Round about mid-summer, 2014, some­one or some­ones con­vinced Chan­cel­lor Wise and the UIUC Trustees to not bring Steven Salaita aboard.  The “Salaita Kram­pus” is what I pre­vi­ously called this person/persons in an ear­lier blog (The Salaita Kram­pus).

As I said in that blog, one preva­lent the­ory is that the actor in this behind-closed-doors pro­posal was “the Jews.”  I say this as a mem­ber of that tribe,¹ and, in that capac­ity, claim an insider’s rights to use “Jews” rather than “Jew­ish,” the lat­ter being a sort of mil­que­toast mem­ber­ship at best.

Now, regard­ing “the Jews,” they’ve been held respon­si­ble for all sorts of things over the mil­len­nia: bagels; the Hanukkah song; the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion; chicken soup; coor­di­nated mass actions of all sorts.² And given this range of things-attributed-to-the-incredible-influence-of-the-“chosen“³–peo­ple,  I’m prob­a­bly par­tic­u­larly sen­si­tive to the ques­tion of whether or not that claim to cau­sa­tion is true in the Salaita Affair.

To that end, I’ve been spend­ing far too much hol­i­day time look­ing over those aggre­gated FOIA results of emails pro­vided by UIUC on the Salaita Affair –  NGUYEN_443.⁴  And I’ve also been look­ing at the Com­mit­tee on Aca­d­e­mic Free­dom and Tenure’s report on Salaita, which pro­vides a use­ful time­line and set of emails.

While I’m hardly the first per­son to engage in such scrutiny of these doc­u­ments, there are some data that bear pars­ing — and if such parsing’s occurred, I’ve not seen it.

There­fore:

 

1. The FOIAed emails reveal 5 “donor-Jews.”

I’d guess there are about 30 dif­fer­ent peo­ple rep­re­sented in the com­bined FOIA set.  When I looked through these emails I iden­ti­fied only 5 that talked about or implied $-giv­ing enough to be fairly char­ac­ter­ized as “donor-Jews:”

1. “donor-Jew-1″ (Steve Miller) — Rep­re­sented by a series of back-and-forth emails with Chan­cel­lor Wise, the orig­i­nal email sent by donor-Jew-1 on 7–23-14 @ 4:31 pm (donor-jew-1).  From poor redact­ing on UIUC-FOIA’s part, this donor’s been iden­ti­fied as Steve Miller.  Note that this is a pro­longed exchange between Miller and Wise with cc’s to var­i­ous other high-level per­son­nel at UIUC.  Also note that, due to incon­sis­tent redac­tions by UIUC-FOIA, in other copies of some of these emails Miller’s office in North­brook was not redacted, nor was the fact that he was going to Santa Fe.⁵

One of the most inter­est­ing thing about the donor-Jew-1 emails is that they cc a whole bunch of high-level UIUC fundrais­ing peo­ple.  As I said in an ear­lier blog, those peo­ple (Dan Peter­son and Travis Smith and so on) were so con­cerned that within 90 min­utes of donor-Jew-1’s email they’d cced the Chan­cel­lor with advice.  What advice we don’t know, because UIUC-FOIA redacted it (of course).

2. “donor-Jew-2″ –Rep­re­sented by a sin­gle email sent to Chan­cel­lor Wise on 7–24-14 @ 1:07 pm (donor-jew-2).  cced to a redacted address, pre­sum­ably another private-citizen address.  donor-Jew-2 describes himself/herself as an alum of the (grad­u­ate?) “Busi­ness School class of 1977,”  a co-founder of [redacted] and says:

In the past I have donated money and my time to the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois. I was a finan­cial sup­porter of the BIF and Hil­lel build­ings on cam­pus and was proud to have my name on plaques in both of these facil­i­ties. I have fre­quented cam­pus over the past sev­eral years to lec­ture on numer­ous occasions.

