As I’ve written previously, the Salaita Affair” has been in the news a lot lately — that affair being the non-hiring/unhiring/firing of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (“UIUC”) in light of 1) Salaita’s midsummer tweets about Israel’s war in Gaza combined with 2) lots of emails from alumni and students — particularly Jewish ones — objecting to Salaita joining UIUC, with evidence of 3) pressure from big donors to UIUC to undo/not-do Salaita’s joining UIUC.
1. About that “big-donor-pressure” thing …
Regarding this three-part schema, I’m still grappling with that “big donor pressure” issue. Again, the evidence is clearly there that some of the FOIAed emails were from donors — and please don’t believe me on that, check what at the moment appears to be the c. 15 mb canonical set of FOIA results – NGUYEN_443.1 But if you look carefully at some of the received wisdom on what the donors said and how UIUC and Chancellor Wise reacted … well, to be honest, there seem to be some cognitive dissonance there.
What do I mean? Here’s part of one of Corey Robin’s thoughtful pieces on the events in Salaita:2
… In the days following this forthright defense of Salaita, the Chancellor and her associates begin to back-pedal. Around July 23, Wise starts reaching out to select alumni, trying to arrange phone calls (and in one instance, struggling to rearrange her travel schedule just so she can meet one alum in person [pp. 78–94]). To another such alum, she writes, “Let me say that I just recently learned about Steven Salaita’s background, beyond his academic history, and am learning more now.” (p. 293) That “beyond his academic history” is going to get Wise in trouble on academic freedom grounds.
This paragraph is certainly broadly true … so is it just me, or is the phrase “struggling to rearrange her travel schedule just so she can meet one alum in person” … tendentious?
2. How much “struggling” did Chancellor Wise do to meet Steve Miller in Chicago?
Specifically, if you look at the actual back and forth between Wise and the person she’s meeting — outed as Steve Miller in a failed redaction elsewhere in the FOIAed documents (see previous posts) — it strikes me that “struggled” may be a bit of an overblown description. Miller wants to talk to Wise on the phone, Wise says she can be in Chicago anyway, is close to Miller’s office in Northbrook, the timing doesn’t work, Wise goes through Chicago, Miller comes downtown to meet her.
Amusingly, there are two versions of this exchange in the compiled FOIA results — in one, Miller’s location in Northbrook is redacted; in the other, Miller’s trip to Santa Fe is redacted. The latter is particularly funny since Wise’s responses wishing him a good time in Santa Fe are still present — so what was the point in doing the redaction?3
FYI, here are the two versions of the email exchange between the two of them — NGUYEN_443_Excerpt_288_292 (the trip to Santa Fe is not redacted, but Northbrook is); and, NGUYEN_443_Excerpt_82 (Northbrook is not redacted).
3. How much “struggling” did Chancellor Wise do to meet Carle — an A/B comparison.
So if you’ve read that exchange between Wise and Miller (and please, do read it for yourself, and don’t just believe me on it), it seems pretty clear that at every opportunity Miller is happy to talk on the phone, and Wise, while certainly doing some rearranging of her schedule, does’t appear to be doing that much “struggling” to meet Miller.
But as any semiotician knows, words can be slippery little devils — so it’s worthwhile to ask if there are any A versus B comparisons that can be made about Wise’s struggles with big-$ people that might provide larger context for what the Chancellor did with Miller.
Yes, Virginia, of course there are such A/B comparisons that can be made. For example, let’s look at how the Chancellor seems to be willing to struggle with changing her schedule on Good Friday, 2014, in order to make a meeting with Carle:
And then 15 minutes later:
From the emails I obtained in this UIUC FOIA 14–182 production I can’t tell whether the meeting went forward on Good Friday or not — that’s something that would be a marvelous FOIA project for one of the Marvels. And, as always, please fact-check me on all of this. So here’s the complete FOIA production:14_182_FOIA_NUMBERED, and here’s the pinpoint cite to the excerpts above: 14_182_FOIA_NUMBERED_excerpt_84_86.
