pleasure to be here in this wonderful space in this wonderful city and a special thanks to professor chandon ready for all of his work not only did he help put this together but he helped set up a number of events here in the pacific northwest in both oregon and washington and he's worked extraordinarily hard and he's way too civil to say it out loud but i'm not the easiest person in the world with whom to make interest in my case or my situation with the university of illinois we've been calling it a situation and i find that a particularly amusing euphemism but that's kind of what it's morphed to but i  want to situate this situation in a broader context and look at a constellation of issues that informed the university's decision in the first place and that have continued to inform the conversation that has occurred over the past seven or so months i'm happy during the q and a to answer something specific about my case if anybody is curious or to address something that i didn't address or that i won't address during my prepared comments here just line up in the end and ask academic freedom so a few thoughts on academic freedom before moving into some context tool issues first freedom is not settled it doesn't have a anyway so you know sometimes life forces this into circumstances where where we see expertise and things about which we would have otherwise had lesser or little interests with me and academic freedom it's been that way i had a always had a basic understanding of academic freedom the reasons i entered into the you know the profession but after august redefined and there's one thing that i constantly encounter in reading about academic freedom it's that whatever else it does everybody agrees that academic freedom is essential to the conduct of scholarly work and pedagogy that if we or restricted to viewpoint that in form a particular status quo or supplement a particular center of power then we are limited in our ability to do our jobs the way that they were supposed to be done in the humanities and social scientists particularly this is also true certainly of the hard sciences and it's true also of students graduate students instructors in addition to tenured faculty we have a mandate to push boundaries of commonplace thought we have an interest in deconstructing the parameters and assumptions of the status quo and if we are doing o work in a useful and interesting way we are also identifying and critiquing centers of power and it's the recrimination of those centers of power that makes academic freedom critical to our work but academic freedom has never been consistently practiced it's done largely a good job of protecting those who might be seen as as an orthodox from recrimination but it's never done a good job of protecting systematic critique of state power  go back to even before the mccarthy era that so many professors getting fired and you'll find that litmus tests administrative and political litmus tests existed that very much limited the range of  speech and research in which faculty could engage through the mccarthy era of course people's loyalty to american patriotism was constantly tested and dozens of academics were fired from either tenure track or tenured positions a case that is similar to mine at base but much worse much much harsher is that of angela governor ronald reagan fired her her for affiliation with or her membership in the communist party and also her affiliation with the black panther party so it's kind of a double whammy angela davis ended up getting falsely indicted for murder beat the rap on those phony charges ended up back at u c l a and then ended up getting fired again and the reason for her firing a second time is because the u c board of regents cited inflammatory language that's the rationale and you can we can see inflammatory language acting as something of a precursor for the new discourse of civility that has a police brutality or militarism or structural rather than just interpersonal racism if one criticizes israel let me even more specific with plenty of people have criticized israel without paying any penalty but what really gets you in trouble is criticizing zionism if one criticizes zionism and if one criticizes continued u s and canadian colonization and the complicity of multinational corporations in the continuation of that colonization and then environmental destruction one might possibly end up without the full protection of academic freedom if you look at the cases of people who have been fired or harassed over the past twenty five years habitable ie they fit one of those category or or many of them all at once i'm not the first person this have has happened to visa v palestine of course and it another noteworthy case statements critical of israel you can look at really david shorter of u c l a there there have been dozens of people going back to to before the heyday of edward saeed who have either been fired or been denied tenure or in some cases and we forget this often never got a job in the first place and we know that this sort of cloud exists it has in academia for quite some time it does outside of academia to sas jim clancy from c n n or the reverend bruce shipman at yale who was fired from his chaplain ship for criticizing israel's operation protective edge last summer or ask rabbi brant rosen who was forced to leave his synagogue because of of criticisms he made of protective edge so these sorts of things have been happening and they are systematic and they are are under taken in the name of a particular dialogue and peace and coexistence but in the end there are primary stock in trade or the primary stock in trade of those who seek to stifle the speech rights of advocates of palestinian human rights is unfettered charges of antisemitism this too has been a longstanding tactic it's problematic for many reasons one of the reasons it's troublesome is that it co flates jewish cultural identity jewish religion jewish ethnicity with the practices of the state of israel we should not want those conflation sibby made no matter our national or cultural or ethnic background i for example am a citizen of the jordan in addition to the united states and when people criticize the kin or the jordanian government i don't feel attacked on an ethnic or cultural level i believe that people should criticize the king and the jordanian government and the american government and any other government any other state actor without that sort of