Steven Salaita

Steven Salaita is an American scholar who specializes in Native American studies. A Christian Arab, 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." 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. 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, 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." Salaita wrote these tweets after people from Gaza and elsewhere uploaded photographs of dead and wounded people, terrified fleeing civilians, and bereft parents holding the bodies (living and dead) of their injured children being pulled out of rubble. Israel's Operation Protective Edge was in full swing in Gaza and the results of an occupied people being bombed and shot at by a regional power — with state-of-the-art weaponry — was being broadcast to the world on social media. Indeed, one website titled a piece (perhaps hyperbolically): Israel Has a New Worst Enemy — Twitter.

Salaita also tweeted about the ever-increasing, violent, and illegal settlers on the West Bank. In reference to the three Israeli teenagers whose kidnappings and brutal murders 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 Professors and had a strong reputation as a defender of academic freedom. Some commentaters, including Mondoweiss columnist Phan Nguyen, suggested that Nelson suffers from a blind spot about Israel such that his usual principles were not on display in the Salaita case, 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.” Warrior is also an expert in the field of "comparisons of Native Americans to Palestinians," so Salaita would have been an additional such.

In early September of 2014, more than 5000 scholars announced that they would boycott UIUC until the university reinstated Salaita. 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. 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. However, it was later also blocked.

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.

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. 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. On August 23, 2015, 41 department chairs and program heads at UIUC called for Steven Salaita to be reinstated. 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. 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: