The Salaita Affair as a Signal Amid UIUC’s College of Medicine Push

Canaries were used by coalmin­ers to detect poi­so­nous gases, typ­i­cally car­bon monox­ide, as the lit­tle birdies were (and are) far more sen­si­tive to such things than humans.  What’s appar­ently called an “ani­mal sentinel.”

Well.  I’ve said since the Salaita affair struck over a year ago that the whole thing was largely under­laid by the push for the UIUC Col­lege of Med­i­cine — the COM.  At the time too many were too focused on Jew­ish influ­ence (and prob­a­bly too many still are), but, as these “sup­ple­men­tal” emails from UIUC now begin to show, my ani­mal sen­tinel instincts were right all along — it’s the COM, stupid.

We’re only in the begin­ning of this unfold­ing night­mare, with only more dam­age to come for every­one and every­thing involved, the UIUC man­age­ment, the syco­phant pro­fes­sors, the new-speaking func­tionar­ies,¹ the good rep­u­ta­tion of UIUC, the out­look of the stu­dents,² etc. etc.  And while I hardly think I’m the only per­son to have seen early signs of the oncom­ing storm, I do want to get some­thing out there — I warned numer­ous peo­ple in the uni­ver­sity of what was likely com­ing two years ago.

This is a story I’ve been reveal­ing bits and pieces of in ear­lier posts: the Research Park, the nepo­tism there, the unbe­liev­able con­cen­tra­tion of power in Laura Frerichs, the head of the Research Park, and how I saw that con­cen­tra­tion of power as dan­ger­ous — and how I suf­fered for try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate my con­cerns to UIUC man­age­ment — Chan­cel­lor Wise included.

The time has clearly come to talk about this more — about Frerichs and how she works at least par­tially for Peter Fox, the bil­lion­aire devel­oper who built the Research Park, who seems to want to build the COM (when something’s built), and who is appar­ently leg­endary for engag­ing in scorched-earth maneu­vers to get what he wants.  The time has come to talk about how Frerichs, Fox, and a bunch of other pow­er­ful monied locals served as the spe­cial advi­sory group to Wise on build­ing the COM³–  and how they oper­ated in even more secrecy than I’d thought, not only leav­ing out any com­mu­nity rep­re­sen­ta­tion, but prob­a­bly using per­sonal emails for most of their impor­tant remote dis­cus­sions.⁴

So let me start this process of telling more with my attempt to com­mu­ni­cate with Carol Kraus Lauf­fer, the woman Laura Frerichs brought in (for $35K as I recall) to opine favor­ably on the build­ing of the COM.  I found out that Kraus Lauf­fer was inter­view­ing peo­ple in CU for her “clus­ter report, tried to talk to her, and was unable to do so.

Fine.  Not a prob­lem.  So then I wrote her the fol­low­ing let­ter … Frerich’s response to her about what to do about what I’d writ­ten was heav­ily redacted by UIUC-FOIA, and my appeal of those redac­tions is still on appeal to the Illi­nois AG’s office, which I believe is doing its best to sup­press any responses to my appeals.⁵

Here’s the email:

Boy, in ret­ro­spect that looks … prophetic …

1. Robin Kahler, for her state­ment to the News-Gazette, “I said the same thing I say to every­one: ‘If you don’t want to see it in the paper, don’t put it in an email.’”  See News Gazette 8/16/15 [↩]
2. Who now appar­ently must be told that “while pla­gia­rism is bad and uneth­i­cal, avoid­ing FOIA ‘because you are doing it for the U’ is good.” [↩]
3. As I wrote in Jan­u­ary of this year, these peo­ple were/are:
   1. Phyl­lis Wise — Chan­cel­lor of UIUC;
   2. Ile­sanmi Adesida — Vice Chan­cel­lor for Aca­d­e­mic Affairs and Provost,UIUC;
   3. Dan‎ Peter­son — Vice Chan­cel­lor, Insti­tu­tional Advance­ment, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent, UI Foundation;
   4. Michael DeLorenzo — Asso­ciate Chan­cel­lor, UIUC;
   5. Pradeep Khanna — Asso­ciate Chan­cel­lor for Cor­po­rate and Inter­na­tional Rela­tions, UIUC;
   6. Laura Frerichs — UIUC Research Park Direc­tor, UIUC Direc­tor of Eco­nomic Development;
   7. Peter Fox — “Peter B. Fox is the Founder of Fox Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (FDC), a real estate devel­op­ment firm which devel­ops, man­ages, and leases approx­i­mately 1.5 mil­lion square feet of office and retail space in Cham­paign, Illinois”;
   8. Jim Leonard — Pres­i­dent & CEO, Carle Foun­da­tion Hospital;
   9. Greg Lykins – Chair­man of First Busey and a direc­tor of Busey Bank and Busey Wealth Man­age­ment, Inc; and,
   10. Rick Stephens, founder, Horizon Hobby.

   See my Jan­u­ary 2015 post — Big Guns [↩]

4. The “sup­ple­men­tal” emails on the COM are the barest brush­ing away of the thick lay­ers of obscu­rants, since UIUC war­rants only that these emails were “rel­e­vant to the COM,” not how they picked them or what else is out there that was on per­sonal emails and involved uni­ver­sity busi­ness. [↩]
5. I have var­i­ous bits of evi­dence of this. [↩]