Steven Salaita, the scholar of indigenous peoples who lately relocated to Illinois from Virginia only to have the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana rescind his appointment to teach because of his tweets against Zionism, has gotten strong support from Robert Farley and now Scott Lemieux, at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Lemieux, a professor himself, is offended by this assertion by Cary Nelson, the Israel lobbyist and professor at U of Illinois who has supported his school’s president’s decision re Salaita:
a campus and its faculty members have the right to consider whether, for example, a job candidate’s publications, statements to the press, social media presence, public lectures, teaching profile, and so forth suggest he or she will make a positive contribution to the department, student life, and the community as a whole.
Lemieux says that’s a clubby criterion, making an academic appointment on the basis of who you’d like to share a drink with at your country club:
People don’t have due process protections when they’re turned down for a job, but this still doesn’t mean that “does the candidate disagree with Cary Nelson about Israeli policy too stridently?” is a criterion that any responsible hiring committee should be taking into account. The “I would choose to have him as a colleague” line gives away the show here — this is supposed to be a professional process, not a consideration of who you’d like to be sharing cognac with at the 19th hole of the country club.
Most of Nelson’s bill of particulars consist of tweets, that while they sometimes express ideas I don’t agree with in language I would be disinclined to use, can’t possibly be firing offenses. To add to this, he asks whether “Jewish students in his classes [will] feel comfortable” with his Tweets. At least here we’re talking about something (teaching) that is relevant to whether someone should be fired, as opposed to something that isn’t (whether someone disagrees with Cary Nelson’s political views too vehemently.) But leaving aside his obviously erroneous assumption that no Jewish student could agree with the substance of Salaita’s views, this is again a remarkably poor argument. First of all, as many people have pointed out, this proves too much; it’s just an argument that no faculty member should ever express a view on a controversial topic. And, second, it’s not as if this was Salaita’s first job out of a British PhD program; if he had any record of treating students who disagree with him about Israeli policy this would, presumably, come out in the evaluation of his teaching. If it didn’t, it’s not relevant.
Sensible arguments. We can only hope that this disastrous decision, such blatant evidence of the Israel lobby’s corrupting touch, is soon reversed.
Iymen Chehade, a victim of this blacklisting himself, makes a similar point in supporting Salaita:
“Academic freedom entails that professors have the right to express their knowledge about the plight of the Palestinians both inside and outside of the classroom despite the fact that it currently deviates from the dominant narrative in the United States.”
It would be useful to consider the difficulty corollary. Suppose there were a Zionist professor tweeting furiously this summer, cheering on the IDF assaults on Gaza, writing off the beach killings as an unfortunate accident ultimately traceable to Hamas, retweeting a call to have, say, Ali Abunimah harmed, and offering clear, fact-based classroom defenses of Israel’s right to exist as an ethno-theocracy, with special rights (of return, land use, etc.) reserved for Jews, while respecting students’ rights to challenge her and present alternative opinions
Would we argue forcefully that her preliminary conflict be honored? I hope so, and I think we would. Palestine and its supporters have the facts and the justice on their side, so that silencing the opposition is a much smaller arrow in the quill. It’s a sign of Zionist desperation that a frequently honorable man like Cary Nelson tosses his belief in academic freedom out the window when it comes to Israelis murdering Palestinians, as he himself admitted ion his interview with Ali Abunimah. And he trembles cravenly behind the inequitable iniquities of the capitalist work contract, proposing to enforce a “civility” that he himself is hardly notable for practicing with his colleagues, students, and others.
To add to the hypocrisy here: Mr. Nelson is a frequent leftist who has published important semi-marxist studies of fully marxist cultural work, and for him suddenly to start talking like craven university counsel deserves peals of derisive laughter.,
Old country club, new country club, next country club?
Nelson has got to be a BDS double agent. Nobody can be against the academic boycott and be this clueless.
By the way, why does it always say Your comment is awaiting moderation? How does Mondoweiss know what my comments are thinking about?
The Zionists know they are losing the battle where it counts most…on college campuses. That is why they are fighting so hard there. The strategy of taking over student governments with Jewish students backing them with money and resources disproportionately to their representative numbers worked in congress so why not on campus.