The Faculty Lounge: Steven Salaita's New Blog Is Worth Reading

Steven Salaita has launched a blog to “host some writing, mainly longform pieces with the occasional polemic.” The first entry details his “transition from professor to school bus driver.” It is extremely well written, quite moving, and very thoughtful. I strongly recommend reading it, and there will be some excerpts – with my commentary – after the jump.

But first, let me make my views clear on Salaita. As I have written several times, his deep animosity toward Israel led him to traffic in anti-Semitic images, especially in the tweets that brought him national notoriety. His books, for the most part, were often more diatribe than scholarship. Even so, as I have also written, he did not deserve the treatment he got at the University of Illinois and afterward, and he should not have been exiled from academics, which included the veto of a job offer at the American University of Beirut (AUB). There are many professors at U.S. universities who are equally ideological and whose work is no better than Salaita’s. Singling him out for banishment was an injustice.

Salaita’s friends and supporters, however, did him no favors by defending his most indefensible tweets, which only served to extend and intensify the controversy. If they had acknowledged anti-Semitism when they saw it, perhaps Salaita would have tempered his own response. As it was, he doubled and tripled down, rather than simply apologize for his bigoted language. He might well have made the whole thing go away at an early stage if he had been willing to step back and concede the obvious – which, of course, would have disappointed his perceived base. He appears to realize that now, to some extent, although it is unfortunately too late.

I feel badly for Salaita, even though I have been one of his strongest critics. Israel-Palestine issues have driven many people to deplorable rhetoric, and the consequences for Salaita have been far too grave.

The first essay on his blog is impressive and well worth reading.

“An Honest Living” is a long (very long) essay about Salaita’s transition from professor to school bus driver. It is bittersweet but not acrimonious, and it gracefully describes the job of school bus driving as a position of care, responsibility, and importance. Along the way, he reflects on the circumstances that drove him out of academics. Here are a few representative paragraphs, followed by my observations.

Infamy never agreed with my disposition. I disliked the attention, which seemed to elicit vague expectations of reciprocity; I hated the rewards that come from reciting slogans and platitudes; I detested the tacit contract that I was supposed to be some kind of role-model to people who proclaim mistrust of authority. After a while I felt obliged to sabotage my fame. No media appearances. No networking. No phony relationships. No orchestrated controversies. No whiny monologues about being repressed. In short, none of the usual bullshit that goes into the making of a micro-celebrity. When a white liberal upbraided me for failing in my responsibilities as an “Arab American leader” (I had criticized one of Bernie Sanders’s terrible opinions about Palestine) a return to pseudo-anonymity seemed to be the only viable response.

Well, maybe. Salaita certainly seemed to revel in his notoriety before it took its toll. He was a constant tweeter of overheated "slogans and platitudes." If he hated it at the time, it certainly did not show. But of course, it is impossible to know another person's inner life. Perhaps it was all political performance, in which case it was convincing indeed.

When I recall my hardest moments in academe, my thoughts invariably wander to AUB, perhaps because it was my last gig. As my contract wound down and the job market came up cold, every morning felt like the Friday of finals week. During this period, I finally understood the ugly possibilities of mendacity and alienation in spaces devoted to higher learning. A search committee had selected me for a directorship. Meanwhile, US Senators and AUB’s reactionary donor class pressured the university’s president to cancel the appointment. AUB has long been a site of soft power for the State Department. Platitudes about faculty governance and student leadership notwithstanding, universities inhibit democracy in ways that would please any thin-skinned despot. Despite vigorous protest from a small but spirited group of students and a smattering of bad press, AUB held firm. I left Beirut in August of 2017. The program I was hired to direct has since collapsed, though it maintains a five-million-dollar endowment.

I have read before about Salaita's brief experience at the American University of Beirut, and the rejection of his nomination to head its Center for American Studies. At the time, some of his supporters claimed "that AUB is reproducing the trend of persecuting scholars who condemn the injustices committed in Palestine," which seems more than highly improbable, in Lebanon, even if the claim is politically expedient. To his credit, Salaita does not repeat the claim; the words Palestine and Israel appear only once apiece in the essay, and neither as an explanation for Salaita's hardships.

Salaita is at his best when describing his new occupation, undertaken out of financial necessity but nonetheless worthy and meaningful:

Yet the job induces primal expressions of love. School buses supersede their physical structure; they anchor a huge apparatus designed to guard the vulnerable. The machine is outfitted with lights and blinkers calculated to announce its presence. It is excessive on purpose. Nothing is more important than its cargo. SUVs, bicycles, eighteen-wheelers, ambulances, fire trucks—all abdicate their right of way when the stop sign and crossbar swing into the roadway. The school bus is one of the few institutions in the United States that protects the powerless from the depredations of commerce.

***

Academic jobs are notorious for long, convoluted hiring processes, but becoming a school bus driver, at least in the county where I work, isn’t much easier. For an academic position, applicants submit a dossier (often packed with repetitive material), survive a screening interview (with a committee larded by ulterior motives), and visit the prospective employer for at least a day, during which they’ll be tested and measured by dozens of gatekeepers, before negotiating a complex employment package and earning the governing board’s rubber stamp, all of which can take over a year. Aspiring drivers attend an orientation, watch dozens of online videos, solicit moral references, pass a physical (including a drug screening), get a commercial learner’s permit (a laborious process that requires extensive testing and hours at the DMV), finish classroom and road training (at least 200 hours), sit for various written exams (failure of a single exam can mean removal from the program), complete a half-day CDL test (which includes a daunting pre-trip bus check), and undertake at least two weeks of on-the-job training before showing up at the intake office to request a route that probably isn’t available. Trainees are paid once they reach the classroom. I finished everything in about six months.

I have only scratched the surface here. At over 8000 words, the graceful essay appears strikingly honest and revealing. Expanded, it would make an affecting memoir, and I suspect one is in the works. If so, perhaps I will make a brief appearance as a villain or antagonist. I could live with that. For all of our profound disagreement about Israel -- and less disagreement about the occupation of Palestine, which I believe has been oppressive and intolerable -- I have always defended Salaita's free speech and academic freedom.

Every now and again while my family sleeps and I’m on the back porch enjoying a final cigarette I think about my days as a star speaker, memories that allow me to better appreciate the quiet of my surroundings, although in pronounced moments of loneliness I miss the company of the audience, the pleasure of applause and laughter and the cathartic thrill of raging against injustice, but the feeling is evanescent, for the sobering immediacy of cold air on my fingertips and pressure in my thorax reminds me of both material and psychological limitations that render me unfit for prominence, being that I’ve become the kind of person content with the humdrum thrill of stopping traffic.

I hope he keeps writing.