Draft Letter to Chancellor Wise: if anyone would like to co-sign this letter and/or make suggestions for its improvement, please message Lauren Goodlad. The letter is intended for UI faculty - please do not share its contents since it would need to be rewritten for a larger group of signatories. Dear Chancellor Wise, I appreciate your commitment to civility and the difficulties of maintaining it in such a highly visible position. But I also imagine that you are equally committed to other principles crucial to maintaining excellence at a renowned academic institution including due process, transparency, and shared governance. I have not yet had a chance to read the scholarship of Stephen Salaita but I have looked forward to doing so not least since the issue of the controversial tweets arose. Nor have I had the opportunity to learn about his record of teaching and service: given the offer of a tenured position on our faculty, I have trusted to the rigorous process of search and review that anticipates such an offer. In fairness to the difficulty of your position I will add that I was not impressed by the remarks quoted from Salaita’s Twitter account: I found them polarizing, inflammatory, and likely to be ineffective on a topic that, as it happens, causes me great concern. But though I do not myself follow twitter, I know enough about the medium to perceive that on topics of weight it can heighten emotion without providing the lucidity, penetration, careful argument, and appeal to dialogue that characterizes the best humanities research. It may well be that we in the academy haven’t yet fully processed the impact of social media on our lives as scholars and teachers: how, for example, it blurs conventional lines between public and private and between one’s professional decorum and one’s obligation as a citizen to speak one’s mind without fear of censure. Be that as it may, Salaita was certainly not representing himself as spokesman for the University of Illinois or addressing a classroom when he tweeted his remarks and he has been offered a position based on his excellence in these and other professional capacities. The appearance, therefore, is that the University of Illinois has arbitrarily rescinded an offer without good cause, that we have been intolerant of free speech on a controversial issue, and that we have put secondary matters before our core mission of academic excellence in research and teaching. Just as concerning is the lack of transparency that surrounds this issue. How and through what process was this exceptional decision reached? Should the outcome of a rigorous search and tenure review process be overturned without any faculty involvement and consultation with experts in the field? If Twitter is to become central in this or any other hiring decision is that not a discussion to have with the Illinois Senate? And if tweets can trump a record of research, teaching and service which was years in the making should we not be scrutinizing everybody’s tweets? Surely this is exactly the sort of situation that requires procedural rectitude of the highest degree and yet in this case the questions that are being asked--the fact that faculty and leaders on our campus are so very much in the dark--makes this decision that much more troubling. One imagines that if an offer were rescinded at this late date because of a matter concerning a faculty member’s professional ethics that precisely such a process would be put into place. If the failure to articulate and follow through on such a process is to do with the political nature of the speech in question, then we have quite unmistakably made a serious and damaging professional decision based on speech that is constitutionally protected and in which all of us, whatever our political opinions, share a great stake. Chancellor Wise, I have great respect and regard for the difficulties you are facing but I am writing to ask that you do something more difficult still. I am writing to say that I think your decision was a mistaken one and to ask that you reverse course, reinstate the offer to its former status and, with respect to any statements of concern you may have received from others about civility on social media, put this matter in the hands of a faculty committee appointed by the UI Senate. Very sincerely,
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 14:27:00 +0000