Steven Salaita hiring controversy

The Steven Salaita Controversy is frequently labeled the controversy resulted when Steven Salaita was offered a position by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign but then Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise abruptly withdrew his offer. Wise was cited for withdrawing the offer after reviewing tweets by Salaita as controversial. This began a national debate about academic freedom. From the beginning th the decision was supported by Wise by the University's board of trustees. Salaita quickly fought the decision declaring infringement on his academic freedom and insisted the university reinstate its offer rather than search for a financial settlement. This began a long process of litigation. In August 2015, Chancellor Phyllis Wise resigned her role after she was implicated in hiding emails that involved the rescinding of Salaita's job offer. These emails included conversations regarding the Salaita Contorversy. Shortly after Wise's resignation, 41 department heads, chairs and directors published an open letter calling "Acting Chancellor Barbara Wilson and President Timothy Killeen should call for the reinstatement of Steven Salaita at the September 2015 board meeting." The Salaita case received national attention on academic freedom for faculty.

Background

Prior to the controversy Salatia was an tenured associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. While teaching, Salaita wrote about themes of immigration, indigenous peoples, dislocation, race, ethnicity and multi-culturalism. Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times refers to him as a "respected scholar in American Indian studies and Israeli-Arab relations." On October 3rd 2013, the University of Illinois offered a professorial position to Salaita, but withdrew the offer in 2014, apparently after reviewing tweets of his the university viewed as controversial. Salaita's position originally scheduled to begin in January 2014 at the rank of Associate Professor with indefinite tenure as part of the American Indian Studies Program. Salaita accepted, but with a projected start date of August 16, 2014. In July 2014, about one month before he was to begin his new teaching duties, but before the Board was scheduled to meet to approve new hires, Salaita posted a series of remarks on his Twitter account regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, which included,

• "If you're defending #Israel right now you're an awful human being."
• "If Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?"
• "Zionists: transforming ëanti-semitismí from something horrible into something honorable since 1948."
• ìI wish all the fucking West Bank settlers would go missing.î

Phyllis M. Wise, then-Chancellor of the Urbana-Champaign campus, received hundreds of complaints about Salaita's Twitter remarks from university donors and others connected to the University who objected to Salaita's behavior, some characterizing the remarks as vulgar, and others seeing them as anti-Semitic.

In a statement released on August 22, 2014, Wise wrote:

A pre-eminent university must always be a home for difficult discussions and for the teaching of diverse ideas. One of our core missions is to welcome and encourage differing perspectives. Robust ñ and even intense and provocative ñ debate and disagreement are deeply valued and critical to the success of our university....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.

The university's code of conduct for faculty requires them to practice "...respect by treating others with civility and decency". Wise announced that she was withdrawing the job offer previously made, before Salaita's appointment could be voted on by the University Board of Trustees to make the hiring official. On September 11, 2014, the University's Board of Trustees voted 8-1 to support Chancellor Wise's decision.

However, on August 1, 2014, Vice President for Academic Affairs Christophe Pierre and Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise wrote to Salaita saying that that they had chosen not to present his potential appointment to the Board, effectively cancelling the job offer at a point after Salaita had resigned his position at Virginia Tech. Published e-mails between the university staff and current and former faculty, students, and community members showed the university was overwhelmed with letters from those who objected to Salaita's controversial Twitter comments, which were characterized as vulgar and considered by many to be anti-Semitic. Salaita declared this was an infringement on his academic freedom and insisted the university reinstate its offer rather than search for a financial settlement.

On September 10, 2014, the trustees voted down a proposal to reconsider his offer of employment. An outcry ensued, both at the university itself and in other academic institutions. Five departments voted "no confidence" in Chancellor Wise, several academic organizations condemned the university's actions, and some scholars have cancelled lectures scheduled at the university. On its website the American Indian studies program shared its statement of no-confidence "With this vote of no confidence, the faculty of UIUC's American Indian studies program also joins the thousands of scholars and organizations in the United States and across the world in seeing the chancellor's action as a violation of academic freedom and freedom of speech." Cary Nelson defended the decision on the basis that Salaita had not yet become a faculty member at the time that his offer was withdrawn, but the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana stated that "Professor Salaita's appointment should have entitled him to the due process rights of a tenured faculty member" and that the University "violated the AAUP/AAC&U 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure". The Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure at UIUC stated that "The process by which Dr. Salaitaís proposed appointment was withdrawn and eventually rejected did not follow existing policies and procedures in several substantial respects...The reasons given ó the civility of tweets made by Dr. Salaita in the summer of 2014 ó is not consistent with the Universityís guarantee of freedom of political speech...however, ... the Chancellor has raised legitimate questions about Dr. Salaitaís professional fitness that must be addressed." It recommended that Salaita's candidacy "be remanded to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for reconsideration by a committee of qualified academic experts."

