Ah, the big donor and the poor lit­tle uni­ver­sity in the donor’s sway.  The evil suitor and the blush­ing maiden seek­ing true-love’s-first-kiss.  A recipe for dis­as­ter if ever there was one.

In the much-discussed recent exam­ple at UIUC — that is, the Salaita Affair — the big bad donor is by all reports a wealthy Jew­ish per­son – prob­a­bly Steve Miller,¹ a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist² who (suc­cess­fully it seems) pres­sured UIUC’s Chan­cel­lor Wise into declin­ing to take on Steven Salaita because of Salaita’s tweets about Israel’s actions dur­ing the sum­mer war of 2014 in the Gaza strip.³

Now the point made in the blo­gos­phere is that donors as a gen­eral class (not just of par­tic­u­lar reli­gious per­sua­sions) like to get their way, and the big­ger the dona­tions the more likely the donor is to want her/his way on where it goes.  And, so the the­ory usu­ally runs, not only does the donor get her/his way, but she/he exerts some sort of almost Svengali-like influ­ence over the blush­ing entity that’s the recip­i­ent of the gift.⁴

Some­thing like this:⁵

 

1. In fact it takes two to tango, Sven­gali and Sub­ject both.

Just to dis­card a thresh­old mis­per­cep­tion, hyp­no­tism requires two play­ers: 1) the hyp­no­tizer; and, 2) the hyp­no­tized.  And while it’s con­ve­nient to see the hyp­no­tized as a naive vic­tim, that point-of-view is almost always excep­tion­ally dangerous.

 

2. In the Salaita Affair, regard­less of the hyp­notic abil­i­ties of the donor, UIUC in the form of Chan­cel­lor Wise was the cul­prit for allow­ing the donor’s actions.

I’m hardly the only per­son to point out that the donor in the Salaita case isn’t really the prob­lem — instead, respon­si­bil­ity falls on the shoul­ders of UIUC per­son­nel, par­tic­u­larly the Chan­cel­lor, Phyl­lis Wise.  We know donors want what they want — and we also know that it’s up to the recipient(s) of the dona­tion to show some for­ti­tude in what they’ll allow, and what they won’t.⁶

In UIUC’s case, the Chan­cel­lor is the point-person for what goes on, par­tic­u­larly for what goes on in terms of aca­d­e­mic stan­dards and aca­d­e­mic prin­ci­ples.  Here’s an apro­pos visual to this point of the Chancellor’s ever-present con­trol:⁷

My unsub­tle point: UIUC is Chan­cel­lor Wise’s domain, she has her arms around every­thing going on, and she bears the respon­si­bil­ity for allow­ing things to hap­pen, or to stop them from occurring.

 

3. Chan­cel­lor Wise is allowing/encouraging inter­fer­ence in UIUC’s mis­sion by a much big­ger donor than the one in the Salaita Affair — which is to say, Carle hospital.

Blog­gers and other com­men­ta­tors have gen­er­ally con­cluded that the Salaita Affair has a huge com­po­nent of indue influ­ence — dol­lars talk­ing.  Thus con­sider Michael Hiltzik’s post in the 9–25-14 online LA Times⁸ on the deci­sion not to “retain“⁹ Salaita:

This can rightly be seen as a blow to the very con­cept of aca­d­e­mic free­dom, but there’s another sin­is­ter under­cur­rent to the case: there’s evi­dence that major donors put pres­sure on the board and the uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tion to dump the pro­fes­sor, Steven Salaita. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time that finan­cial donors have tried to manip­u­late uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tions into doing their bid­ding, but it’s cer­tainly one of the most dis­turb­ing exam­ples of a bad trend.

That phrase, “manip­u­late uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tions into doing” donor bid­ding … in the event you might be won­der­ing whether there are other exam­ples of this hap­pen­ing at UIUC, let’s con­sider the “arrange­ment” between UIUC and a huge local hos­pi­tal chain — Carle Hos­pi­tal — to climb in bed together on a med­ical center.

 

4. Carle: infa­mous … and yet part­nered with UIUC, which is busy shilling for it.

Talk­ing about just Carle is itself a long-haul; and the sep­a­rate topic of the Carle/UIUC col­lab­o­ra­tion on the med­ical cen­ter … nope, not even remotely a walk in the park.