criticism being juxtaposed with an attack on an ethnic community if your basing a sort of cultural identity on the practices and behaviors of the state of israel you are putting yourself in a terrible position because the practices of the state of israel have been and continue to be deeply violent and very often rise to the level or descend to the level of war crimes as numerous journalists and human rights reports of the past year indicate anti semitism is a very real phenomenon and a phenomenon about which we should all be deeply concerned and for which we should be against were which we should profoundly oppose but in the context of painting critics of israel resign with a broad brush it's largely a rhetorical technique that's intended to shut down conversation and shutting down conversation is the stock in trade of a host of pro israel organizations and there are a number of them that focus on academ two things stand out in my mind and in my experience for thinking about these matters one is the american studies association the academic boycott resolution of of december two thousand  thirteen and then israel's intensive bombardment of the gaza strip over fifty one days last summer in which over two thousand palestinians were killed anywhere from five hundred one thousand to five hundred thirty eight of them children led to massive property damage and destruction and it led to an intensive suffering in the territory that continues today a territory that is periodically subject to this kind of blanket bombing  and that has suffered tremendously already and there are lots of ways that we can go about it let me let me focus on discourses i started to notice this during the debate around the american studies resolution i was involved in that you know i was part of the core group of  faculty who were who were pushing the resolution and then i wrote a number of pieces justifying the you know the resolution or defending the resolution after it had been passed and there's plenty of reason to believe that that  vocal support of this particular resolution is what landed me in hot water in the first place and the and the targeting of me precedes my recent twitter at to vittie but i noticed during the debate just as i noticed during the political conversations around operation protective edge that very few people these days defend israel's actions they defend the idea of israel they defend the honor of israel the defend the sort of existential realities of israel but they don't actually defend israel's actions or israel's behavior during the conversation around they say resolution for example i heard plenty of people opposing the the resolution the proposed resolution but they very few people of any were saying during the usa events the men to discuss it i don't think any of them were saying what these people pro resolution folks are saying about israeli universities being complicit in the occupation is not true what they're saying about israel being an occupying force or even having a military occupation is not true you just weren't hearing those sorts of arguments what you were hearing were arguments like is it the role of a scholarly group to pass this sort of resolution and we came to say the answer was was was a simple yes right did it done it tons of times you also heard you know arguments like will you know scholarly groups shouldn't be political which is an old standby for the crowd that wants a certain sort of self serving politics to be centered right in the in a particular institution and everybody else has to be silent or marginalized you also heard that advocates of the boycott are singling out israel that's another common argument you know why shouldn't we be boycotting north korea or china or cuba because u s universities have tons of formal relationships with cuba north korea because you know that is the truth like i've been noticing this for years and nobody kinds of arguments and then i'm not registered this is an interesting way to argue it it's an interesting it's interesting to defend a state based on these abstract concerns of existential  rather than on the matters of policy that are being introduced and critiqued by the other side then protected rolled around and i saw a similar phenomenon at israel really took a beating in public relations during that period us democrats at this point various studies have surveys recent surveys have shown or probe palestinian are identifying as pro palestinian rather than pro israel at a rate of anywhere from sixty to sixty percent these days these are u s democrats that's a remarkable number that's a remark that could be described as a sea change in public attitudes towards israel of course the u s left in the global left always been pro palestine but israel is increasingly becoming an issue of the tea party right now if that's where it's being defended that's where it is drawing the majority of its popular support and during protective edge people were seeing news stories profoundly critical of israel in the media spaces the could normally be relied upon to sanitize or whitewash israeli violence people were taking to their social media and seeing pictures of of of you know palestinian infants and toddlers being blown to smithereens they were seeing these photos of little boys in g whose corpses were being stored in an ice cream freezer and they were being stored in ice cream freezer because the morgues had run out of space and because gaza had no electricity and in the summers heat they were going to rapidly decompose and create an ongoing or an even worse health crisis people were engaged with these images they were seeing these images and israel's public defenses of that operation were  you could describe them as existing somewhere between the preved and risible i remember when naftali bennett i think he's the israeli minister of finance he's a mainstream in all kinds of worldwide condemnation for israel as well it's sort of because by every standard it was a war crime and wolf blitzer asked bennett about the four boys that been it didn't answer the question and mentioned the four boys he went into a diatribe about how the arabs have in their houses missile launcher rooms and he kept going on about the missile launcher room and he seen the missile launcher room because of course he served in israel's invasion in lebanon george bush doesn't like black people you know use this like you know and i don't know if it's like wow you know that's that's that's