Communications released subsequently show that the withdrawal of Salaita's employment offer came after contentions by faculty, students and donors that Salaita's tweets regarding Israel's military actions in Gaza were "anti-Semitic". The Chancellor of the University stated that the decision was not influenced by these communications. Salaita rejected the accusations of antisemitism in an interview with The Jewish Daily Forward, saying he is "deeply opposed to all forms of bigotry and racism including anti-Semitism". He countered that the situation is part of a campaign by "wealthy and well organized groups to attack pro-Palestinian students and faculty". The case received wide attention on many college campuses because it raises the issue of suppression of academic freedom regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The newspaper serving Champaign-Urbana pointed out that the situation was unique because, so few "prospective employees ... would engage in the kind of self-destructive behavior that Salaita did between job offer and contract approval". In response the university's actions, a group of over 40 Jewish faculty and students at the university signed a letter to Chancellor Wise and the board, protesting what they consider an unjustified conflation of "criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism."

In November 2014, he filed a lawsuit against the university, insisting it make public the meeting minutes and email correspondence of university staff who were involved in withdrawing his employment offer. Salaita has received support for his cause from the Modern Language Association, the AAUP and the Middle East Studies Association. However, Cary Nelson, the President of the AAUP from 2006 to 2012, lamented that it has become difficult to find an academic arena "grounded in an empathy for both Palestinians and Israelis". In an article criticizing a narrative that has become common in the West post-Charlie Hebdo shooting, according to which civil rights in the West are under threat from radical Islam, journalist and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald stated, instead, that it's Muslims and pro-Palestinian activists who bear the brunt of free speech violations in the West; he cited as one of his proofs the Salaita case. In another article he described Salaita's firing as "likely illegal".

In March 2015, Todd Samuel Presner, the director of the Jewish studies center at the University of California, Los Angeles, followed similar action by Cornel West and Anita Hill in cancelling a lecture he was scheduled to give at the University of Illinois over its withdrawal of a job offer to Salaita. Todd Presner notified Phyllis Wise that he would not visit the campus for its Rosenthal Lecture because of how she and the university board handled the Salaita case. The lecture, "A Message in a Bottle: Holocaust Testimony and the Jewish Future", was scheduled for April 27. Presner wrote in his letter to Wise: "I condemn anti-Semitic speech and also recognize his right to express his views. At the same time, I also believe that we need to thoughtfully and honestly confront the complex and violent reality that spawned these speech acts (and many others, on both sides). That's a tall order when the silencing of dissent at all levels of public and private discourse is evermore prevalent and particularly when that silencing comes from the very places that are meant to protect it." Celebrated civil rights activist and academic Cornel West also canceled a speech scheduled in April at the University of Illinois because of the university's treatment of Salaita. He described the university's decision to cancel Salaita's employment offer "a moral scandal".

In August 2015 Chancellor Phyllis Wise resigned her role after she was implicated in hiding emails that involved the rescinding of Salaita's job offer. Shortly thereafter, 41 department heads, chairs and directors, predominantly from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, published an open letter calling "Acting Chancellor Barbara Wilson and President Timothy Killeen should call for the reinstatement of Steven Salaita at the September 2015 board meeting."

Litigation

In November 2014 Salaita sued the University of Illinois to force them to release all records relating to the hiring process, as required by the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. In June 2015, a federal judge ruled that the University must release any e-mails relevant to the Salaita firing. The University complied with the court order in August, and made hundreds of e-mails available to the public.

In January 2015, Salaita sued to have his job offer reinstated. In August 2015, a federal judge rejected the University's motion to dismiss the case. In so doing, the federal judge allowed a spoliation of evidence claim to proceed against the University of Illinois. Rather than litigating the claims, the University of Illinois settled the action at cost of more than $2 million.

The November 2015 settlement involved the university paying Salaita $600,000, and a further $275,000 to cover his legal expenses. The university did not admit wrongdoing, and justified the settlement by noting that it had already spent $1.3 million on the case, and that the cost of proceeding to trial would likely have exceeded the settlement amount. As part of the settlement it was agreed that Salaita would not join the university faculty.

Political activism

Salaita's case was viewed by The Nation as relevant for the political right to criticize Israel "frankly and without threat of punishment". In supporting Salaita, the UIUC Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure concluded,

The process by which Dr. Salaita's proposed appointment was withdrawn and eventually rejected did not follow existing policies and procedures in several substantial respects, raising questions about the institution's commitment to shared governance. The reasons givenóthe civility of tweets made by Dr. Salaita in the summer of 2014óis not consistent with the University's guarantee of freedom of political speech. Statements made by the Chancellor, President, and Trustees asserting that the incivility of a candidate's utterances may constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting his appointment should be renounced. We conclude, however, that the Chancellor has raised legitimate questions about Dr. Salaita's professional fitness that must be addressed. In light of the irregular circumstances leading up to the Board of Trustees' disapproval of an appointment for Dr. Salaita, the Committee recommends that Dr. Salaita's candidacy be remanded to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for reconsideration by a committee of qualified academic experts.