Steven Salaita

Steven Salaita is an American scholar who specializes in Native American studies.Who is Steven Salaita? | News-Gazette.com A Christian Arab,https://theintercept.com/2015/10/20/professor-hopes-to-return-after-being-fired-for-disrespectful-tweets-against-israel/ he was born in 1975 to Jordanian and Palestinian immigrants to the US. According to one of Salaita's colleagues, "His mother's parents were forced out of what is now Israel."http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2014-09-07/who-steven-salaita.html On August 6, 2014, after being inundated with protests about Salaita's tweets in response to Israel's 2014 attack on Gaza, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) revoked an offer they had made to Salaita as a tenure-track professor in their American Indian Studies Department.U. of Illinois apparently revokes job offer to controversial scholar | InsideHigherEd While the approval of faculty hires is typically rubber-stamped by a university's governing body, in a "rare, if not unprecedented" decision, UIUC's board of trustees voted not to ratify his hiring,U. of I. trustees vote 8-1 to reject Salaita - Chicago Tribune a power the university argued was explicitly reserved to them in the text of his job offer.
==The tweets and their context==
On July 19,2014 Salaita tweeted:
Immediately followed by:
He had similarly stated the day before that by conflating Jewishness and Zionism "Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror."[c Mirror of the Twitter post on legalinsurrection.com] Salaita wrote these tweets after people from Gaza and elsewhere uploaded photographs of dead and wounded people,Israeli bomb hits Gaza center for disabled, as civilian casualties mount | Al Jazeera America terrified fleeing civilians, and bereft parents holding the bodies (living and dead) of their injured childrenhttps://twitter.com/DrBaselAbuwarda/status/496171014590451715 being pulled out of rubble.https://twitter.com/WG062/status/510767358701735937 Israel's Operation Protective Edge was in full swing in Gaza and the results of an occupiedhttp://blog.unwatch.org/index.php/2012/01/27/un-we-still-consider-gaza-occupied-by-israel/ people being bombedIDF begins evacuating Gazans before stepped up air strikes - Operation Protective Edge - Jerusalem Post and shot atIDF starts Gaza ground offensive - Operation Protective Edge - Jerusalem Post by a regional powerAmerica and the Regional Powers in a Transforming Middle East | Middle East Policy CouncilProminent Saudi Columnist Notes Arab Support for Israeli Strike on Hezbollah - The Washington Institute for Near East Policy — with state-of-the-art weaponryhttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/israels-5-most-deadly-weapons-war-12865 — was being broadcast to the world on social media.Timeline: The Month That Brought Gaza Back To The Breaking Point | ThinkProgress Indeed, one website titled a piece (perhaps hyperbolically): Israel Has a New Worst Enemy — Twitter.Israel Has a New Worst Enemy — Twitter - Israel – Forward.com 
Salaita also tweeted about the ever-increasing,http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Settler-construction-up-sharply-in-first-quarter-405556 violent,http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/31/middleeast/palestinian-price-tag-attack/ and illegalhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/31/un-panel-israeli-settlements-illegal_n_2589394.html settlers on the West Bank. In reference to the three Israeli teenagers whose kidnappings and brutal murderstheguardian.com/world/2014/aug/21/hamas-kidnapping-three-israeli-teenagers-saleh-al-arouri-qassam-brigades by Hamas eventually led to the 2014 War in Gaza:
==Early weeks and months after the firing announcement==
UIUC professor Cary Nelson heartily supported and led the public defense of UIUC's then-Chancellor Phyllis Wise's decision to fire Salaita, declaring:
Nelson had just finished serving three terms as president of the American Association of University ProfessorsFrom The President: Campus Equity Year | AAUP and had a strong reputation as a defender of academic freedom. Some commentaters, including Mondoweiss columnist Phan Nguyen,http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/reading-salaita-illinois-1#tweet1 suggested that Nelson suffers from a blind spot about Israel such that his usual principles were not on display in the Salaita case,Cary Nelson faces backlash over his views on a controversial scholar | InsideHigherEd though Nelson noted that he had previously defended consideration of civility/collegiality at the time of hiring.
Prof. Robert Warrior, an Osage Nation citizen and Director of American Indian Studies and professor of American Indian Studies, English and History at UIUC, stated: "Steven was a candidate in an open field search where we were looking for the best person available in the field of American Indian and Indigenous studies." Warrior continued, "What became compelling about his work is the comparative analysis of the experiences of American Indian people and Palestinian people, which is at the heart of his work.”Salaita’s Background Is What the College Wanted, Not His Free Speech - ICTMN.com Warrior is also an expert in the field of "comparisons of Native Americans to Palestinians," so Salaita would have been an additional such.https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/872266/files/29429109/download.http://www.aub.edu.lb/fas/casar/Conferences/V/Documents/Abstracts/Robert-Warrior.pdfhttp://therevealer.org/archives/19935
In early September of 2014, more than 5000 scholars announced that they would boycott UIUC until the university reinstated Salaita. http://coreyrobin.com/2014/09/09/over-5000-scholars-boycotting-the-uiuc/ Salaita himself spoke at the university that month:
As of October 6, 2014, 14 UIUC departments had voted "no confidence" in Chancellor Wise due to the Salaita matter.Wise speaks on Salaita, College of Medicine, unionization - The Daily Illini By December of 2014, thirty-four heads of departments and academic units at UIUC had written a scathing letter to the University of Illinois’s president, pointing out serious fall-out from the firing:
Salaita has since taken a position at the American University of Beirut.It's time, U. of I.: Offer controversial scholar Steven Salaita a job - Chicago Tribune However, it was later also blocked."Reports circulate that American of Beirut has blocked a permanent appointment"
===Irony===
	 
