Open Letter: Graduate Students Demand Restoration of Academic Freedom at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Open Letter: Graduate Students Demand Restoration of Academic Freedom at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Open Letter: Graduate Students Demand Restoration of Academic Freedom at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following open letter to Chancellor Wise at the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne was issued on 4 September 2014 by graduate students from around the United States and beyond in opposition to the summary dismissal of Professor Steven Salaita and in defense of academic freedom and freedom of speach. Over 550 graduate students have signed the letter thus far, and their signature can be viewed by clicking here. If you are a graduate student and would like to add your name, please click here.]

Phyllis M. Wise, PhD
Swanlund Administration Building, MC 304
601 East John Street
Champagne, IL 61821

Dear Chancellor Wise and the University of Illinois Board of Trustees,

We the undersigned graduate students wish to register our opposition to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s (UI-UC) summary dismissal of Professor Steven G. Salaita. In addition to drawing condemnation from across the academic community as a fundamental violation of academic freedom, this firing has deeply concerned graduate students across the country who view this case as a dangerous precedent. As the rising generation of scholars and public intellectuals, we are troubled about what this signals about the work environments, hiring conditions, and the larger academe we are working to enter.

We believe that the only explanation of Professor Salaita’s firing that is supported by the facts at hand is that Salaita was targeted by those who opposed his political viewpoints and fired for those aforementioned views, using a handful of tweets as pretext. Other faculty and legal scholars have clearly outlined the facts of the case and have documented the lack of due process, rampant interference from outside the university, and employment of double standards that characterize this case.[1]

UI-UC`s actions have signaled to the graduate student community that in order to secure employment, we should stay silent on political questions, eliminate our online interactions with others in the public and in the scholarly community, and cease researching and asking tough questions that may displease those in authority. These conditions trouble us all, and will deter many graduate students from applying to faculty positions at UI-UC in the future.

We hold that the value of scholarly efforts must not be determined by how readily they appease the powerful or cater to the status quo; instead, such efforts must be weighed by their degree of due diligence and attention to the ethical pursuit of knowledge, as well as the imperative to voice righteous criticisms when necessary. To constrain our research and public engagement in such a way as to protect ourselves from the treatment Professor Salaita has received promises to strip the academy of all relevance to society as an institution that values intellectual debate.

Therefore, we join the growing body of academics of various disciplines, across departments, and within the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who have overwhelmingly condemned Professor Salaita’s firing.[2] We express our support for academic freedom, freedom of speech, due process, and the broader principles that this firing undermines. As such, we state that we will not engage as speakers or participants in conferences organized by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign or co-sponsored by departments, programs and offices of the university until such a time as this decision is reversed.[3] We will also encourage other graduate students and faculty to boycott such conferences and events, and we will work to raise awareness in our universities and communities about this case and its implications.

We believe there is time to reverse Professor Salaita’s firing and begin to undo the damage to the academy that these actions have inflicted, and we urge you to reconsider your position. However, barring a reversal of your decision, we cannot in good conscience engage with your university as if its behavior did not violate the basic freedoms required for the scholarly community to survive as an independent and critical body.

Sincerely

[Over 550 graduate students have signed the letter thus far, and their signatures can be viewed by clicking here.]

[If you are a graduate student and would like to add your name, please click here.]

Notes

[1] For more, see a recent letter by the American Association of University Professors: http://www.aaup.org/file/AAUPLetterChancellorWise.pdf A recent statement by legal scholars on this issue: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gxfbptf2t0d17vw/Faculty%20Letter%20to%20U%20of%20I.pdf

[2] See the growing body of actions in response to the firing here: http://coreyrobin.com/2014/08/31/salaita-by-the-numbers-5-cancelled-lectures-3-votes-of-no-confidence-3849-boycotters-and-1-nyt-article/ and a catalogue of boycott pledges here: http://coreyrobin.com/2014/08/23/more-than-3000-scholars-boycott-the-university-of-illinois/

[3] Institutional affiliations are for purposes of identification only. We sign as graduate students and not on behalf of our departments or universities. 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412