Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom by Steven Salaita (review)

AT THE CENTER OF Uncivil Rites is Steven Salaita's precise and thorough commentary on his firing in August of 2014 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after his hiring by the university's American Indian Studies Program, a hire approved in late September of 2013 by the interim dean, Brian H. Ross. Professor Salaita accepted the position in early October, resigned his tenured position at Virginia Tech, and in the summer of 2014 was preparing to move his family to Champaign when on August 1 he was peremptorily fired before he ever got to assume his position as associate professor with tenure. The letter of termination, signed by Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise and Vice President for Academic Affairs Christophe Pierre, gives no reason for the termination but simply refers to a pro forma sentence in the dean's letter offering the position to Salaita: "This recommendation for appointment is subject to approval by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois." The citing of this sentence was followed by the blow: "We write to inform you that your appointment will not be recommended for submission to the Board of Trustees." This letter and the dean's letter along with a letter from then acting director of the American Indian Program, Dr. Jodi Byrd, outlining the terms of the hire are reprinted in the appendix of Salaita's book. They are important reading for those who want to understand the institutional violence in this case.

Salaita's firing, then, was a violation of expected university hiring practices, where the faculty and the dean are typically entrusted with such decisions. Thus, the peremptory firing constitutes a subversion of faculty governance, departmental/program autonomy, and, as it turned out, Professor Salaita's academic freedom. For the firing, as subsequent events made abundantly clear, was based on Salaita's principled stand in support of Palestinian rights, particularly his support of Palestinian civil society's nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) aimed at legally resisting Israeli colonialism. A particular irony in this regard is that the dean's letter offering the position to Salaita contained the following boilerplate: "At the University of Illinois, like most universities in this country, we subscribe to the principles of academic freedom and tenure laid down by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)."

Forced to come up with some reason for his termination, then, the administration cited Professor Salaita's "uncivil" Twitter feed in support of Palestinian rights as a reason to deem him unfit to be a teacher and colleague at Illinois, even though his record on both counts at Virginia Tech was impeccable and even though extramural speech is protected under the canons of academic freedom developed by the AAUP, which invoked those canons in unequivocally condemning Chancellor Wise's decision, driven by the Board of Trustees backed by certain university donors. But of course the administration's emphasis in criticizing Salaita's Twitter feed was on his "incivility," not on his criticism of Israeli state policy because the Illinois administration had to try to maintain the increasingly transparent illusion that universities are supporters of academic freedom and diversity in all matters.

Salaita does a splendid job of deconstructing this particular fiction, while analyzing the limits of academic freedom so evident in his case and others. In this respect chapter 1, "Tweet Tweet," opens with the question "Does Twitter lend itself to civility?" Salaita's answer is emphatically "no." Nor, he explains, is Twitter intended to be a platform for civility. Nor, for that matter, is it anybody's business under both the First Amendment and the canons of academic freedom to judge a discourse's "civility," whatever that word may mean. To explore this meaning, which he does with incisive analysis in the course of the book, Salaita focuses on the colonial origins of the word "civility," its precise use in the discourse of "savagery" to distinguish "them" from "us." As Salaita remarks: "Civility exists in...