But there are basi­cally three points:

1. Carle is already infa­mous for its bat­tle with the City of Urbana and the State of Illi­nois over Taxes;
2. Despite that infamy, UIUC’s part­nered with Carle on a long-term arrange­ment to build a med­ical cen­ter in Urbana that’s vehe­mently opposed by UI Chicago; and,
3. UIUC’s allowed some very high-level per­son­nel to go out and speak for Carle’s short-term projects, projects unre­lated to the med­ical center..

I’m not going to dwell on the first two points, as there are lots and lots of arti­cles already writ­ten about them.¹⁰

But that third point?  Well, there’s no ques­tion that UIUC really really (really) wants its own med­ical school — all the other big uni­ver­si­ties have theirs after all.

And how much is “really really (really)?”  Well, enough for UIUC’s Chan­cel­lor Wise to deploy Jen­nifer Eard­ley, an ‎Asso­ciate Vice Chan­cel­lor for Research, to advo­cate for a Carle bed expan­sion that’s not at all related to the pro­posed med­ical cen­ter.  At Carle’s solic­i­ta­tion.  Pre­sum­ably to make nice with Carle — what many would call tak­ing direc­tion from a donor.

To this point, below are excerpts from var­i­ous Freedom-of-Information-Act (FOIA) requests I filed with UIUC-FOIA to trace down the facts around Ms. Eardley’s tes­ti­mony at the Illi­nois per­mit­ting agency con­sid­er­ing Carle’s expan­sion:¹¹

 

5. FOIA Result — Carle says Speak, Jen­nifer does (to their script), Carle pays for it.

 

 

 

6. Appeal Result — When caught red-handed, claim you didn’t cash the check.

If you thought the above exchange was bad enough … wait, there’s more!

So when I filed FOIA I obtained some results (excerpts above), but there were lots of with­hold­ings and lots of gaps that roused my ire.

So I appealed to the Illi­nois Attor­ney General’s office.  And UIUC-FOIA responded by pro­vid­ing me a let­ter and with­hold­ing a num­ber of state­ments — under oath no less — from Ms. Eard­ley and other UIUC per­son­nel that, UIUC-FOIA claimed, showed they were respon­sive.  I raised the roof over this and finally got these state­ments.¹²

More about these details in a later post.  For now, let’s focus on this part of Ms. Eardley’s sworn statement:

Well, there it is, world — even though Carle promised to pay, and Ms. Eard­ley sub­mit­ted the mileage, and Carle sent her a check, we can all rest easy because she didn’t cash it!

 

7. Appeal Result — And about that hotel you stayed in … ?

Now that we can rest easy know­ing Ms. Eard­ley didn’t cash the check, I guess we shouldn’t worry our pretty lit­tle heads about the hotel she had reserved for her and pre­sum­ably stayed in, or the meal(s) she ate there, and the drinks she drank?

Of course, that state­ment that “I did not sub­mit any other expenses to Carle” is a bit odd in light of that hotel, and the likely meals and drinks and so on.  If I didn’t know bet­ter, I’d almost say that was an attempt to do an end-run around the basic ques­tion of whether Carle paid for the trip as well as just pro­vid­ing a script of talk­ing points?

But, I guess if George Wash­ing­ton had been asked if he cut down the cherry tree with a chain­saw, he could have answered no with com­plete honesty.

 

8. Why this behav­ior dis­gusts me.

The Salaita affair is awful, because uni­ver­si­ties are sup­posed to main­tain strong fire­walls between their aca­d­e­mics and the out­side world, which given its druthers would like to enforce its own strong pref­er­ences on who’s hired and what they say.

The UIUC-Carle rela­tion­ship is even worse, because the university-industry part­ner­ship is ubiq­ui­tous, and far less sur­veilled than aca­d­e­mic hirings.

I’ll be writ­ing more about this, and pro­vid­ing lots more FOIA results and Appeals.  For the moment let me just say that I’m dis­gusted that the great uni­ver­sity I attended as an under­grad­u­ate has sunk to shilling for a local hos­pi­tal chain, and even more dis­gusted that it would seem­ingly lie about its actions with such ease.

