On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 2:04 PM, Robert Naiman wrote: > I promise you, if he comes to Champaign-Urbana, we will put him under 24 > hour guard until the threats to him subside. :) >
At Illinois - even more so than at other comparable institutions like its Big 10 peers - there seems to be a big humanities-STEM divide, and the Salaita affair has really brought this split into sharp relief. Roughly speaking, there seems to be robust support for Salaita among humanities faculty, but among the STEM faculty mostly indifference or hostility. The humanities cannot compete with the STEM disciplines in terms of money, power and prestige, especially at a school like Illinois with a very strong STEM program and average humanities programs. http://goodenoughprofessor.blogspot.com/2015/08/when-i-first-started-blogging-about.html ----------------------------------snip When I first started blogging about Salaita, one of several questions that baffled me was why STEM faculty seemed so indifferent to the issues raised by his unhiring. It seemed continuous with a humanities/STEM divide that had emerged in the course of faculty unionizing, but it was also different in important ways: different stakes, different consequences, different collective action. I expended a lot of bandwidth trying out different formulations: dead canaries <http://goodenoughprofessor.blogspot.com/2014/08/in-coal-mine-with-dead-canary-on.html>, boiled frogs <http://goodenoughprofessor.blogspot.com/2014/08/in-kettle-with-boiled-frogs.html>, competing polarities <http://goodenoughprofessor.blogspot.com/2014/09/two-cultures-not-two-that-you-think.html>. A year has passed since the unhiring news broke. My job duties have changed, and I now spend more time with administrative professionals from various campus units, less with fellow humanities faculty. The issue now looks much more straightforward to me, but also much bleaker. The corporate university has won. The humanities and interpretive social sciences linger on as quaint vestiges of the ways things used to be done, but nobody who isn't us really knows why they're still here or what they're for, apart from supplying certain service courses. -raghu. > On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 7:35 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Wow, this is great! Good riddance to her. >> >> Sadly Salaita's reinstatement still seems highly unlikely, and perhaps >> even undesirable considering hostility and resentment he is likely to face >> there. But this may clear the way for some kind of resolution. >> -raghu. >> >> >> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Joseph Catron <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> "University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis Wise said >>> Thursday that she is resigning, citing a range of 'external issues' >>> she says have become a distraction for the school. >>> >>> "Wise leaves as she and the school face a lawsuit filed by a professor >>> whose job offer she rescinded over his anti-Israel Twitter messages, a >>> vote by a prominent academic group to censure the campus in response, >>> and complaints and a pair of lawsuits alleging mistreatment of >>> athletes in three sports. Her resignation is effective Aug. 12." >>> >>> >>> http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ad89fcdf27dc4e83a8e76d0d1e8b0427/university-illinois-chancellor-wise-resigning-aug-12 >>> >>> Coming a few hours after this, the timing of her announcement seems >>> clear: >>> >>> "The University of Illinois cannot disavow having contractual >>> obligations to Steven G. Salaita, the controversial scholar whose job >>> offer it rescinded last summer before he could begin teaching on the >>> Urbana-Champaign campus, a federal court ruled on Thursday." >>> >>> >>> http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/court-holds-that-u-of-illinois-broke-contract-in-salaita-case/102881 >>> >>> Academic types, am I correct in thinking that six days' notice is >>> awfully short? >>> >>>
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