Inside the Email Exchange on Salaita’s Hiring Controversy at UIUC

A cou­ple of news arti­cles ago I put up an email that UIUC’s Chan­cel­lor Phyl­lis Wise for­warded on the night of July 23, 2014, you know, that one that UIUC had never pro­duced in pre­vi­ous FOIAs (why?) in which Wise repro­duced pre­sum­ably Robin Kaler quot­ing an HR per­son at UIUC sug­gest­ing she (Wise) sit Dr. Salaita down once he arrived at UIUC and … well, basi­cally read him the riot act about how to behave:

Since this was the night before the UIUC Board of Trustees (BOT) meet­ing where Wise and (Wise thought) the BOT reached agree­ment that Wise wouldn’t for­ward Salaita’s hire let­ter, the above email cer­tainly sug­gests Wise was going to go ahead with the hire until … well, until … per­haps … some­one on the Board cor­rected her mis­ap­pre­hen­sion that she ought do that (hire Salaita)?

Just to close one of the many loops here, below is a com­ment I received from UIUC’s Dr. War­rior last month — that is, long before I had the above email — Warrior’s response being to my query about what he and Wise dis­cussed when she called him at 4:30 pm on the 23rd:

So it’s inter­est­ing, what War­rior describes Wise as hav­ing said in the phone call fits with the con­tent of that later Wise/(Kaler)/Deb Stone email; also, since that HR email was for­warded by again pre­sum­ably Kaler (who signs her emails “r”) at 5:49 pm, you have to won­der if Wise had seen/heard it ear­lier directly from Deb Stone?

I admit this starts to get out into the weeds, so let me empha­size the take­aways that I see in this (feel free to differ):

1. UIUC didn’t pro­duce the first email when it should have (2014), rais­ing sig­nif­i­cant ques­tions of vio­la­tions of FOIA law;
2. If this non-disclosure was inten­tional, it would make per­fect sense in as much as the emails I’ve been putting up were likely not what UIUC would have wanted out feed­ing the bon­fires of fall, 2014;
3. I query why UIUC released these emails now … I admit my FOIA to them was clever, but even so, the tim­ing of the release (just before Memo­r­ial day) could sug­gest some­one there fig­ured this would come out even­tu­ally, so why not right at the start of sum­mer, when no one would notice/care/do any­thing (e.g., the News-Gazette);
4. Warrior’s rec­ol­lec­tion of the con­ver­sa­tion with Wise fur­ther sup­ports what I’m begin­ning to feel more and more is the real­ity here — that Wise et al. prob­a­bly were going to hire Salaita, but someone(s) at the Board sat on them not to.  Not to say this story — if true — makes Wise guilt­less, but the pick­ing around she seems to have done on Salaita between July 21 and the BOT on July 24 fits rea­son­ably well with a “hire and then pil­lory” strat­egy, and not (in my opin­ion) with a “blast Salaita out of the water” approach.

All just opin­ions of course, but it’s cer­tainly true that there are more facts on the ground here than UIUC ever let on.

Which is, to my eye, ille­gal behavior.