Despite the fact that the Illinois Attorney General’s office has denied that samizdat-startups is a “news-media” outlet for the purposes of Illinois FOIA law, we continue to gather news. That is, to work to file FOIAs to obtain unreleased (concealed) documents from UIUC (our current target of investigation), to analyze those documents (what the AG’s office pejoratively calls “mere commenting”), and to follow up with people who need to respond to the documents they’ve either never seen (the CAFT committee for example) or claim never to have seen (the top echelons of UIUC).
We now have another example — as you’ll recall the last one we discussed was an email that UIUC never released of Chancellor Wise herself extolling Steven Salaita’s free speech rights. So now add to that an email from the UIUC fundraising people following up on the Jew donor1 Steve Miller’s email to Wise at 4:31 PM on the 23rd of July.
Specifically, here’s an email from Travis Smith to Molly Tracy forwarding on that Miller email, you’ll note the time of the Smith email is 5:58 PM:2
Why is this never-released email significant? Because there’s an already-released one from 12 minutes later at 6:11 PM to Wise about what to do about naughty Mr. Salaita, the “Dan, Molly and I discussed this …” email:3
So we now know that Miller sent his email at 4:31, Travis forwarded it to Molly at 5:58, and just 12 minutes later Dan, Molly and Travis told Wise what to do about it, in a mostly-redacted email.
12 minutes, that’s pretty fast to have a confab of Travis and Dan and Molly, especially since Travis and Dan’s calendars show them both at parties until 6. The conclusion is that UIUC fundraising was veritably smoking to act on Salaita, much more so than the emails UIUC managed to find suggest.
Now of course there are two storylines as to why the rush. The “Blame the Jews” storyline is that pushy Jew donors demanded action. The “It’s the Medical Center, Stupid” theory holds that Wise et al. had spent early July prepping for a hostile review by UIC on the medical center and then revving up to shill for Carle Hospital in its bed expansion. So Salaita picked exactly the wrong moment to tweet, and Dan and Molly and Travis suggested something on the order of “get that guy out of here” to keep the profile low and focused.
No room for it here but samizdat-startups has more and more FOIAed evidence that supports the second storyline. We’ve asked CAFT to comment and they haven’t. We’re getting back to them with the new information.
Stay tuned.
- My phrasing, a rather unsubtle comment on the anti-semitism that seems to surround the too-frequent belief out there that “The Jews” are running the Salaita Affair, rather than, say, Big Developers like Peter Fox (is he Jewish?). [↩]
- Actually, it’s not really 5:58, in fact there should be seconds on the time but they don’t show because when someone at UI forwards an email their system cuts out the seconds. [↩]
- See also The Salaita Krampus [↩]