vice President for Academic Affairs Christophe Pierre and
Chancellor Phyllis Wise wrote Salaita to announce that his appointment would
not be brought to the UIUC Board of Trustees.
This way of putting the matter made it appear that Wise was making the
decision herself. But the reality may be that the Board gave her her
marching orders. She now says she's "tired of carrying
water"(http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2015-08-08/salaita-attorney-mo
re-questions.html ) for the Trustees. In fact, she said, "I am going to
talk with (university counsel) Scott (Rice) about setting the record
straight."
Note that although it is the custom that academic appointments are approved
by the Board of Trustees or the Regents, that approval is generally pro
forma and by law, Salaita had already been hired and had a contract. It
appears to have occurred to some Board Trustees that they could attempt to
do an end run around their contractual obligations to Salaita by pretending
that he had not actually been hired until the Trustee vote on the matter.
The American Association of University Professors laughed that argument out
of court(http://www.juancole.com/2015/06/professors-censures-illinois.html )
even before the courts laughed it out of court.
Salaita was fired after having been hired, a tort that in the law is called
"promissory estoppel," and which is very illegal in Illinois law. And he
was fired for constitutionally protected
speech(https://verdict.justia.com/2014/08/13/academic-freedom-salaita-case)
Once Salaita sued, the court required UIUC to preserve or turn over
communications relevant to the decision.
But it is alleged by a UI commission that Chancellor Wise started using her
personal, instead of her university email to discuss the case, so as to get
around disclosure requirements, and that not all the relevant communications
leading up to the decision were turned over to the court, as required.
Last week, in a massive defeat for the university administration, a a
Federal judge refused to throw out Salaita's
lawsuit(http://www.thenation.com/article/steven-salaita-professor-fired-for-
uncivil-tweets-vindicated-in-federal-court/ ) . The judge seems to me
actively to have made fun of the university's two central claims, a) that it
hadn't actually hired Salaita and so could cancel his appointment and b)
that his "incivility" on Twitter amounted to obscenity. The judge pointed
out that the Supreme Court had found in 1971 that a book cover with the
title "fuck the draft" was not obscene or illegal. The judge was implicitly
saying that if you can say 'fuck the draft' then you can wonder when Israeli
PM Binyamin Netanyahu would show up with a necklace of children's teeth, as
Salaita tweeted. (His vicious assault on Gaza did kill 400 children).
Pro-Israel Jewish nationalists, cocooning in a hothouse atmosphere, have
decided that no trenchant criticism of Israel or its leaders will be
allowed, and they have sought to enforce the prohibition with all the tools
of a cult. The judge slapped them down.
As apparently had been agreed beforehand, Wise offered her resignation to
the Board of Trustees once the Federal court allowed the suit to go forward.
The judgment, in fact, boded very badly for the university if the case goes
to trial.
But in a twist, the university administration rejected the
resignation(https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/08/14/phyllis-wis
e-fires-back-u-illinois-board ) and fired her instead. She maintains that
she was owed $400,000 as a retention incentive, but she won't receive it if
she is fired. She has resubmitted her resignation and insists on getting
it. This is yet another lawsuit.
The Board appears to believe that the evidence that emerged that Wise may
not have been in compliance with court orders about turning over emails and
preserving further ones is a firing offence. The issue has also become
political, with the governor of Illinois characterizing the $400,000 as a
"bonus" which she does not deserve.
Cary
Nelson(https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/15/cary-nelson-faces-back
lash-over-his-views-controversial-scholar ) , a powerful faculty member at
UIUC and pro-Israel fanatic who supported Salaita's firing later said that
he thought it would be fair to give Salaita a settlement of a million
dollars to go away. That is, it was worth $1 mn. of state money to Nelson
to avoid having on campus a colleague with whom he disagrees. Nelson had,
scarily enough, been high in the American Association of University
Professors' academic freedom committee for years. I very much doubt that he
would have defended my freedom of speech.
But it turns out that Nelson was wrong. The university is not going to get
away with paying Salaita $1 mn. to go away.
Wise's career is in tatters. She is out $400,000 and had to give up her
last year of a 5-year term as chancellor. A lot of chancellors or provosts
go to another university to become president. That is not a likely move for
her now. Moreover, she now thinks she was made the fall guy by the very
Board that may have conspired with extremist donors to instruct her to do
the firing. It seems entirely possible that the scandal may yet reach into
the Board of Trustees itself and other members of the upper administration.
It is entirely possible that Salaita, who has in the meantime accepted an
appointment at the American University in Beirut, will have to be
reinstated. If the university is wise it will just reappoint him and give
him a settlement and avoid the lawsuit, which it seems likely to lose very
badly.