 

9. Post­script — for your read­ing pleasure.

In the event you’re inter­ested, here are some read­ing mate­ri­als for your perusal:

UIUC-FOIA Eard­ley Results

141023_Shilling_For_Carle Appeal to AG

UIUC Response to Appeal

2014 PAC 31991 Uni­ver­sity Affidavits

 

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The show­case image is from the 1897 book “Magic: stage illu­sions and sci­en­tific diver­sions ” avail­able at Magic: stage illu­sions and sci­en­tific diversions.

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1. This based on a slip by UIUC-FOIA in not redact­ing his name.  See Steve Miller, the mys­te­ri­ous donor. [↩]
2. See, e.g., Corey Robin, The Salaita Papers. [↩]
3. Lan­guage is always slip­pery, and in the Salaita case there’s been noth­ing short of hermeneu­ti­cal scrutiny of every state­ment made by anyone/everyone.  Please don’t infer any­thing from my lan­guage about my sym­pa­thies — to put it short and sweet, I’m Jew­ish, I don’t sup­port every­thing Israel does, I resent peo­ple imply­ing that Jews are a bunch of zom­bies who do exhibit such mind­less and auto­matic sup­port.  We’re a con­tentious tribe; I’ve yet to see a din­ner party where Jews agreed even on the amount of salt!  As far as the Salaita Affair, as I’ve already said, there are fire­walls that need to exist in uni­ver­si­ties to ensure sep­a­ra­tion between donor desires and uni­ver­sity actions.  Is that effi­cient?  No.  But nei­ther is the tem­plate on which this country’s gov­ern­ment was built (three coequal branches of gov­ern­ment).  If it was good enough for the Founders, it ought be good enough for uni­ver­si­ties.  Nu? [↩]
4. I never know how politically-incorrect a par­tic­u­lar usage is these days, but I note that, accord­ing to Wikipedia, “Schol­ars call Sven­gali [from du Maurier’s 1895 novel, “Trilby”] a clas­sic exam­ple of anti-Semitism in lit­er­a­ture because he is Jew­ish, of East­ern Euro­pean ori­gins, and he seduces, dom­i­nates and exploits Trilby, a young Eng­lish girl, and makes her into a famous singer.”  See Wikide­pia on Sven­gali.  I use the word here strictly for its more generic impli­ca­tions, and only for those impli­ca­tions. [↩]
5. Really the one in the busi­ness suit ought be the one doing the hyp­no­sis, not the professor-type in the robes.  Things have obvi­ously changed since  this image appeared in the 1906 San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle.  See Hyp­no­sis Poster. [↩]
6. Given the above, I don’t under­stand why the donor in this case — pre­sum­ably Steve Miller — would feel even remotely shy about dis­cussing how he felt, what he wrote and what he expected.  I sup­pose he’s pro­tect­ing his rela­tion­ship with UIUC, his Alma mater after all, but still, why not get the con­ver­sa­tion out in the open for real dis­cus­sion? [↩]
7. An illus­tra­tion from the Moody Bible Insti­tute Monthly, Decem­ber, 1925.  See Moody Bible Insti­tute.  Note that I’ve edited the image; in the orig­i­nal, the octo­pus is labeled “Mod­ernism,” and the build­ings wrapped in its ten­ta­cles are all YMCAs and reli­gious sem­i­nar­ies and the like. [↩]
8. See The Salaita Case and Big Money Donors. [↩]
9. Again the word-choice here is not a demon­stra­tion of affil­i­a­tion on my part.  Was Salaita hired and then fired?  Was he never really hired?  I think he should have ended up at UIUC because it wasn’t for the Chan­cel­lor to decide … but just let “retain” be a stand-in for some com­bi­na­tion of hired and fired ( and nei­ther) quan­tum states. [↩]
10. See, e.g., David Prochaska’s arti­cle in the Pub­licI,  How Pub­lic & Pri­vate Work Together Today: A UIUC/Carle Med­ical School? [↩]
11. The per­mit­ting agency is the Illi­nois Health Facil­i­ties and Ser­vices Review Board (IHFSRB), the FOIAs include 14–501 through 14–505 and 14–607 through 14–611.  These FOIAs resulted in 24 pages of doc­u­ments and an Appeal on my part before the Attor­ney Gen­eral of Illi­nois, still ongo­ing. [↩]
12. Although not 10 pages of with­held doc­u­ments that I am cur­rently seek­ing to learn more about.  Are they merely doc­u­ments that I’ve already seen in redacted form … or are they some­thing else? [↩]