Another Professor Punished for Anti-Israel Views

[Cover of Steven Salaita`s book \"Anti-Arab Racism in the USA\"] [Cover of Steven Salaita`s book \"Anti-Arab Racism in the USA\"]

Another Professor Punished for Anti-Israel Views

By : Corey Robin

Until two weeks ago, Steven Salaita was heading to a job at the University of Illinois as a professor of American Indian Studies. He had already resigned from his position at Virginia Tech; everything seemed sewn up. Now the chancellor of the University of Illinois has overturned Salaita’s appointment and rescinded the offer. Because of Israel.

The sources familiar with the university’s decision say that concern grew over the tone of his comments on Twitter about Israel’s policies in Gaza….

For instance, there is this tweet: “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised? #Gaza.” Or this one: “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror.” Or this one: “Zionists, take responsibility: if your dream of an ethnocratic Israel is worth the murder of children, just fucking own it already.”

In recent weeks, bloggers and others have started to draw attention to Salaita’s comments on Twitter. But as recently as 22 July (before the job offer was revoked), a university spokeswoman defended Salaita’s comments on Twitter and elsewhere. A spokeswoman told The News-Gazette for an article about Salaita that “faculty have a wide range of scholarly and political views, and we recognize the freedom-of-speech rights of all of our employees.”

I have written about a number of these types of cases over the past few years, but few have touched me the way this one has. For three reasons.

First, Steven is a friend on Facebook, and we follow each other on Twitter. I do not know him personally but I have valued his unapologetic defense of the rights of Palestinians. Often he posts articles and information from which I have learned quite a bit.

Second, I have no doubt that an easily rattled administrator would find some of my public writings on Israel and Palestine to have crossed a line. If you’re in favor of Salaita being punished, you should be in favor of me being punished. And not just me. On Twitter, many of us—not just on this issue but a variety of issues, and not just on the left, but also on the right—speak in a way that can jar or shock a tender sensibility. We swear, we accuse, we say no, in thunder. That is the medium. Though I have never really thought twice about it, it is fairly chilling to think that a university official might now be combing through my tweets to see if I had said anything that would warrant me being deemed ineligible for a job. Or worse, since I have tenure, that an administrator might be doing that to any and every potential job candidate.

Third, Cary Nelson, who was once the president of the American Association of University Professors, has weighed in in defense of this decision by the University of Illinois Chancellor.

“I think the chancellor made the right decision,” he said via email. “I know of no other senior faculty member tweeting such venomous statements—and certainly not in such an obsessively driven way. There are scores of over-the-top Salaita tweets. I also do not know of another search committee that had to confront a case where the subject matter of academic publications overlaps with a loathsome and foul-mouthed presence in social media. I doubt if the search committee felt equipped to deal with the implications for the campus and its students. I am glad the chancellor did what had to be done.”

Asked if he feared that the withdrawal of the job offer could represent a scholar being punished for his unpopular political views, Nelson said he did not think that was the case. “If Salaita had limited himself to expressing his hostility to Israel in academic publications subjected to peer review, I believe the appointment would have gone through without difficulty,” he said. Nelson added that harsh criticism of Israel is widespread among faculty members. “Salaita’s extremist and uncivil views stand alone. There is nothing ‘unpopular’ on this campus about hostility to Israel.”

Once upon a time I wrote an essay for an anthology Nelson edited on unions in academia. When I was the leader of the grad union drive at Yale, he came to campus and spoke out on our behalf. I thought of him as not only a champion of academic freedom but as an especially acerbic—some might even say uncivil—commentator willing to throw a few elbows at his fellow academics. One time, he even compared a fellow English professor to a vampire bat, and proceeded to make fun of his bodily movements and facial gestures. In an academic publication subject to peer review.

But in recent years Nelson has become an outspoken defender of the State of Israel and a critic of the BDS movement. A man who once called for the boycott of a university now thinks boycotts of universities are a grave threat to academic freedom. A man who serially violates the norms of academic civility—urging fellow academics to “give key administrators no peace. Place chanting pickets outside their homes. Disrupt every meeting they attend with sardonic or inspiring public theater”—now invokes those same norms against a critic of Israel. A man who once wrote that “claims about collegiality are being used to stifle campus debate, to punish faculty, and to silence the free exchange of opinion by the imposition of corporate-style conformity,” now complains about an anti-Zionist professor’s “foul-mouthed presence in social media.” A man who once called the movement against hostile environments and in favor of sensitive speech on campus “Orwellian,” now frets over a student of Salaita’s fearing she “would be academically at risk in expressing pro-Israeli views in class.”