The case reeks of corruption, of high-handed and over-paid administrators
flaunting the law and allowing themselves to become tools of sectional
interests (the very definition of corruption in office in the eyes of the
Founding Fathers). To have our professors forced to flee abroad for jobs is
the most shameful thing of all. It is as though we are some seedy fascist
state where some frank tweets about geopolitics result in political exile.
---
Related video:
AMED SFSU "American Studies Association 2014: Scholars Under Attack"
(https://youtu.be/O0mqlCh8lAI )
<p>
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Truthdiggers of the Week: Whistleblowers in the Department of Veterans
Affairs
Knock, Knock, Hillary: Black Lives Matter Wants to Speak With You, Too
AUDIO: 'Left, Right & Center': Cuba and Ferguson-Plus, Does Clinton Have
Competition?
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
C 2015 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
Signup for Truthdig's newsletter
Truthdig
How the Israel Lobbies Hurt the University of Illinois and the First
Amendment in the Salaita Case
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_israel_lobbies_hurt_university_illin
ois_1st_amendment_salaita_20150815/
Posted on Aug 15, 2015
By Juan Cole
Shutterstock
This post originally ran on Juan Cole's
website(http://www.juancole.com/2015/08/illinois-damaged-amendment.html) .
There is no honor among thieves or ideologues, and it is sad to see a great
university's leadership descend into petty squabbling and vicious infighting
over the illegal firing of Professor Steven
Salaita.(http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/nationalism-political-salaita.html
)
In recent days new revelations and developments have emerged that make
clearer the contours of the crime that was committed against Salaita. What
happened was this. Salaita is a specialist in Native American studies who
has also written about Palestinians in a comparative vein, and was at
Virginia Tech. In 2013 he was hired by the University of Illinois Urbana
Champaign; in summer of 2014 he moved to Urbana, and sold his house in
Virginia, bringing his family out. Then Israeli prime minister Binyamin
Netanyahu launched a brutal attack on the defenseless little Gaza Strip,
which left some 2000 dead, 400 of them children. Whatever the provocation
for this assault, it was certainly disproportionate and showed a reckless
disregard for the lives of noncombatants, and therefore a war crime. The
Israeli human rights group Breaking Silence collected testimonies from
Israeli
soldiers(http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/04/israeli-soldiers-cast-
doubt-on-legality-of-gaza-military-operation ) who invaded Gaza indicating
that they were given such loose rules of engagement that war crimes were
inevitable.
Salaita said as much on Twitter that summer, sometimes deploying hyperbole
and ridicule to get his point across. His bold micro-blogging provoked the
usual angry letters from fanatics demanding that his constitutional rights
be abrogated by the university administration, and through mid-July the
communications of Chancellor Phyllis Wise and the Board of Trustees about
Salaita mainly concerned how to deal with this uproar.
Then, on the July 24 meeting,
(http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2015-08-08/salaita-attorney-more-que
stions.html ) something changed. Critics allege that the Board of Trustees
got enormous pressure from powerful and wealthy pro-Israel donors to fire
Salaita, and that the Trustees caved.
Although the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign is a public, state
university, it, like all state universities, has been deliberately defunded
by the state legislature over the past 30 years, in what must be a
nation-wide conspiracy of some shadowy lobbying organization of the ALEC
sort. Without sufficient funds from the legislature, the state universities
have been forced to raise tuition and to seek large private endowments from
donors. Most of the donors are hard-working, public-spirited and
philanthropic people who want to help their alma mater. But a handful
sometimes start thinking their donation has bought them influence over how
the university is run (an attitude that is unfair to the other donors, and
to the university itself).
Demonstrably(http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2014-09-02/salaita-promp
ted-donors-fury.html ) , the university got pressure from pro-Israel extreme
nationalists who boasted of having made 6-figure gifts to the university
that they would be discontinuing. Why they think their gift to an
institution dedicated to free speech and critical thinking gives them the
right to abrogate the professors' and students' free speech and critical
thinking I'll never understand.
Abruptly, Vice President for Academic Affairs Christophe Pierre and
Chancellor Phyllis Wise wrote Salaita to announce that his appointment would
not be brought to the UIUC Board of Trustees.
This way of putting the matter made it appear that Wise was making the
decision herself. But the reality may be that the Board gave her her
marching orders. She now says she's "tired of carrying
water"(http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2015-08-08/salaita-attorney-mo
re-questions.html ) for the Trustees. In fact, she said, "I am going to
talk with (university counsel) Scott (Rice) about setting the record
straight."
Note that although it is the custom that academic appointments are approved
by the Board of Trustees or the Regents, that approval is generally pro
forma and by law, Salaita had already been hired and had a contract. It
appears to have occurred to some Board Trustees that they could attempt to
do an end run around their contractual obligations to Salaita by pretending
that he had not actually been hired until the Trustee vote on the matter.
