Steven Salaita’s Academic Talk at Urbana’s Independent Media Center

Steven Salaita spoke at the Inde­pen­dent Media Cen­ter (IMC) in Urbana on the night of  Tues­day the 13th to a crowd of at least 200 people.

No fire­works.  In fact the con­ver­sa­tion was so aca­d­e­mic it was hard to lis­ten to the man and believe he incurred (and con­tin­ues to incur) such con­tro­versy.  Appear­ances may be deceiv­ing, and ongo­ing lit­i­ga­tion may be an inhibitor of more emphatic state­ments, but I and, I think, many in the audi­ence, were by and large left won­der­ing what the fuss was all about.

Of course the deeper pic­ture is exactly that the fuss was man­u­fac­tured, but by whom and for what rea­sons we still don’t know, how­ever many months we are into the multi-million dol­lar lit­i­ga­tion, how­ever many months we are into UIUC’s non­pro­duc­tion of the Salaita doc­u­ments they were required under court-order to pro­duce.  How­ever many months we are into a con­tin­ued stream of grotesque exam­ples of deceit and indif­fer­ence to the com­mu­nity and the law by UIUC top admin­is­tra­tors and staff.

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Lis­ten­ing to Salaita I kept wait­ing for the bomb to drop, and kept hear­ing no bomb’s boom.  Again it’s tempt­ing to think he’s tight-lipped because of lit­i­ga­tion; but, hav­ing read far too many of the Salaita emails, and hav­ing spent far too much time already on analy­sis, I’m really pretty con­vinced he knows as lit­tle as the rest of us.

I should say that I’m not giv­ing Salaita a pass on his own actions, some of which were cer­tainly at least intem­per­ate; also I’m not judg­ing his dan­ger­ous­ness (or lack thereof) in terms of his larger state­ments about BDS, Israel, and etc.   Salaita may well be intem­per­ate, unqual­i­fied, and dan­ger­ous … but none of those char­ac­ter­is­tics were at all in evi­dence on Tues­day; instead Salaita came across as a pretty aca­d­e­mic guy, spout­ing pretty aca­d­e­mic talk.

Those rever­ber­a­tions of the acad­emy extended to his inter­locu­tor, Robert War­rior, as well as to the spon­sor of the event, the Cam­pus Fac­ulty Asso­ci­a­tion (CFA).  Con­sid­er­ing the media cov­er­age and the crowd this could eas­ily have been a water­shed moment for out­rage and orga­niz­ing; instead, it played far more into that whole “civil­ity” think that (for­mer) Chan­cel­lor Wise has rec­om­mended to the com­mu­nity as the way to live one’s life.

Was that pur­pose­ful?  Per­haps, but I think the like­lier truth is that reports of orga­niz­ing and hot-headeness have been wildly exag­ger­ated. The fuss was man­u­fac­tured, and the fuss about the fuss has been overblown – at least as it applies to Salaita and his sup­port­ers. How­ever unrea­son­able and untrust­wor­thy they may be, they’re not nearly as cal­cu­lat­ing as they’ve been made out.

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The Tues­day talk leaves me won­der­ing what comes next.  More dispir­it­ing rev­e­la­tions no doubt — I won­der if any­one in the UIUC admin­is­tra­tion real­izes how destruc­tive that fes­ter­ing of undis­closed truths is? Lis­ten­ing to Salaita and read­ing the (to date revealed) emails I’m left with this great sense of the over­all stu­pid­ity and incom­pe­tence of every­one involved; but the longer there’s no open­ness on UIUC’s part about what went on, and no calls to account­ing, the more that sense of dis­may at the bungling turns to jus­ti­fi­able anger and outrage.

And that’s hardly sur­pris­ing since the larger con­text for the Salaita Affair is the duty of a uni­ver­sity to act with open­ness, a bedrock prin­ci­ple of the acad­emy.  Hon­estly it’s amus­ing to hear peo­ple claim that uni­ver­si­ties are drawn to secrecy on the cor­po­rate model of non-disclosure, since that cor­po­rate model is largely dis­cred­ited, albeit still too preva­lent.  Many cor­po­ra­tions have fig­ured out that it’s alto­gether bet­ter not to dis­sem­ble at all rather than to be caught in the lies later on.  Not all by any means, but enough that no uni­ver­sity can claim with a straight face that they’re only doing what’s stan­dard prac­tice for corporations.

And if UIUC thought they were fol­low­ing a cor­po­rate play­book here or, worse, if they con­tinue to think they can just claim that “ongo­ing lit­i­ga­tion” pre­cludes full-discussion and truth­ful­ness … then Salaita will have far more con­se­quence than he ever intended, or the uni­ver­sity ever wanted to happen.

And that might be a good thing, at least if it brings about change.

(Note I’d sent this to Acad­em­blog in case they wanted to put it up.  They didn’t, so I’m putting it up here.  It may or my not be my finest work (I make no claims to it being so), but I thought it worth not­ing that reports of Salaita’s incen­di­ary nature have been greatly exag­ger­ated, at least if that talk was any indicator.)