Newly published emails show that, contrary to the university administration's previous position, a member of the Board of Trustees played a very active part in Salaita's firing and the Board did not merely passively go along with a decision made by campus-level administrators.
Chancellor Phyllis Wise, as awful as she is, did not act on her own in this matter. This is an important summary article that is a must-read for anyone who has been following this affair. http://academeblog.org/2015/08/10/the-revelations-in-phyllis-wises-emails/ ----------------------snip In more than 1,000 pages of previously private emails about the Salaita case, the James Kilgore case, and the (successful) efforts to create a new College of Medicine at UIUC, a startling picture emerges that these three cases are actually intertwined. You can’t understand what happened to Salaita without seeing the other two events. Wise’s problems begin when Champaign-Urbana News Gazette columnist Jim Dey writes about ex-felon James Kilgore teaching as an adjunct at UIUC. Christopher Kennedy, the chair of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees who plays a decisive role in all of these cases, quickly writes an email on Feb. 10, 2014 to president Bob Easter. Kennedy is happy to ban people from working at the U of I: “there are plenty of other institutions in our state.” He adds, “I think we need to be sensitive to tax payers.” Under “Obligation to Meet Norms of Society,” Kennedy writes: “the University, as the state’s public university, needs to, in many ways, reflect the values of the state.” He warns of a backlash if they are “too cavalier,” one that will “hinder our ability to free ourselves of unwanted procurement rules” and similar important values of the University. Kennedy seemed mostly interested in the state de-regulating economic decisions of the University, and felt that controversial professors would interfere with his goal. Under “Risk Management,” Kennedy writes: “Given the enormous attention that the Ayers vote received, it’s incredible to me that no one informed the rest of the board or me that the University was home to another such ex-terrorist.” Kennedy remained angry at Bill Ayers, the UIC professor for whom he had personally demanded the denial of emeritus status because a Weathermen book once defended Robert F. Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan as a political prisoner. But this statement indicates that Kennedy expected advance warning of any potentially offensive professors being hired, with dire consequences if he was disobeyed. Wise’s failure to see the Salaita scandal in advance meant that she was under extreme pressure from Kennedy to act quickly in another case similar to Ayers and Kilgore. Finally, under “Civility,” Kennedy wrote, “Our campus in Urbana is plagued right now with a civility issue. We are all, of course, perplexed by the lack of civility that our students showed in their criticism of an administrative decision. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised by their conduct, given the fact that we have held up to the students examples people like this fellow who thought it was ok to target cops and non-combatants for murder as an expression of political disagreement.” Here, Kennedy is talking about the racist and sexist social media comments of students who objected to Wise’s wise decision not to cancel classes because it was cold on January 27, 2014. The bigoted messages were an embarrassment to the University. But it was bizarre for Kennedy to imagine that racist comments were caused by James Kilgore, a left-wing anti-racist adjunct professor who was involved in a terrorist group decades earlier, especially since his past hadn’t been publicized on campus. It’s interesting that Kennedy doesn’t frame the issue as bigotry (as every media story had done), but instead as a question of civility in the form of questioning the decisions of authority. Kennedy’s strange obsession with civility would clearly shape how Wise and the Board responded to the Salaita case. Wise’s response to reading Kennedy’s email was, “Wow. I hope he has calmed down some.” The Kilgore case also reveals another major influence on Wise: education professor Nicholas Burbules, who had gained Wise’s trust and support. On Feb. 11, 2014, Burbules wrote an email to Wise discussing ways to ban people like Kilgore from being hired: “A related policy might address the question of ‘controversial’ hires—this is murkier, because people’s ideas of what is controversial will differ. But a crude rule of thumb is, if you think someone’s name is going to end up on the front page of the newspaper as a U of I employee, you can’t make that decision on your own say so. You need to get some higher level review and approval.” As a standard of academic freedom, this is simply appalling: Burbules wanted to explicitly make the controversial status of someone grounds for banning their hiring without permission from top administrators. And that permission would almost never be granted, since he called for “policy changes or new procedures that tell people, ‘We’ve looked into how this happened and here’s what we’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’” Burbules advocated “a more principled statement of what the U of I stands for: that we welcome the widest possible range of viewpoints and positions, but not all positions. And that there are some things that are not consistent with our values.” It certainly took chutzpah for Burbules to call his demand for firing controversial faculty “more principled” and welcoming the “widest possible range” of ideas. Wise surrounded herself with a small group of trusted faculty such as Burbules who vigorously defended her actions and espoused an extraordinarily narrow view of academic freedom. This helped great an atmosphere of groupthink.
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