that's a remarkable narrative bennett that's you know your knowledge of the enemy is just stunning because about my childhood you know and because i you know i was born  apartment in front of this but this is the this is the level of rationalization that we were getting all right there's only one example of many the little rationalization that we were getting during protective edge this is from a mainstream israeli politician ok vote saying that arabs are coming to the polls and drove us right you know and these sorts of statements are revealing a side to israel that has normally been precluded from corporate media coverage in the u s but during protective a very few people were defending israel's actions i didn't hear nastily bennett or the rest of the collection of talking heads saying things like no no five hundred and one thousand palestinian children didn't die we didn't you know no no israel is not shooting you know human shelters and schools israel is not doing any of these things that's false nobody was arguing that w call it it doesn't constitute a defense in fact it sounds an awful lot like a very derivative five hundred year old colonial discourse that every colonizers use to explain how he was pure of soul until he encountered the native who transformed him into a here to for unimaginable corruption and damn it made him do things that he never would have thought possible and so the palestinian corrupted the israeli when you cannot win the debate and make no mistake i would say that the pro israel camp has lost the debate they've lost it based on journalism based on human rights reports based on public perception based on experience based on eyewitness accounts based on dozens and dozens and dozens of of meticulous scholarly work all right it is impossible at this point to say with a straight face that israel did not displace anywhere from seven hundred to eight hundred thousand palestinians upon its founding that that is not engaged in a military occupation and settlement program the violates every relevant international law but it has not largely been the aggressor and that it has done nothing but reach out towards the palestinians in peace only to receive a cold and welcoming hand in suck down the conversation you don't even let the conversation get off the ground and you punish and silence those who are bringing uncomfortable facts to your attention and to the attention of the general public you x you get more with a particular discourse a particular narrative and it follows you and so you shut the conversation down now what's of interest to us or i think of tremendous interest should be of tremendous interest is the are the narratives that go into these acts of administrative repression because make no mistake administrator is or are not only complicit in these restrictions on academic freedom but they are prevented or some of these restrictions on academic freedom if you need any evidence just think about the fact that every major scholarly association in the country and many around the world baby you pee tons of faculty senate have come out against the university of illinois decision but not a single upper administrator at a single u university has done the same right that's where the battle lines are drawn but the discourse of civility is particularly interesting to me especially as an updating of the language of  inflammatory language or collegiality civilities strikes me as more insidious because it's slightly less on missed and direct at least when they fired angela davis for inflammatory language had something to work with you know but when they see civility i do they deploy that language administrators and they use it all over the place now you know once a you know but it's been in existence since before my firing but after it it's spread through administrative offices quicker then then then then settlers spread through the north american continent so i caught and gone you know and one of the reasons for that is because it's a fundamentally ambiguous word it's the word the we recognize as something bad but it doesn't compel its user to explain what's bad about it it's supposed to be self evident so you just invoke civility and then that's it the conversation ends but our job right is as people interested in academe and interested in ideas to students and teachers to think about the different ways that a term like civility connotes and where it connotes and so i like to remind people that i was hired in the american indian studies program and in the context of american indian histories a term like civility certainly has tons of baggage it's civil on civil civilized uncivilized  civilized savage civilized barbaric these by an aries were in many ways continued to be the lingua franca of conquest they were every place european colonization occurred that's the discursive rationale really in lots of ways a moral rationale for undertaking the colonial project in the first place and so in the context of american studies we can look at a term like civility and try to think through its implications and we might reach the conclusion that for a feel dead engaged in the work of it and adherents to civility is very problematic indeed that in fact it might prevent those in the field of american indian studies and other fields from doing what it is that people in the field do which is to deconstruct discourses like this to focus on the ways that a colonialist and totalizing language of conquest continue to circulate and influence our common sense ideas of us history and the us present and i don't believe that administrators were consciously aware of those connotations when they decided to try it out civility that doesn't let them off the hook that makes the use of the term all the more insidious it means that there's a particular colonial logic that governs the commonsense wisdom of running academe and people are not aware consciously aware about logic and we can detect and understand that logic based on the terminologies of this new administrati vocabulary that somehow racism reproduces itself it doesn't reproduce itself when paula deen says something stupid it doesn't do you know it did does it does it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't even produce itself when when andrew harrison gets caught whispering that a microphone rhys ism is constantly reproduced through an exam and vocabularies of in some cases civility  that's the way that it reproduces itself and i've been if i if