Is Steven Salaita an Anti-Semite?

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Clarissa

August 25, 2014

Jonathan Mayhew wrote a brilliant post on the Steven Salaita affair that everybody should read. Here is the most salient point:

People defending him because they agree with his perspective, or attacking him because they don’t, are putting forward irrelevant information. In other words, you should put it in the form of a hypothetical: a faculty member was hired, quit his previous job, and moved, and then had the appointment canceled because of tweets about X (where X is an unknown variable.) What do you think? Your opinion should not change after you discover the content of the tweets.

This is absolutely spot-on and it’s also how I approached the situation. I only now found out what the tweets in question actually said, and I believe their content is irrelevant to the issue. It is not a university’s place to police tweets, Facebook pages, Tumblrs, and blogs. Especially while there are shameless plagiarists who are in no way persecuted for plagiarizing among the faculty members at some institutions of higher learning. In short: universities, get your noses out of Twitter and start reading books already!

I also agree with Jonathan that “Salaita is a foolish anti-semitic blowhard who should sue the pants of UIUC.” His tweets are those of a raging anti-Semite. However, I don’t see why the entire academic community everywhere should be punished for Salaita’s personal bigotry, which is exactly what will happen if it becomes normal to castigate scholars academically for what they do outside of academia. While Salaita’s unhinged outpourings offend my sensibilities as a Jew and a normal person, the precedent set by UIUC can damage me and the entire academic community in a much more tangible way.

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20 responses to “Is Steven Salaita an Anti-Semite?”

ladyleahjane

August 25, 2014

I don’t understand this whole thing at all. One of the most famous and well-regarded professors at my university is infamous for picking fights on Twitter, he even threatened a journalist who wrote something critical of him that he would “kick [journalist’s] immigrant ass back to [country of origin]”, and the university would never consider booting him for that.

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1. Clarissa
  
  August 25, 2014
  
  Illinois is supposed to be better than this Twitter policing. UIUC is a very respectable, good university that for some reason decided to demean itself by butting into Twitter wars. This is very disgraceful.
  
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  1. ladyleahjane
    
    August 26, 2014
    
    Well let’s see how long they maintain that reputation by butting into professor’s personal lives/opinions.
    
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musteryou

August 25, 2014

meanwhile I am being attacked by an Australian and Zimbabweans on Facebook for using the word “Rhodesia”. Of course today people deny the historical sense and want to flatten reality into a narrow question of morality, where predefined characters where white or black hats and where it is considered highly intellectual or ingenious to label what hat somebody is wearing.

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1. Clarissa
  
  August 25, 2014
  
  Ridiculous. What, are you supposed to forget Rhodesia existed?
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    August 25, 2014
    
    Yes. I am not to use that term anymore, or I get comments from all sorts saying, “racist”. Obviously this is a symptom of contempt for history and reveals the prevalence of the history-obliterating tendency which is narcissistic identity politics.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      August 25, 2014
      
      Yes, there is clearly no difference at all between naming a thing and approving it.
      
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      1. musteryou
        
        August 25, 2014
        
        These days things really are that intellectually superficial for the most part.
        
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  2. J. Otto Pohl
    
    August 26, 2014
    
    Believe it or not this very issue came up in the Race and Ethnicity graduate class I teach. We were discussing Southern African history decades before ZANU or ZAPU existed and I explained that at that time nobody referred to the colony as Zimbabwe. The term Zimbabwe at that time only referred to the ancient kingdom of Zimbabwe. Using Zimbabwe to refer to the colony of Rhodesia was a later adaptation. So to call Rhodesia by the name Zimbabwe in reference to the early 20th century was imposing a later name upon it.
    
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Anonymous

August 25, 2014

University of Illinois employs Bill Ayers as a Distinguished Professor and everyone seems to be OK with that. If Salaita tweeted such hateful things about Blacks or Hispanics his career would be over. He will learn his lesson, if you want to work as college professor, bite your tongue.

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1. Clarissa
  
  August 25, 2014
  
  A silent professor with a bitten tongue is an oxymoron. 🙂 🙂
  
  And any university will be fortunate to hire Ayers who is a brilliant scholar of pedagogy, so I’m not sure how you link him to Salaita.
  
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Lionel

August 25, 2014

If Salaita tweeted such hateful things about Blacks his career would be over. Your university did the right thing. Now racists like Salaita learn to bite their nasty tongues.

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1. Clarissa
  
  August 25, 2014
  
  You couldn’t be more wrong in what your saying about hateful comments on blacks. Haven’t you read my stories about racists comments easily and loudly made by my profs at Yale?
  
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Lionel

August 25, 2014

Sorry, I posted twice. My point is that Salaita didn’t physically harm anyone like Ayers. On one hand, if Ayers can be employed as college professor, then any criminal can be. On the other hand, this is 2014 for Pete’s sake, racists should not be employed anywhere.

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1. Clarissa
  
  August 25, 2014
  
  If racists don’t get employed anywhere, unemployment rates will soar to 90%. 🙂
  
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Lionel

August 25, 2014

I started to read your blog recently, so I didn’t read that yet.

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1. Clarissa
  
  August 25, 2014
  
  Welcome to the blog!
  
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Hattie

August 25, 2014

“Nothing in Professor Salaita’s Twitter feed suggests a violation of professional ethics or disciplinary incompetence. The University of Illinois is therefore clearly in violation of a fundamental principle of academic freedom with regard to extramural speech; moreover, your decision effectively overrides legitimate faculty decision-making and peer review in a way that is inconsistent with AAUP guidelines regarding governance.” Michael Bérubé, director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University

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Robert Haymond

August 27, 2014

In the first place, the contract was never finalized so, in effect, the promise of a job was just that, a promise, not a signed confirmation. Second, and more importantly, something that our spoiled brat professors and their academic minions may not be taking into account, professors, including Steven Salaita, are not living in a vacuum. That is to say, they are expected to show a certain level of collegiality in order to further the academic and communal interests of the institution which is in process of hiring them. There is also (normally) a “test” period before an individual becomes tenured. It was obvious, in Salaita’s case, that hiring him would have been exceedingly disruptive to the faculty as a whole and to his department in particular. His tweets and other statements were so far beyond the bounds of civility not to mention beyond any conceivable objective social science that he would have endangered the reputation as well as the functioning of his academic community. The quest, as in this case, for a complete disavowal of standards and limitations in search of an extreme ideal of “free speech” is a mindset which is destroying the academic community at large. It is happening in America, in Canada, in the countries of western Europe and even in Israel. Quite frankly, to those of us who work outside academia, we are gaining measures of contempt for the overfed brains bred by universities which appear to (dys)function without an iota of common sense or civil discourse.

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1. Clarissa
  
  August 27, 2014
  
  If you don’t work in academia and have no idea how job contracts look, then what makes you want to opine on a subject of which you are so ignorant? It is very, very silly and childish to repeat this unintelligent opinion of some fool about contract that wasn’t “finalized.” What possessed you to do such a thing?
  
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