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217 8 normatizing State Power Uncritical Ethical Praxis and Zionism Steven Salaita In spring 2009, I was near the end of my yearlong tenure and promotion review at Virginia Tech. Tech is a research university that requires a decent amount of publication from its humanists, though its expectations are not what most would consider rigid or excessive. My tenure and promotion case had the added complication of being a year ahead of schedule (potentially four years, depending on the viewpoint). Counting my three years on faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, I applied for tenure and promotion in my sixth year out of graduate school rather than during my seventh, as is customary at Tech. My strong record of publication and teaching provided me a good reason to go forward a year early. It was also a practical decision: because my research and writing deal with controversial material, I did not want to give fanatical groups and individuals any more time than they needed to derail my career (though tenure is no foolproof protection against politically inspired termination). This concern was not merely quaint paranoia, unfortunately: various right-wing groups, aided both tacitly and directly by more liberal colleagues, have successfully damaged the academic careers of scholars such as Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Margo RamlalNankoe , Thomas Abowd, and Tariq Ramadan. Given the volatile nature of academe, it didn’t seem prudent for me to bide any time. Although I have published widely and have spoken at every available opportunity in support of Palestinian freedom and indigenous rights more broadly, I toil away more or less undetected, happy to belong to a small but devoted group of scholars and activists whose work assesses comparable themes with the same type of committed methodological approach. I enjoy a productive and comfortable professional life, one that puts me in a better economic and existential position than the vast majority of the world’s population . This lucky reality often causes me to chuckle at professorial claims of 218 · STeven SalaITa untenable busyness or inordinate stress: our lives for the most part are those of comfort and privilege, and we are remarkably fortunate to be paid to write and then talk about what we write. I place a high value on my job, then, and I am eager to protect it. Navigating promotion in higher education is tricky, as anybody who has done it knows, for me mostly because I find it difficult to balance my antiauthoritarian viewpoints with the pressures of conformity that tacitly dominate professorial advancement. As tenure is so profoundly intertwined with institutional loyalty, notions of scholarly responsibility, and other implicit expectations, tenure is useful for university administrators because it socializes faculty into particular modes of thinking that virtually eliminate meaningful contestation. I bring up these points because it’s important to think about what it means to act ethically and responsibly in academe, in terms of both institutional presuppositions and communal commitments—two phenomena that do not usually correspond. While most scholars and university administrators talk glowingly of engaging broad audiences and working to improve the world, such talk is invariably in the abstract, denoting a reproduction of ideals and not actual change—at least not the type that would threaten the socioeconomic privileges most administrators and professors ardently protect. It is sometimes from within this gap between discursive showmanship and substantive praxis that controversies over faculty activism and scholarship arise. Without judging the quality or veracity of their efforts, I would suggest that scholars who commit themselves to any sort of advocacy that contravenes institutional sensibilities or interests earn a reputation (or notoriety) as consciously “political,” rather than equally active scholars whose advocacy happens to reinforce or complement institutional sensibilities. This observation seems obvious, but it is one that warrants further exploration. At stake are people’s livelihoods, professional futures, and conceptions of responsibility. The issue of the political in academe therefore deserves a closer reading than its general treatment to this point. It is an issue that exists most conspicuously and contentiously in the interrelated frameworks of Zionism and the Israel/Palestine conflict. To be more specific, charges of unjustifiably politically motivated research and of unwarranted politicization of scholarship work overwhelmingly—sometimes implicitly but often explicitly—to maintain Zionism’s normative status and to protect Israel from any serious criticism , no matter how demonstrable and legitimate. I am deliberating these matters frequently nowadays, inspired by the hostile atmosphere in academe toward junior scholars devoted to justice for [18.223...

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