Based on the hir­ing of Mr. Salaita, I have decided to recon­sider any future com­mit­ment of time and money to the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois. I have tremen­dous respect for Dean Debrock, Tim Durst and the Busi­ness School devel­op­ment office, and I am deeply con­flicted by my deci­sion to recon­sider any sup­port for the Busi­ness School. How­ever, as a Jew and lover of Israel, I see no other way to make my voice heard then to take this action.

3. “donor-Jew-3″  – Rep­re­sented by a sin­gle email sent to Chan­cel­lor Wise on 7–24-14 @ 2:35 pm (donor-Jew-3). cced to a redacted address, pre­sum­ably another private-citizen address.  Regard­ing dona­tions, she⁶ says:

We will now cease our annual con­tri­bu­tions to the uni­ver­sity and will let our fel­low alumni know why we are doing so. We will encour­age oth­ers to join us in this protest, as per­haps finan­cial con­se­quences will sway you even though morals, com­mon sense and decency did not.

4. “donor-Jew-4″  – Rep­re­sented by a sin­gle email sent to Chan­cel­lor Wise on 7–25-14 @ 11:19 am (donor-Jew-4).  donor-Jew-4 says this about his⁷ donations

I am [a] loyal Illi­nois alum as is my wife [REDACTED] and son [REDACTED].  We have been President’s coun­cil mem­bers for sev­eral decades and donors to both aca­d­e­mic pro­grams and the I-Fund. I am a past pres­i­dent [SENTENCE REDACTED]. I have been a relent­less pro­moter of UIUC as the school for the best and bright­est Jew­ish stu­dents in Illi­nois. The beau­ti­ful Cohen Hil­lel helped solid­ify this effort.

Note that being a mem­ber of the UIUC President’s coun­cil seems to require hav­ing given a min­i­mum of $25,000 over the years.⁸  By my stan­dards hardly a small amount; on the other hand, the top giv­ing cat­e­gories are in the multi-millions.

5. “donor-Jew-5″  – Rep­re­sented by a sin­gle email sent to Chan­cel­lor Wise on 7–28-14 @ 7:28 pm (donor-Jew-5).  donor-Jew-5 describes him­self⁹ as a mem­ber of the Chancellor’s Cir­cle, and says the fol­low­ing regard­ing donations:

Hav­ing been a mul­ti­ple 6 fig­ure donor to Illi­nois over the years I know our sup­port is end­ing as we vehe­mently dis­agree with the approach this indi­vid­ual espouses. This is dou­bly unfor­tu­nate for the school as we have been blessed in our careers and have accu­mu­lated quite a bal­ance sheet over my 35 year career.

 

2. Only 2 of these “donor-Jews” (donor-Jew-1 (Steve Miller)) and donor-Jew-5) appear to be big (6 fig­ure) donors.

So 5 “donor Jews” are revealed in those emails.  Not a lot — but hardly an insignif­i­cant num­ber, espe­cially if they’re all large donors.

Are they?  The evi­dence won’t be iron­clad until/unless we know who all of them are and the actual amounts they’ve given.  But on the other hand, only two of them claim in the 6 fig­ures, with a third (donor-Jew-4) prob­a­bly a 5-figure donor.

Do we care about this?  After all, this can only be the tip of the ice­berg — even if only two 6-figure donors wrote UIUC, there must have been many more out there who called or oth­er­wise exerted other (unde­tectable) chan­nels of influence?

Yeah, well.  Given that two Jews in a room are too reg­u­larly labeled “a con­spir­acy,” while I don’t dis­miss the idea that there’s more to the story than just these two big donors, I think it’s com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate to extrap­o­late from 2 to hun­dreds, espe­cially a con­spir­acy of hundreds.

So let’s keep to the facts, and let’s con­sider the evi­dence care­fully.  The con­clu­sions drawn from a con­ser­v­a­tive analy­sis cer­tainly can point the way to ask­ing more detailed ques­tions, what­ever their nature.