you can in a selfish personal rambling i've been beautiful moment in my life despite the difficult circumstances in which i received it but i always ask people to to really reserve that love and kinship for the folks in american indian studies that illinois that they've really borne the brunt of of this reeses i'm i don't believe and i am no empirical evidence for this but i still feel strongly about it i don't believe that this could have it could have happened or happened with such ease had i been in the more traditional humanities discipline such as in glitch the fact that it happened in american indian studies tells us a lot about the status of american indian studies and ethnic studies more broadly in the eyes of administrators in our new neoliberal corporate ties to universities not only are they not only do they not bring in the funds the much needed funds th privatisation demands but they also actively work against these neo liberal corporate ties in processes and illinois they've been embroiled with i visited champaign urbana four times ok once to twice actually to find a place to live for those of you think i was hired they paid for all four of them you know an awful awful amount of large yes for for somebody who they were just considering at that point and i saw a chief ally and i work everywhere is on the back of spare tires on the backs of jeeps and banners and t shirts and the chief is everywhere and he turns up too he turns up to a sporting event sometimes somebody in the crowd will dress up like the chief so there's a facebook page with like last i saw like maybe three thousand likes devoted to the revival of the chief and one post that she showed up at a football game i was reading the comments i remember thinking and i was thinking this without snark and i convey the thought to you without snark i promise i'm not even trying to be a jerk about it and are thinking these poor folks don't need in the indian mascot they who gets to control history and who gets to control a discourse and maintaining your your identity as part of the majority area and community and not way or something similar that there was a lot of hand wringing about the browning of b s a and how the new demographics of the field of american study studies were contributing to this sort of nonsense you know you know saying mean things about israel right that you know if the true stewards of the field had still been in charge this kind of nonsense never would have been allowed to happen so think about american indian studies but also think about a lot of the suggestions about american indian studies that exist among supporters of unified ministration you know they seem like they're insults directed at me but they're not really they're insults directed at the people in ai yes that illinois and the field of american indian studies more broadly so when they say so i wasn't qualified or they say that there i'm involved in the higher or whatever other procedural nonsense that they want to cite what they're really saying is hey i'm a jackass with a keyboard i think i'm going to snap my fingers and ren myself an expert on indigenous studies because that's just what we do with fields like that right anybody can become an expert second they're saying the american indian studies faculty shouldn't be allowed to make autonomous hiring decisions the way every other department on campus does that they need the oversight of their seizure and more responsible administrative superiors that they need people to sort of lend a hand in these complicated process is that they obviously don't have the bona fides to undertake on their own it looks a lot like an allegory of federal indian policy except it's not actually allegorical right if you take all of the assumptions sort of underlying these these narratives it tells us again about how american indian and indian studies fit right into the paradigms of the corporate university finally and i'm going to go ahead and wrap up soon so we can have time for questions i don't want to bend your ears too much i'm glad there's a clock back there for me to keep my eye on one thing th administrators keep pointing to that i found particularly bothersome was the fact that they were doing this on behalf of the students the jewish students particularly and they kept saying the jewish students and i found that doubly troublesome first of all because there's been no evidence ever produced that i've ever ever been an inappropriate classroom teacher the evidence simply is not there i've been teaching in colleges since  hundred seven and i have zero complaints against me from from from students or from my peers or from my superiors that hasn't happened but and so you think about the standards of evidence like when you first thing you learn in the english want to one is that you know claims critically extraordinary claims require supporting evidence so it makes me wonder say well who exactly is not qualified to teach college here those who are abrogating an entire tradition of academic freedom based on no evidence whatsoever right or somebody who's teaching record  in this particular field of spotless think about what it means when linda administrators invoke student because they're doing this often these days and i submit that they're not talking about actual human beings but they're talking about an imagined demographic that serves as something of a stand in for administrative interests it reminds me actually a lot of how moralists like to point to the children you know to do their moral sorry hating them you know like leave that leave the children out of it right you know if you want to be repressive and restrictive than you do in your own name it's cowardly to invoke the children because it's an imagined demographic and it's a powerless demographic right you're actually outsourcing about the safety and comfort of a palestinian student in a zionist professor's class never seen it never heard it it's never a consideration power is unilateral of the situations and then let's think about the other assumptions let's see about what's what's what's being closed off in these possibilities administrators want to help students they want to do well i have a student's that's a remarkable claim actually given the evidence or disposal i'm out of work you know that and so i'm thinking about getting into consulting and so i'm i'm i'm living outside of d c you know where everybody is a consultant it's kind of creepy you know what do