I bring this up not to pick on Nelson, but to ask him, and all of you, a simple question: Should Nelson be deemed ineligible for another job at a university simply because of these statements he has written? Should l be deemed ineligible for another job at a university simply because of some “foul-mouthed,” perhaps even intemperate, tweets that I am sure I have written?

But I bring up Nelson’s case for another reason. And that is that his hypocrisy is not merely his own. It is a symptom of the effects of Zionism on academic freedom, how pro-Israel forces have consistently attempted to shut down debate on this issue, how they “distort all that is right.” Nelson’s U-turn demonstrates that we’re heading down a very dangerous road. I strongly urge all of you to put on the brakes.

In the meantime, do something for Steven Salaita. Write a note to University of Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise (best to email her at both chancellor@illinois.edu and pmischo@illinois.edu), urging her to rescind her rescission. As always, be polite, but be firm. Don’t assume this is a done deal; in my experience, it often is not. We have managed through our efforts, on multiple occasions, to get nervous administrators to walk away from the ledge.

Update (3:30 pm)

Here is a third email to add to your list; it is actually a direct email to the chancellor. It is pmwise@illinois.edu. Also, when you write your email, please cc Robert Warrior of the American Indian Studies department at the University of Illinois. His email is rwarrior@illinois.edu. Also cc the department: ais@illinois.edu.

[This article was first published on coreyrobin.com; it can be found here.]

Summer Readings from NEWTON

The New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) page has greatly expanded over the past year, in large part thanks to the recommendations and contributions from many of Jadaliyya’s readers. We would like to provide you with ample summer reading material by reminding you of several new texts that we have featured in recent months. This compilation of works spans a wide range of topics and disciplines by prominent authors in the field of Middle East studies.

We hope this list will be pedagogically useful for readers preparing syllabi for the fall semester, as well as those hoping to learn about new and unique perspectives on the region. To stay up to date with ongoing discussions by scholars and instructors in the field, check out Jadaliyya’s sister organization, Tadween Publishing.

Highlights

NEWTON in Focus: Thinking Through Gender and Sex

NEWTON in Focus: Egypt

NEWTON Author Nergis Ertürk Receives MLA First Book Prize

NEWTON 2012 in Review

This Year’s NEWTONs

New Texts Out Now: Mark Fathi Massoud, Law`s Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan

New Texts Out Now: Ayça Çubukçu, The Responsibility to Protect: Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity

New Texts Out Now: Louise Cainkar, Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas

New Texts Out Now: Maya Mikdashi, What is Settler Colonialism? and Sherene Seikaly, Return to the Present

New Texts Out Now: Joel Beinin, Mixing, Separation, and Violence in Urban Spaces and the Rural Frontier in Palestine

New Texts Out Now: Wendy Pearlman, Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon

New Texts Out Now: Simon Jackson, Diaspora Politics and Developmental Empire: The Syro-Lebanese at the League of Nations

New Texts Out Now: Charles Tripp, The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East

New Texts Out Now: Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam

New Texts Out Now: Adel Iskandar and Bassam Haddad, Mediating the Arab Uprisings

New Texts Out Now: David McMurray and Amanda Ufheil-Somers, The Arab Revolts

New Texts Out Now: Esam Al-Amin, The Arab Awakening Unveiled

New Texts Out Now: Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East

New Texts Out Now: Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South

New Texts Out Now: Paul Aarts and Francesco Cavatorta, Civil Society in Syria and Iran

New Texts Out Now: Amr Adly, State Reform and Development in the Middle East: Turkey and Egypt in the Post-Liberalization Era

New Texts Out Now: Rachel Beckles Willson, Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West

New Texts Out Now: Ilana Feldman, The Challenge of Categories: UNRWA and the Definition of a "Palestine Refugee"

New Texts Out Now: Jeannie Sowers, Environmental Politics in Egypt: Activists, Experts, and the State

New Texts Out Now: Dina Rizk Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance

New Texts Out Now: Na`eem Jeenah, Pretending Democracy: Israel, An Ethnocratic State

New Texts Out Now: Sally K. Gallagher, Making Do in Damascus

New Texts Out Now: Natalya Vince, Saintly Grandmothers: Youth Reception and Reinterpretation of the National Past in Contemporary Algeria

New Texts Out Now: January 2013 Back to School Edition

New Texts Out Now: John M. Willis, Unmaking North and South: Cartographies of the Yemeni Past, 1857-1934

New Texts Out Now: Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism

New Texts Out Now: Madawi Al-Rasheed, A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia

New Texts Out Now: Noga Efrati, Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present

New Texts Out Now: Nicola Pratt, The Gender Logics of Resistance to the "War on Terror"

New Texts Out Now: Lisa Hajjar, Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights

New Texts Out Now: Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq

New Texts Out Now: Marwan M. Kraidy, The Revolutionary Body Politic