 

3. Of these 2 big donors, only donor-Jew-1 (Steve Miller) cced other UIUC per­son­nel, who almost imme­di­ately “encour­aged” Chan­cel­lor Wise to meet this donor to [REDACTED].

So only two big donors were revealed in the emails — and only one of them cced the UIUC fundrais­ing appa­ra­tus, donor-Jew-1 (Steve Miller).  And as I’ve already dis­cussed,  (The Salaita Kram­pus) the UIUC fundrais­ing appa­ra­tus (Dan Peter­son, Travis Smith, etc.) had a plan of action out to Wise 90 min­utes after Miller had sent his email.

It isn’t easy to give an iron­clad esti­ma­tion of the causative effects of this event, although it sure looks sus­pi­cious.  One prob­lem is that there haven’t (yet) been coor­di­nated attempts to find out what Travis and Dan and Molly were talk­ing about.  A sec­ond prob­lem is that we don’t really know if that quick response time to Wise was a stan­dard “I’m on it” sort of thing that hap­pened reg­u­larly, or if it was a full-bore 5 alarm fire.

While not dis­positve on this ques­tion, I do find it fas­ci­nat­ing that the email from the UIUC Pres­i­dent Bob Easter to Chan­cel­lor Wise two days ear­lier didn’t bring out the troops, at least from the trail the FOIAed emails pro­vide:¹⁰

 

 

Absolutely no emails show­ing Wise and Easter talked, or that any­one was cced.  Not to say these things didn’t hap­pen — cer­tainly email isn’t the only form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and there might actu­ally be emails that we haven’t seen because UIUC-FOIA wasn’t asked for them in exactly the right way.

But still.  The 21st comes and goes, then we have the explo­sion the night of the 23rd after Miller’s email, and on the 24th Wise is meet­ing with the Trustees:¹¹

 

 

4. The fine-tooth-comb analy­sis sum­mary: 1) dimin­ished argu­ments for “the Jews” dri­ving Wise/the UIUC Trustees; 2) strength­ened argu­ments for the crit­i­cal causative role of the inter­nal UIUC fundrais­ing unit.

I’m not going to claim the pre­vi­ous dis­cus­sion proves any­thing.  On the other hand, I don’t think you can look at the emails with this kind of fine-tooth-comb and fail to think there’s a huge and rel­a­tively unex­am­ined role played by the inter­nal UIUC fundrais­ing people.

I’m going to have more to say about that in later posts, but, as a pre­view, I think it’s a case of “inter­ven­ing super­sed­ing cau­sa­tion,” a legal con­cept that’s been devel­oped to deal with sit­u­a­tions where, even though there’s clearly cau­sa­tion from the first causative agent, the cau­sa­tion of the sec­ond agent is assigned cul­pa­bil­ity, since the sec­ond agent’s actions super­sede the cul­pa­bil­ity of the actions of the ear­lier agent.

That’s a mouth­ful I know.  So let me add just one more thing.  I’m sure peo­ple are won­der­ing what makes me spend this amount of time look­ing at these emails with this much scrutiny.¹²

I won­dered the same myself, until I came across the fol­low­ing quote from an inter­view with Alan Der­showitz about the dif­fer­ent approaches of sci­ency peo­ple ver­sus non-sciency peo­ple to the Salaita Affair:

Der­showitz said that in his expe­ri­ence, aca­d­e­mics work­ing in STEM tend, “in gen­eral, to be more objec­tive and prin­ci­pled, and those in the human­i­ties tend to be ide­o­logues and results-oriented, and believe it’s the appro­pri­ate role of the scholar to use his or her podium to pro­pa­gan­dize students.”

Der­showitz said he believed per­sonal opin­ion had influ­enced how those human sci­ences viewed both the Salaita and Sum­mers cases, and that sci­en­tists were like­lier to exam­ine the evi­dence impartially.

