The End of Academic Freedom in America: the Case of Steven Salaita
In the twenty-one years I spent at Columbia University, there was always some professor or another coming under attack from the Israel lobby—starting with the famous brouhaha of Edward Said throwing a rock or two at an Israeli military watchtower near the border with Lebanon. AIPAC would have had you believe that this was not a symbolic act but an existential threat to a state armed with nuclear weapons. But no matter the intensity of the witch-hunt, I was always proud to see my employer stand up for the free speech rights of the faculty.
As such my attention has been riveted on the trials and tribulations of Steven Salaita who was unfortunate enough to be the victim of a combined assault by the Israel lobby and a university officialdom that was determined to make him pay for telling the truth, no matter how bitter that truth. Since I am very close to some tenure-track professors, I have a better handle than most on what it means to be robbed of a tenured position. Getting tenure nowadays is almost like winning the American Idol contest, so the very idea of being denied a position and thrown to the wolves (no offense meant to a member of the animal kingdom far more noble than the University of Illinois mucketymucks) struck me as a wantonly destructive act—all the more so since it was defended in Pecksniffian terms by the likes of Cary Nelson.
When I posted an excerpt from Salaita’s newly published “Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom” on my blog this week, I was struck by the sharp rise in page views. Clearly, just about everybody on the left has a feeling that in this case the IWW slogan rings as true as ever: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
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