Illegal Non-Disclosure of Emails in the Salaita Affair by UIUC

In my pre­vi­ous post I pro­vided the com­plete FOIA set that I’d got­ten from UIUC right before memo­r­ial day, the one in which Adesida and Wise and Bur­bules and Tol­liver were exchang­ing thoughts on the Salaita Affair the morn­ing of the UIUC Board of Trustees (BOT) meet­ing on July 24.

The fall­out from these emails has been sig­nif­i­cant: when even the Gazette sits up and takes notice (Even the Gazette Has to Report) you know that the pond is truly well-rippled.  Per­haps more to the point, the CAFT asked Chan­cel­lor Wise to explain why the emails in that FOIA had never been pro­vided them, a ques­tion to which she responded (accord­ing to the Gazette article):

Wise on Thurs­day acknowl­edged talk­ing with “a few peo­ple” about the case, includ­ing the provost, Bur­bules and Tol­liver, but “I wouldn’t con­sider that con­sul­ta­tion.” She said she had told the com­mit­tee that she “did not con­sult in the way I pride myself on consulting.”

If that isn’t a muti­la­tion of the eng­lish lan­guage, I don’t know what is.

***

But here’s the more impor­tant point: no mat­ter what you think of Wise’s remarks, or for that mat­ter no mat­ter what you think of Salaita’s tweets, his “un-hiring” etc. etc., you must remem­ber this:

UIUC never pro­duced those emails in its 1,600 pages of FOIA responses in 2014, and that was either a per se ille­gal break­ing of FOIA law, or it was an act of such incred­i­ble neg­li­gence as to almost cer­tainly rise to the level of criminality.

So let me step you through it — and keep in mind that, who­ever “you” are, you should be com­pletely over-the-top incensed at these ille­gal actions no mat­ter what else you think about the Salaita case:

1. It took samizdat-startups.org to col­late all the FOIAs filed on the Salaita Affair in 2014 — no one else thought to do this.  FOIA fil­ers don’t work together, and there were 27 FOIA fil­ings in 2014 on the Salaita case, so no one had a vantage-point of the entire set of doc­u­ments pro­duced.  samizdat-startups.org did, because a DDoS-FOIA col­lab­o­ra­tor filed FOIA with UIUC to obtain all Salaita-related FOIAs, includ­ing both 1) the FOIA requests them­selves as well as 2) the doc­u­ments produced.
2. The col­lated results (FOIA 14–849) showed 27 FOIAs filed, 12 answered, and a total of about 1,600 pages of results — again, this total packet was some­thing no one else saw (because no one else asked for it).  There were 27 FOIAs filed with UIUC on Salaita in 2014, UIUC answered the 12 it didn’t con­sider “unduly bur­den­some,” for a total of about 1,600 pages of mostly emails, many of them repeated mul­ti­ple times.  Was this huge dataset use­ful?  Damn straight it was, because no sin­gle FOIA pro­duc­tion con­tained all the infor­ma­tion present in the 1,600 page mon­ster.  There are a vari­ety of rea­sons why this was the case, some of them a sim­ple result of how the indi­vid­ual FOIA requests were worded, some likely more nefar­i­ous.  But con­sider that UIUC FOIA was scram­bling to respond to these requests and, no mat­ter how para­noid you are you can still under­stand why they pro­vided results that only par­tially over­lapped one another.
3. samizdat-startups.org (in the human form of yours truly) reviewed every sin­gle page of that bloated FOIA set, and found things that no one else did.  Yes, I admit, I did it, and it took me a hugely long time, and I found it pos­si­ble only because I have an essen­tially eidetic mem­ory (I’m like Shel­don, only shorter, although I think my jokes are fun­nier).  As a result I dis­cov­ered emails that had never been pub­licly dis­cussed.  Like the Adesida com­ment that Salaita’s hir­ing was “final” (go back to my ear­lier post and read it, the lan­guage is pretty telling but prob­a­bly not com­pletely dis­pos­i­tive of Salaita’s estop­pel claim),
4. samizdat-startups.org (in the human form of yours truly) real­ized that the only way to get real data on the Salaita Affair was to file FOIA for every email sent by each player on each day of the Affair.  UIUC hates me, I’ve filed more FOIAs with them over the last three years than any­one else — hun­dreds (they’re almost all single-question FOIAs, which I file to defeat their rejec­tion of more-than-one-question FOIAs as “unduly bur­den­some.”  I.e., how 27 FOIAs became 12).  But I learned a great deal from fil­ing those FOIAs, chiefly that fil­ing a FOIA ask­ing UIUC-FOIA to find doc­u­ments is an invi­ta­tion to  … bup­kis.  And then I real­ized that I could file FOIAs to ask for, say, “all emails sent by Chan­cel­lor Wise on July 21, 2014,” and the 22nd and the 23rd and the 24th (each one a sep­a­rate request, so that, bun­dled, UIUC couldn’t reject the bun­dle as “unduly bur­den­some”).  And this mostly com­plete set (deleted emails are prob­a­bly not pro­duced, and there’s appar­ently no over­sight of what the indi­vid­ual tasked with the pro­duc­tion pro­vides to the FOIA office) is as com­plete as it’s going to get, unfil­tered by any selec­tion done by the UIUC-FOIA office or the per­son tasked with pro­vid­ing the UIUC-FOIA office the documents.
5. Right before memo­r­ial day I got the FOIA set con­tain­ing the Wise & Adesida & Bur­bules & Tol­liver emails.  I con­tinue to be very sur­prised UIUC pro­vided me those doc­u­ments, and I think the fact that they waited until right before memo­r­ial day is very sus­pi­cious.  My guess is that they fig­ured that the stuff was going to come out even­tu­ally, why not dis­close it at a time when most peo­ple wouldn’t care.  But I don’t know if that’s true.
6. NONE of those emails were in the 1,600 page mon­ster (FOIA 14–849), which means either 1) UIUC inten­tion­ally and ille­gally with­held them, or 2) UIUC was neg­li­gent about pro­vid­ing them, so neg­li­gent I’d argue it rises to the level of actual criminality.

***

So, QED.  I chal­lenge any­one to come up with any expla­na­tion for the absence of those emails other than 1) inten­tional and ille­gal with­hold­ing by UIUC or 2) neg­li­gence so enor­mous as to rise to the level of criminality.

Oh and don’t argue along Wise’s line of “it wasn’t really con­sult­ing, so I didn’t need to tell the CAFT.”  The CAFT failed in numer­ous ways in its Report, includ­ing not doc­u­ment­ing what they reviewed or the con­di­tions under which they talked to Wise or a tran­script of that con­ver­sa­tion (even redacted).  But a FOIA response has NOTHING to do with the CAFT.  Adesida alone sent an email on the 24th where he specif­i­cally referred to Salaita, so any key­word search in response to those 12 FOIAs MUST have iden­ti­fied that email.  And yet it wasn’t dis­closed until this year.

The point of all of the above, is that whether or not you like Salaita, or Wise, or are a Jew or a non-Jew, what­ever you may be, you ought be OUTRAGED that UIUC broke FOIA law.

Because as I’ve pas­sion­ately noted pre­vi­ously, these laws are there to pro­tect us, the citizens.

So now you have the facts, what are you gonna do about them?

And yes, I’m talkin to you.