While Salaita and his supporters are up in arms over the question of academic freedom, Salaita condones excluding what he describes as an ethnocentric Jewish student organization from participating in campus multiculturalism activities.It's time, U. of I.: Offer controversial scholar Steven Salaita a job - Chicago Tribune
==Legal vindication==
On August 6, 2015, Judge Henry Leinenweber of the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ruled that UIUC had breached its contract with Steven Salaita. As The Chronicle of Higher Education put it:
Judge Leinenweber also signaled that if Salaita's free speech claims against UIUC went forward his case was strong:
==University of Illinois officials drop like flies==
On August 7, 2015, 1100 of Chancellor Wise's emails were released, showing, among other things, that she had told individuals in July of 2014 that the university had decided to hire Salaita and he had, in fact, accepted the offer.http://coreyrobin.com/2015/08/07/chancellor-wise-forced-to-release-emails-from-personal-account/ In the same cache of university emails she advised individuals that she would prefer using private email accounts to hide the communications. Wise immediately resigned upon release of these emails.http://coreyrobin.com/2015/08/14/why-im-not-crying-over-the-fate-of-chancellor-wise/	
 
On August 23, 2015, 41 department chairs and program heads at UIUC called for Steven Salaita to be reinstated.http://coreyrobin.com/2015/08/23/after-three-weeks-of-terrible-publicity-41-uiuc-leaders-call-on-administration-to-resolve-crisis/ By August 24, 2015, Ilesanmi Adesida, provost of UIUC; Board of Trustees member Chris Kennedy, and; UI President Robert Easter, had all stepped down from their positions.
==Case concluded==
Salaita and UIUC reached a settlement of $875,000, which was announced on November 11, 2015. Salaita will not rejoin the faculty there.Eighty faculty from American universities signed a letter urging that the American Association of University Professors continue to boycott UIUC until this concern is addressed: "a cash settlement without an offer of reinstatement leaves unaddressed the unjust terms by which [Salaita's] employment was terminated....the settlement demonstrates that the university can abridge such rights at a price, setting a perilous precedent."http://www.dailyillini.com/article/2015/11/salaita-ui-settle In his immediate statement, Salaita said: "We settled the case against UIUC today, and I am deeply grateful for the support and solidarity from so many individuals and communities. Together, we sent a strong message to those who would silence Palestine activists and limit speech on campus." But then he took to the pages of the Nation magazine to declare that the most important point of his case had been obscured:
==External links==
*Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom, by Steven Salaita.
==References==
Category:Antisemites
Category:Freedom of speech
Category:Living people