The American Association of University Professors laughed that argument out
of court(http://www.juancole.com/2015/06/professors-censures-illinois.html )
even before the courts laughed it out of court.
Salaita was fired after having been hired, a tort that in the law is called
"promissory estoppel," and which is very illegal in Illinois law. And he
was fired for constitutionally protected
speech(https://verdict.justia.com/2014/08/13/academic-freedom-salaita-case)
Once Salaita sued, the court required UIUC to preserve or turn over
communications relevant to the decision.
But it is alleged by a UI commission that Chancellor Wise started using her
personal, instead of her university email to discuss the case, so as to get
around disclosure requirements, and that not all the relevant communications
leading up to the decision were turned over to the court, as required.
Last week, in a massive defeat for the university administration, a a
Federal judge refused to throw out Salaita's
lawsuit(http://www.thenation.com/article/steven-salaita-professor-fired-for-
uncivil-tweets-vindicated-in-federal-court/ ) . The judge seems to me
actively to have made fun of the university's two central claims, a) that it
hadn't actually hired Salaita and so could cancel his appointment and b)
that his "incivility" on Twitter amounted to obscenity. The judge pointed
out that the Supreme Court had found in 1971 that a book cover with the
title "fuck the draft" was not obscene or illegal. The judge was implicitly
saying that if you can say 'fuck the draft' then you can wonder when Israeli
PM Binyamin Netanyahu would show up with a necklace of children's teeth, as
Salaita tweeted. (His vicious assault on Gaza did kill 400 children).
Pro-Israel Jewish nationalists, cocooning in a hothouse atmosphere, have
decided that no trenchant criticism of Israel or its leaders will be
allowed, and they have sought to enforce the prohibition with all the tools
of a cult. The judge slapped them down.
As apparently had been agreed beforehand, Wise offered her resignation to
the Board of Trustees once the Federal court allowed the suit to go forward.
The judgment, in fact, boded very badly for the university if the case goes
to trial.
But in a twist, the university administration rejected the
resignation(https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/08/14/phyllis-wis
e-fires-back-u-illinois-board ) and fired her instead. She maintains that
she was owed $400,000 as a retention incentive, but she won't receive it if
she is fired. She has resubmitted her resignation and insists on getting
it. This is yet another lawsuit.
The Board appears to believe that the evidence that emerged that Wise may
not have been in compliance with court orders about turning over emails and
preserving further ones is a firing offence. The issue has also become
political, with the governor of Illinois characterizing the $400,000 as a
"bonus" which she does not deserve.
Cary
Nelson(https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/15/cary-nelson-faces-back
lash-over-his-views-controversial-scholar ) , a powerful faculty member at
UIUC and pro-Israel fanatic who supported Salaita's firing later said that
he thought it would be fair to give Salaita a settlement of a million
dollars to go away. That is, it was worth $1 mn. of state money to Nelson
to avoid having on campus a colleague with whom he disagrees. Nelson had,
scarily enough, been high in the American Association of University
Professors' academic freedom committee for years. I very much doubt that he
would have defended my freedom of speech.
But it turns out that Nelson was wrong. The university is not going to get
away with paying Salaita $1 mn. to go away.
Wise's career is in tatters. She is out $400,000 and had to give up her
last year of a 5-year term as chancellor. A lot of chancellors or provosts
go to another university to become president. That is not a likely move for
her now. Moreover, she now thinks she was made the fall guy by the very
Board that may have conspired with extremist donors to instruct her to do
the firing. It seems entirely possible that the scandal may yet reach into
the Board of Trustees itself and other members of the upper administration.
It is entirely possible that Salaita, who has in the meantime accepted an
appointment at the American University in Beirut, will have to be
reinstated. If the university is wise it will just reappoint him and give
him a settlement and avoid the lawsuit, which it seems likely to lose very
badly.
The case reeks of corruption, of high-handed and over-paid administrators
flaunting the law and allowing themselves to become tools of sectional
interests (the very definition of corruption in office in the eyes of the
Founding Fathers). To have our professors forced to flee abroad for jobs is
the most shameful thing of all. It is as though we are some seedy fascist
state where some frank tweets about geopolitics result in political exile.
---
Related video:
AMED SFSU "American Studies Association 2014: Scholars Under Attack"
(https://youtu.be/O0mqlCh8lAI )
<p>
Extreme Weather Puts Africa's Food Security at Risk
Truthdiggers of the Week: Whistleblowers in the Department of Veterans
Affairs
Knock, Knock, Hillary: Black Lives Matter Wants to Speak With You, Too
AUDIO: 'Left, Right & Center': Cuba and Ferguson-Plus, Does Clinton Have
Competition?
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
C 2015 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
Signup for Truthdig's newsletter
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