Update on Steven Salaita

Steven Salaita has announced on his Facebook page that he is leaving academia and plans to pursue a career writing and lecturing.  After two years as a visiting professor at the American University of Beirut, Salaita was unable to find another university appointment. As he explains,

Despite applying to positions on four continents, I was unable to find an academic job, so I no longer count myself among the professoriate. A number of colleagues have attempted to recruit me, but their efforts always get shut down by management. In turn, I often feel like I’m reliving the UIUC fiasco, which isn’t conducive to the kind of mood I prefer to inhabit. I’m easygoing, but I refuse to tolerate the indignities of a blacklist.

Given the consequences for his career and his family, Salaita’s post is impressively graceful and low-key. “I don’t intend to slosh around in self-pity,” he says. “Whatever I end up doing, I will maintain the spirit of noncompliance that defined my time in academe. If you take any lesson from my ouster, please don’t let it be fear or caution. Docility is a gift to those who profit from injustice.”

Of course, he identifies his adversaries and sticks to his principles, but he avoids the sort of vicious rhetoric that drew attention to him, and sparked his troubles, in the first place: “Zionists have worked overtime to incriminate me, but they’ve never found anything incriminating—not from a lack of diligence, but because there’s nothing to find but plainspoken disdain for settler colonization.”

Many will recall that Salaita was far more than “plainspoken” in his vilification of Israel.  Neither he nor his supporters have ever acknowledged the undertone of anti-Semitism in his tweets, which evoked ritual child murder and compared Israeli Jews as scabies.  He also used the term “Zio-trolls,” adapting a slur originated by David Duke.  As pointed out by Yair Rosenberg on Tablet, British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbin (who is no fan of Israel) repudiated the term “Zio” as a “vile epithet that follows in a long line of earlier such terms that have no place whatsoever in our party.” Progressives have no trouble recognizing anti-Semitism when The Daily Stormer refers to Zionists as “rats,” but the same acuity failed them when Salaita analogized Zio-trolls to vermin.

Even so, Salaita did not deserve to have his career destroyed.  As I wrote at the time in the Chicago Tribune, and as the AAUP later concluded, Salaita’s political opinions, no matter how offensively expressed, should not have killed his appointment at the University of Illinois. Although he obtained a hefty settlement in litigation, a better resolution would have been renewing the job offer at Illinois.

So I feel badly for Steven Salaita.  There are many tenured professors in the U.S. who have been equally vile and whose academic work is certainly no better than his, but who are celebrated and promoted by their universities.  Yes, it is ironic that Salaita complains of a “blacklist” while endorsing the comparable BDS boycott of Israeli universities, but consistency has never been a requirement for an academic position.

It is also understandable that Salaita remains unapologetic about his tweets:

People still ask if I would go back in time and change anything. I would not. If my behavior were dishonorable, then I might have something to regret. I condemned a brutal ethnocratic state. On this count, I will die unapologetic.

Here, I think he must be truly unaware about why he became such a lightning rod, given that his current statement is so much more measured and thoughtful.  He concludes,

I haven’t always been a good professor—I’m disorganized and forgetful and reclusive and unresponsive and an easy grader—but I’ve never compromised my ethics or sold out colleagues and students in order to ingratiate myself to power.

Thank you for entertaining my self-indulgence. If my words sound incompatible with the demands of nuance and discretion that predominate in academic culture, then it’s because I’m no longer of the culture and thus unconstrained by its emphasis on disinterest and diplomacy. I can speak according to the whims of my conscience. This is what happens when you manage to survive a punishment. You become free.

If Salaita had been this “unconstrained” in the first place, he would be teaching today at the University of Illinois. Nonetheless, he should not have been exiled from academics, and I hope he finds success and fulfillment on the lecture circuit.