Ah, motive.  The actor struts and frets her hour on the stage, but why?  Is it the over­whelm­ing desire to ACT?  Or is there a more direct motive, say some­one whip­ping her legs to inspire her, as in the image above?

But let’s be less eso­teric.  The wis­dom in the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois Urbana-Champaign (“UIUC”) Salaita Affair is that Steven Salaita was fired/unhired/etc. by UIUC’s Chan­cel­lor Phyl­lis Wise’s inter­ven­tion after Wise was pres­sured by a big-$ UIUC donor about Salaita’s com­ments on Israel and the war in Gaza dur­ing the sum­mer of 2014.

Due to incom­plete redac­tions by the UIUC Freedom-of-Information-Act (“FOIA”) office, it appears that donor is Steve Miller, a Jew­ish donor who runs a ven­ture cap­i­tal fund in Chicago (“Ori­gin Ven­tures“¹) and sits on a num­ber of boards, includ­ing the Hil­lel board in Urbana-Champaign.  This has led to the fol­low­ing pro­posed chain of cau­sa­tion for the events in the Salaita Affair:

1. Salaita sends out tweets;
2. Jew­ish donor (Miller) “com­plains” to Wise, i.e., exerts great influ­ence via his/her (his) $$$;
3. Wise bends to this great $$$ influ­ence; and,
4. Wise, along with UIUC trustees and per­haps oth­ers acts to fire/unhire/etc. Salaita.

The prob­lem, though, is that while this chain of events cer­tainly makes sense, is it really the case that UIUC would sell itself that cheaply?  Specif­i­cally, as I’ll dis­cuss below, Steve Miller’s really not that big a donor, despite the ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist label and so on.

I don’t have an imme­di­ate answer to that ques­tion.  So let me focus on a related issue — if Miller had influ­ence given the rel­a­tively small amount he’s given to UIUC, how much more influ­ence is being exerted by the really big $ play­ers — Carle, Peter Fox …

And I do want to empha­size a point about this ques­tion of the influ­ence of larger $ sources; it’s not a zero-sum game, the Salaita Affair is impor­tant in-and-of-itself, regard­less of how really-big-$ play­ers move pol­icy at UIUC.

But at the same time, I do think an under­stand­ing of the effects of the really big $ sources helps under­stand the Salaita Affair.

 

1. Why would UIUC care about Steve Miller’s views, he’s a small-time donor at best.

Lots of hay’s been made about Miller being a big-time donor.  But what are the facts to sup­port that?  Here are a cou­ple of excerpts on Mr. Miller’s abil­i­ties to throw his money around, there might be more, but these came up with rel­a­tively lit­tle effort:

… more than $500,000 from Steven and Diane Miller, to cre­ate the Diane and Steven N. Miller Endowed Pro­fes­sor­ship in Busi­ness Fund. Pro­ceeds from the fund will sup­port a pro­fes­sor in the Col­lege of Busi­ness with exper­tise and aca­d­e­mic abil­i­ties in the field of entre­pre­neur­ship. Pre­vi­ous gifts from the Millers estab­lished two inter­view rooms in the new Col­lege of Busi­ness Instruc­tional Facil­ity as well as sup­port for fel­low­ships and schol­ar­ships for busi­ness stu­dents inter­ested in entre­pre­neur­ship. Steven Miller, a 1987 grad­u­ate of the Col­lege of Busi­ness, is a found­ing part­ner of Northbrook-based ven­ture cap­i­tal firm Ori­gin Ven­tures. Diane Miller’s career involved health care mar­ket­ing.²

[Miller] serves on the board of US Empow­ered, which fur­nishes urban stu­dents with the resources, sup­port and net­works that make higher edu­ca­tion a real­ity. Steve is a board mem­ber and com­mit­tee chair of the Jew­ish United Fund/Jewish Fed­er­a­tion of Met­ro­pol­i­tan Chicago, as well as the Bet­ter Gov­ern­ment Asso­ci­a­tion. He is a long­time board mem­ber of the not-for-profit orga­ni­za­tion i.c.stars, which pro­vides inner-city young adults with tech­nol­ogy train­ing and lead­er­ship devel­op­ment. He is a mem­ber of the Eco­nomic Club of Chicago, and the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois Foun­da­tion.³

So there you have it, let’s say Miller’s given c. $750,000 or so.  Hardly small change, I admit.  But is it really that much?

 

1. Steve Miller’s dona­tions amount to about $750,000; Carle Hospital’s putting in $100M to the UIUC-Carle med­ical cen­ter.  Which do you think has more influ­ence with Chan­cel­lor Wise?

Accord­ing to recent reports, Carle hos­pi­tal is plan­ning to put in $100M over 10 years⁴ into a med­ical cen­ter it and UIUC want to build in the Champaign-Urbana area.

$100 mil­lion?   Wow, that’s a bit big­ger than Steve Miller’s con­tri­bu­tions to UIUC; I won­der if there’s any evi­dence that Chan­cel­lor Wise might be influ­enced by this level of donation?

And actu­ally this $100M isn’t a dona­tion; instead it’s a  full-blown ongo­ing rela­tion­ship between Carle and UIUC that ben­e­fits not merely Carle’s abil­ity to put other local hos­pi­tals out of busi­ness,⁵ but also puts $$$$s in the pock­ets of local multi-billion dol­lar investors (Peter Fox) and other (already) very rich (already) very heavy hitters.

Well bully for them — job well done, espe­cially in light of the fact that it’s not as if everyone’s just jump­ing for joy at the prospect of this med­ical cen­ter.  In fact there’s heated oppo­si­tion from no less than the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois, Chicago, which sees it as com­pletely unnec­es­sary and a project that will occur at the expense of the UIUC/UIC sys­tem as a whole:

“It would be a waste because it would be a lot of redun­dancy,” Dim­itri Azar, UIC’s dean of the Col­lege of Med­i­cine, said in an inter­view. “Just because the idea is new, doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean it’s the best idea.“⁶

And, while it’s not exactly “opposed” by the City of Urbana, the Urbana Mayor (Lau­rel Pruss­ing) has been push­ing UIUC/Chancellor Wise to open a pub­lic dia­logue on how this Carle-UIUC rela­tion­ship affects the Carle-Urbana tax law­suit.⁷ Push­ing, but, alas, so far unsuccessfully:

Pruss­ing met Fri­day [12/12/14] with Chan­cel­lor Phyl­lis Wise and invited the UI to co-host a com­mu­nity forum on Carle, which is embroiled in a bat­tle with the city over tax exemp­tions. The chan­cel­lor declined.

“We appre­ci­ate Urbana’s sit­u­a­tion, but this dis­cus­sion should be led by Urbana, not the uni­ver­sity,” Wise said Mon­day through a spokeswoman.

…

Pruss­ing argued that the impact of the tax­a­tion issue and ris­ing health insur­ance costs in the com­mu­nity go beyond Urbana’s bor­ders, affect­ing the uni­ver­sity, every local busi­ness and social ser­vice agen­cies. They also tie in to dis­cus­sions Wise con­vened two years ago about “micro-urban trans­for­ma­tional lead­er­ship” to improve the community’s future, she said.⁸

All of which leads to the ques­tion of how much more Wise/UIUC might be influ­enced by these really really big $$$$$ pots as opposed to the Jew­ish donor in the Salaita case.

 

2. A woods-for-the-trees view of cau­sa­tion — Miller?  Yah sure, you betcha.  But Carle/Fox/etc. is likely a lot more causative.

To quickly sum­ma­rize, sure, that donor (Miller) had influ­ence, and there look to be some smok­ing gun emails that Wise sent that sup­port this point of view.  In these cir­cum­stances, very pub­lic scrutiny and soul-searching is the least UIUC should want to see occur.⁹

But.  While I don’t in any way min­i­mize the Salaita Affair, if peo­ple want to talk about donor influ­ence at UIUC, that con­ver­sa­tion should go well beyond the facts of the Salaita case and include the really big donors out there in the shad­ows.

To that end, here’s a wider view of the poten­tial causal chain-‘o-influence at UIUC:

1. Gigantically-huge money-pots like Carle or Peter Fox exert great influ­ence via $$$ on UIUC/Wise;
2. Wise bends to this great $$$ influ­ence; and,
3. Wise, along with UIUC trustees and per­haps oth­ers act in ways that, at the very least, ought be pub­licly scru­ti­nized in light of that huge-$$$ influence;
4. Other donors such as (pre­sum­ably) Miller also wield power, and this also needs pub­lic dis­cus­sion; but,
5. For some rea­son the huge donors remain in the shad­ows, not in the limelight.

Rea­son­able enough, yes?

But is there evi­dence to sup­port this larger view of things?

 

3. Regard­ing that evi­dence?  Here you go.  Tip ‘o the iceberg.

So here’s an email exchange between Chan­cel­lor Wise and some of those $$$$-pots that tends to sup­port the idea that there’s influ­encers big­ger than Miller:¹⁰

 

More such emails to come.  That link, btw, is Bil­lion­aires with Big Ideas.

 

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The mar­quee illus­tra­tion is “Alas, poor Ghost: R.W. Ellis­ton whip­ping the legs of the Ghost who is being low­ered through a trap, Ham­let, act I, scene 1, by George Cruik­shank, 1857,”  from the Fol­ger Shake­speare library.  See Fol­ger Shake­speare Library Images.

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1. See Ori­gin Ven­tures — Steve Miller. [↩]
2. From Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois Foun­da­tion press release of Octo­ber, 2010.  See UIF Announce­ment [↩]
3. See Vic­tory Gar­dens web­site, at Vic­tory Gar­dens — Steve Miller. [↩]
4. See, .eg., Pro­posed Med­ical School Draws Con­tro­versy. [↩]
5. See. for exam­ple, Covenant-Carle Fight, which pro­vides the tip of the ice­berg of the strug­gle between the two enti­ties. This arti­cle doesn’t state that Covenant’s opposed to the new med­ical cen­ter, but clearly they’re against the favoritism of UIUC towards Carle. [↩]
6. See Pro­posed Med­ical School Draws Con­tro­versy. [↩]
7. E.g., Law­suit His­tory. [↩]
8. See UI Won’t Join Urbana. [↩]
9. Which is, no doubt, why Chan­cel­lor Wise hasn’t asked the Jew­ish donor (Miller) to pro­vide another copy of that oddly miss­ing “two-pager” doc­u­ment that’s now the sub­ject of a law­suit (see my ear­lier posts).  That’s sar­casm btw, if you’re Shel­don. [↩]
10. From Schein­man UIUC FOIA 14–369.  See 14–369.Final.Documents.Redacted [↩]