you do i'm a consultant ok it's nice to meet you you know i just i don't know  there's just something sorry for any legitimate consultants in here but in d c consulting could mean all kinds of things anyway if ministers want to help students i'm going give them some free advice all right number leaving college with tens and tens of thousands of dollars of debt sometimes over one hundred thousand dollars of debt and we know that the one of the first desires of any capitalist marketplace is to create a help students they can do something about the administrative bloat that's taken over academe over the past ten fifteen twenty years that over the past ten years administrator to student and administrator to faculty ratios have increased while faculty to suit ratios have decreased they can do something about this administrative blow who pays for that bloat well lots of sources but one of the sources the students whose tuition keeps rising in some cases by double digits pretty year which also contributes to the student loan industry now you have administrator for everything upper administrators it's an entire class of capitalist management deeply invested in the reputation of the institution refer job they do a terrific job of political organizing for rights they do a great job in the classroom but it is if you never taught college take my word for it it is next to impossible to properly teach five classes a semester particularly those that are writing intensive and grading you know two hundred papers every three four weeks or so and devote the proper attention to each student individually that student needs in order to optimize her his learning on it and so now we have an increase of contingent employees a decrease of tenure track in tenured faculty and not only is this financially desirable for upward ministration but it's also politically desirable think about it they end up with an entire class of employee that's not protected by academic freedom this should be protected by academic freedom that are hypothetically technically protected by academic freedom but in reality aren't a contingent employee can be terminated basically at the whim of her department chair or her dean or the provost or the chancellor or the board of trustees and so you end up creating a  class of employee that has a profound incentive not not to criticise the administration and then finally if they want to help students i would i would suggest that they protect academic freedom the spaces that contribute to the process of learning require critical thought and critical requires subversiveness it just to us you don't like it  opportunities for intellectual growth thus is the educational process and thus has it been since the days of socrates possibly even before i'm going to go in close with a good story if you will feel humor me and then we'll get to the q the q s in the a lot of us get into these fields like indigenous studies or african american studies or women than genders and sexuality studies not all of us but a lot of us because of our own experiences of racism or sexism or marginalization in some way and we want to we want to understand those things a little bit better where do they come from who's invested in them who profits from them how might we end them and one of the things that attracted me to indigenous studies among many other things is it's its commitment to the material well being of the communities with which it's engaged its commitment to  decolonization and not just to too abstract to your ization which is which is rather anathema to american indian and indigenous studies but once i was in palestine in the early two thousand and back in my grandmother's childhood it was an arab village majority muslim minority christian in one thousand forty eight it was depopulated my grandmother ended up in jordan she married my grandfather they emigrated to latin america and two generations later here i am and now i'm karen is is a majority jewish village and it's a suburb of jerusalem and it's kind of what i like to call hipster jerusalem really trendy cafes and restaurants it's honestly i'm one of the few frankly if uncivilly the kind of place that if you've been displaced or dispossessed know if i make everybody get off the bus and i wander off and i take all kinds of pictures and i remember thinking man my grandmother is going to love this a loveless my cousins are going to hate me this is going to be wonderful i'm totally going to your favorite and you know i had to take a whole bunch of pictures wander around the place we got back in the bus and about a week later i'm back home and so i ran you know like the first or second day i was there i ran to the drugstore to develop the film and but  more and she totally knows what what what she's looking at and her face just goes stony silent and didn't the emotion leave her face and she took the pictures and she kind of restacked and put them in the fallopian sealed it and without saying a word handed the packet back to me and that's the last time i've spoken about palestine with with my grandmother you know that that pain was still living inside of her she didn't want to have anything to do with a village that existed in her memory in ways that it and exist in these pictures and i think about my grandmother in that particular moment as a motivation for the type of work that we can and should do in academ to create a world in which this sort of pain doesn't exist and isn't so common and whenever a young black person is murdered by the police i think of my grandmother in that moment and whenever i read about missing and murdered indigenous women i think about my grandmother and whenever i hear about cases of of sexual assault on campus going on reported on prosecuted i think about my grandmother and it occurs to me that if we're to do the sort of we're that has any chance at all of undermining these forms of pressure then we will be absolutely able to do it in an environment that demands of us some ambiguous notion of civility and thank you very much appreciate have sometimes they say if you have a new album it's good to you songs from the album and so i'll do another from my latest album is called deep and it's a collection of all governors about his journalistic neutrality after he'd been working there for thirty years with a very popular weekly folk music show he said he was a he was not and he was not a neutral journalist because he told me to keep up the good another tank gas