4. Why this really matters — a digression to what I believe.
First, I think Salaita’s tweets weren’t anti-semitic, and I’m not even sure they were “anti-Israel.” They weren’t the sort of thing you’d tell to your kids to help them get to sleep — but they strike me as well within the fold of what most people would have considered more-or-less civil discussion. I do of course realize that not everyone agrees with this assessment — and that’s fine.
Second, even apart from the above, I think Salaita ought be at UIUC teaching now. There are a million mechanisms for the body academic to engage its own immune response to faculty that aren’t accepted — and those mechanisms work best when they come through the student body or protests against that faculty member by other faculty.
So the blue-sky scenario should have been to hire Salaita and let there be frequent protests against his presence at UIUC by students and faculty both. That would have been academic civility at its best — let the academy itself do the purging and the complaining. Let Salaita speak to his peers and his students and justify himself to them.
Third, since life is invariably not blue-sky, UIUC 1) should have had and 2) should have used a standard operating procedure (“SOP”) for handling the Salaita pushback. In this regard, there’s not even a remote bit of evidence to suggest that the ethics of pressure by students, alums and donors was considered in a standard framework — did Chancellor Wise consult the UIUC ethicist? Did it occur to anyone there to do so?
Fourth, this invent-the-rules-as-you-go approach is incredibly concerning in light of the really big donors Chancellor Wise and UIUC are playing with behind closed doors. By which I mean Carle. Remember that number: Carle is putting in $100M to that medical center. And how much oversight is there? Very very little.
Fifth, there’s unfortunately a very unpleasant undertone in this whole debate about the vast Jewish conspiracy that brought Salaita down. And as much as I’d like to dismiss this point-of-view as not-normal, I have to say that I really worry at how facile the arguments are for this vast coordinated attack by “zombie Jews.”
Consider this commentary by Philip Weiss on Steve Miller:
Miller is a graduate of UIUC and is on the board of the Jewish Federation of Chicago, too– a leading organization in the Jewish establishment, along with Hillel. (This is further evidence of my point that the Israel lobby is based on financial contributions and on the Jewish presence in the establishment, Jews in their 40s and older who were indoctrinated in triumphalist Zionism, such as Brian Roberts and David Cohen, leaders of Comcast, the largest media company in the world, or Thomas Kaplan, who is married to an Israeli and funds an organization that is pushing war with Iran. Today all the mainstream Jewish organizations are Zionist, and you have to reckon with this sociological/religious issue, as uncomfortable as it is, in a process of decolonizing Judaism from Zionism.)4
I don’t quote this in order to condemn what Mr. Weiss has written. Rather, I quote it in order to emphasize that, as disturbing as the donor pressure on UIUC was — and again, the emails only show three such donors — there’s a larger context that everyone on all sides needs to put this in.
And that’s the A/B comparison to what truly large donors do with/to UIUC. Explore the relationship with Carle, and then step back and ask how much of what’s going on here is Salaita-specific, and how much of it is just part of a much much larger problem.
The Salaita Affair and the Carle Caper aren’t a zero-sum-game; each is independently important. But. Please don’t fixate on the first and completely ignore the critical conclusions that you can draw from the latter.
The harlequins in the marquee image are from the website EKDuncan.com. I’ve had an ongoing project of using unity3d to create animated paper theaters, and this is one of the many sites with absolutely lovely images of paper cutouts for those theaters, a technology that was, at one time, state-of-the-art.
- 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. [↩]
- See previous footnote for web link. Note that links internal to the quote will bring you to the dropbox file of the FOIA results. [↩]
- I note that at one level I’m sympathetic to the redactor’s actions, in that the trip to Santa Fe could have served as a cue for the identity of the donor. On the other hand, I think this is a typical example of an over-eagerness to redact at UIUC-FOIA, a point of view that, I suspect, cascades down from the highest levels of that unit of UIUC. [↩]
- See Salaita Firing a “Catastrophe” for UIUC. [↩]