Waiting for Transparency on the Salaita Affair and Ethics Reports

Dear News-Gazette:

It will likely be a mir­a­cle to rival the part­ing of the red sea if UIUC actu­ally releases any of the details of the Salaita affair, or the ethics report(s) around Wise’s mis­con­duct and those of her cronies.  As some­one said above, given that they’re appar­ently print­ing money at the admin build­ing, it’s clear that they’ll be more than happy to spend what­ever it takes to bury the facts, on the the­ory that the best way to learn from this tragedy is to con­ceal, dis­sem­ble, and run like heck from the truth.

Oh well.  The other ques­tion is how much respect do we appro­pri­ately have for Salaita if he set­tles with­out there being some truth-telling.  On the one hand, he has kids to take care of, and I think any par­ent would under­stand that chil­dren run on money as well as love.  Also I’m sure the con­tro­versy hasn’t been espe­cially good for his health — I know there are many who think he’s a pub­lic­ity hound, but his talk at the IMC a few weeks ago was chock-full of shy­ness and missed oppor­tun­ties to bang the drum every­one seems to think he likes to whack.

But if Salaita really does believe in speak­ing truth to power, what do we think of him if his set­tle­ment involves the con­tin­ued supres­sion of the truth?  He’s in an incred­i­ble posi­tion, in that his lawyers are as far as I know basi­cally work­ing for free — the Cen­ter for Con­si­tu­tional Rights (CCR) took his case as part of their own agenda of (in a rosy view) sup­port­ing dis­si­dent voices (espe­cially Palesti­nan ones) and (in my pes­simists view) of cre­at­ing a story about “the Joos” act­ing in con­certed fash­ion to sup­press those dis­si­dent voices.  So he could con­tinue to push the issue, and good­ness knows there’s more than a lit­tle there to pur­sue: destroy­ing doc­u­ments, pre­tend­ing they didn’t know per­sonal emails were sub­ject to FOIA, one lit­tle con­spir­acy after another, utter dis­re­gard for uni­ver­sity pro­ce­dure, pol­icy, or the law …

I have the bad feel­ing the only thing we *might* get in the way of “dis­clo­sure” is the 10,000 emails (you know, Min­nesota is the land of 10,000 lakes, cen­tral Illi­nois is the land of 10,000 emails).  But even that’s not sure, it’s been 6 months and counting.

And of course, even if UIUC does release those emails, you can bet they’ll be a sea of mostly blacked out text, espe­cially since, with Salaita’s set­tling, who’s going to push back to get the black­ing out removed?

(Com­ment on Salaita Set­tle­ment)