“I would bet any­thing that 99 per­cent of the peo­ple who are demand­ing that [Salaita] be restored tenure would be on the exact oppo­site side of this if he’d been mak­ing pro-Israel but equally uncivil state­ments,” he said.¹³

Now I’ve got to tell you that I really like Alan Der­showitz a lot — when he’s Ron Sil­ver play­ing Alan Der­showitz in the 1990 movie “Rever­sal of For­tune.”  As for the orig­i­nal him­self, I find him bril­liant but more than a lit­tle pompous, as that quote above shows quite well.

But I must say, I do feel I’m at least liv­ing up to Dershowitz’s state­ment that sci­en­tists are “like­lier to exam­ine the evi­dence impar­tially.”  I’m not accus­ing any­one else of doing oth­er­wise, but the fine-tooth-comb analy­sis is cer­tainly an extremely inte­gral part of who I am.

What the ulti­mate con­clu­sions are remain to be deter­mined, but I hope there will be more FOIAs, more cumu­la­tive analy­ses and more hard questions.

Oh and btw, I con­tinue to believe that Salaita’s tweets weren’t anti-Semitic, and that his employ­ment should never have been in anyone’s hands but the UIUC fac­ulty.  And that should be a bright-line rule going for­ward, if it isn’t already.

 

---

The mar­quee image is from a set of late 1800s hand-tinted stere­o­graphs, “The 25 Stages from Courtship to Mar­riage,” avail­able at Courtship to Marriage.

---

 

1. Or at least a more-or-less-member — both of my par­ents were Jews, but of the cul­tural more than the reli­gious vari­ety — my father, for exam­ple, had been raised in a prac­tic­ing house­hold in Rus­sia, but when they came to Amer­ica his father died of esophageal can­cer (in my father’s arms), at which point my dad threw all his reli­gious para­pher­na­lia in the trash.  As for me, I was never Bar Mitz­va­hed, and I know more expres­sive Yid­dish than I do incan­ta­tory Hebrew. [↩]
2. Amus­ing hypoth­e­sis given the joke about ask­ing 3 jews their opin­ions on a mat­ter and get­ting 27 answers. [↩]
3. “Cho­sen” for what, one might ask?  Per­haps being less-chosen would be prefer­able. [↩]
4. Again, this is a down­load I did of the doc­u­ment assem­bled by Phan Nguyen and referred to (with link) in Cory Robin’s blog, “Read­ing the Salaita Papers.”  I’ve num­bered each page in this doc­u­ment in order to be able to pull out excerpts with­out los­ing con­text. [↩]
5. As I pointed out pre­vi­ously, any idiot could have con­cluded he was going to Santa Fe since Wise’s com­ments about going to Santa Fe weren’t redacted.  But what do I know? [↩]
6. donor-Jew-3 describes hav­ing a hus­band, I’ll be polit­i­cally incor­rect and assume this isn’t a gay mar­riage, there­fore we’re talk­ing a she, not a he. [↩]
7. Pre­sum­ing a non-gay-marriage. [↩]
8. See UIUC President’s Coun­cil. [↩]
9. donor-Jew-5 describes hav­ing a wife, there­fore again assum­ing a non-gay-marriage, donor-Jew-5 is pre­sum­ably male. [↩]
10. Pages 36–37 of NGUYEN_443. [↩]
11. The quote is from the Com­mit­tee on Aca­d­e­mic Free­dom and Tenure (CAFT) “Report on Steven Salaita Case,” pages 6–7, avail­able at 250857474-CAFT-Report-on-Steven-Salaita-Case.  Note that I’ve joined the rel­e­vant text sec­tions together, and omit­ted a foot­note in doing so. [↩]
12. I know my wife and daugh­ter and cat and dog feel this way about what I’m doing. [↩]
13. See “A House Divided” by Colleen Fla­herty, 9–22-14, Inside Higher Edu­ca­tion at Two cul­tures. [↩]