From the Saturday, Oct. 5, editions of The Daily Journal (Kankakee, Ill.) and The Times (Ottawa, Ill.) …
By Dave Wischnowsky
The WISCH LIST
If a professor doesn’t learn a lesson from his own mistake, should we then have faith in that professor’s ability to teach lessons to others?
That’s a question I have for Steven Salaita, the former Virginia Tech professor who was scheduled to begin a tenured position in the University of Illinois Native American studies department on Aug. 16, before top university officials belatedly became aware of his controversial Twitter posts critical of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and decided otherwise.
After reviewing Salaita’s hostile and profanity-rich @SteveSalaita Twitter feed, which included posts characterized by many (including, yes, angry alumni and donors) as anti-Semitic, Chancellor Phyllis Wise decided not to submit his paperwork to the board of trustees for approval, effectively rescinding Salaita’s job offer.
That decision set off a firestorm of protests among the Illinois academic community and beyond, culminating to this point with an op-ed written by Salaita and published last Monday in the Chicago Tribune under the headline, “U. of I. destroyed my career.”
Throughout his essay, the professor listed his grievances against university officials, attempted to explain (or spin) a few of his controversial tweets (while ignoring others), and generally cast himself as an innocent victim whose unfair plight embodies “a grave threat to faculty and students everywhere,” not to mention “the principles of free speech, academic freedom and shared governance.”
In his op-ed, Salaita said a lot. But never once in nearly 900 words did he take any personal responsibility for his own juvenile online behavior that led to his current state of unemployment. And from my vantage point, it was that – Salaita’s own foolish and inappropriate actions, not the U. of I.’s – that has “destroyed” his career.
As he now reportedly prepares a federal lawsuit against U. of I., Salaita cries that his freedom of speech has been denied. But it hasn’t. What he ignores is that freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences from one’s speech.
Salaita complains that his academic freedom has been jeopardized, as if academics should have the right to behave in whatever crude manner they wish online – again, without any consequences.
And he claims that he’s been denied a job due to his political beliefs, even though his anti-Israel stance is shared by many members of the faculty already employed at U. of I. The difference with those professors is that they haven’t decided the best way to share their opinions is through a starkly hostile, extremely juvenile, and very public Twitter account that’s completely unbecoming of a professor at a prestigious university.
Among my many concerns about Salaita teaching at U. of I. was whether a man who publicly tweets that anyone defending Israel during the latest conflict is “an awful human being” or expresses wishes that “all the (expletive) West Bank settlers would go missing” could be counted on to fairly grade students who might share opinions that differ from his own.
On top of that, I do not think that a personality as volatile as Salaita’s was a good fit to join the Native American Studies department at U. of I., which already has experienced enough volatility regarding American Indian issues.
No matter how controversial, Salaita is free to believe whatever he wishes. And had he simply conducted any measure of self-editing and professional decorum with his Twitter account, I have no doubt that he’d be a professor at Illinois today.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he tweeted his own bed and now has been forced to lie in it, which actually seems quite fitting. After all, Salaita appears to be napping through the lesson about professorship and professionalism that his self-driven saga should have taught him all along.